Apparently I've been out to lunch in the metaphorical sense, and missed this must-bookmark resource: Using Lists for DHTML Menus. Summary - dropdown menu, expandable menu, appropriate markup, gracefully degrading, minimal javascript. If i wasn't such a square, I'd probably say something like "Choice!", or whatever the kids are saying these days. Instead, I'll say "Thanks Dave".
Jeffery Zeldman was nice enough to share an open door to his design and development process with us as he retooled his personal site Jeffery Zeldman Presents. We engaged in a little premptive critique/debate earlier on this site, but I neglected to start a new post noting the fine work he has since accomplished. Perhaps even nicer than the pleasant and readable end-result redesign, was the running commentary he maintained during the process. This particular note struck a chord with me:
As designers, we are uninterested in blowing you away or using web design as an excuse to display our cleverness. We are interested in presenting content simply and engagingly (and on commercial sites, we are interested in facilitating ease of use) within a fast-loading, appropriately branded environment.
Many web designers do not see this kind of reductionism as design at all. For them, the labor of design consists in the crafting of many visual elements. For us, the labor of design consists in the proportioning and positioning of only those elements that are needed.
And while we are on the topic, Todd Dominey has completed a subtle but no less drastic retooling of his excellent weblog What Do I Know, look under the hood and read his notes to understand the full effect.
Here are some others who also retooled and/or redesigned recently: typographer, scriptygoddess, scottandrew (for halloween), hivelogic (molting currently), and monokromatik, and probably others (let us know in a comment!)
So this is one of the many benifits of a nicely crafted site with table-for-tabular-data, CSS styled, valid and structurally sound markup - namely, the state of being eminently re-designable. Something that we will hopefully enjoy more and more of from our favorite sites as time goes on.
You may be able to tell that here at webgraphics we like sites that share information, ideally in a collaborative endevour, and at best, when we get to learn even more through an ensuing comment-discussion. One such site has shared some kind words about us, and we are very greatful. This month's humble gratitude link of the month goes to the very gracious Scriptygoddess
Some of these might come handy...
I also really wanted to get searchii working, but for some reason (almost definitely my fault), I could quite make it happy here, I'll keep trying.
The Munsell system is different because it is based on how people perceive colors. At its core is a set of data from perceptual studies (done in the late 1930's) where people were asked to judge the differences in color pairs. The result is a data set which defines a perceptually uniform color space.
Note that it's in beta form, and has a small list of known issues. (no more critical posts from me for a while).
37signals once again gives away good info for free. Presenting the "Sites that Don't Click" research report. What may be a first in a series.
The comments so far seem positive but make note of some repetition in content. Still a very cool thing.
Columns: IAnything Goes:
http://www.digital-web.com/columns/ianythinggoes/ianythinggoes_2002-10.shtml
"The myth of User-Centered Information Architecture"
by Jeff Lash
Columns: Keep it Simple:
http://www.digital-web.com/columns/keepitsimple/keepitsimple_2002-10.shtml
"Client Centered Design"
by Peter-Paul Koch
Glish points us to a great Introduction to CSS shorthand properties. I always forget these. This page provides a convenient and well-presented reference, including browser support charts.
Chicago, November 8th: 37 Signals Workshop. Get an earful of contingency design goodness.
Mr. Zeldman finally forsakes tables in favor of CSS over at The Daily Report.
Dean of Textism has released a module of his CMS system. The slick, clean, no-nonsense Refer 1.0 will track visitors to your site in an remarkably uncluttered manner. Futher comments after I try installing it myself.
All this talk about Wired's redesign (Zeldman, diveintomark.com, etc.) has prompted a question in me. How does a large scale web site manage its CSS files and definitions?
Using Liorean's Stylesheet Source Viewer I have been trolling both Wired's and [stop] design's CSS files. After digging under the hood of these two sites all I can say is WOW! It had never occured to me to structure my CSS by region. I have always listed definitions in order of HTML redefinitions, classes, and IDs. Nor had I known that CSS had a comment function (boy did I feel like a doofus).
So, how do you organize your CSS???
New author Joshua has just been added to webgraphics, we look forward to his posts.
Colin Mook's sequel to "Actionscript: The Definitive Guide" will be available in December, the new one is entitled "ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide". Colin put together an announcement page with more info. This should make a very nice (and useful) holiday gift.
Now that Uzilla.net 1.0 has launched, I'm working on some supplementary tools. The first release is a fallout (or abandonment) visualization for web page flows.
With a bit of inspiration from Nate, I went with a mask on a gradient approach. Contrary to Nate's inclination, I implemented without CSS or Flash. Plain old tables and transparent gifs. More a matter of the quickest path than a design philosophy, but it is amazing to me that I can get a visualization like this out of plain ole html.
I'm not a big fan of the wiki format, at least for the few wikis I've visited (very few), but after visiting css-discuss wiki, I'm starting to think otherwise.
I'm on the phpclasses.org mailing list, and get notified each day of the classes added to this quickly growing resource for php scripters. I'm on the lookout for classes that seem especially usefull to the webgraphics readers, and I think I found one: Color Class converts colortypes and supports CMYK, RGB, Pantone and Hex. Now you can go and make that web based color picker you've been thinking about.
One of A List Apart's new articles: Build a PHP Style Switcher by Chris Clark.
So we are still trying to figure our way out of the paper bag of options for os x contact, calendar, and task management. Individual calendar and contacts can be iSync-ed between multiple computers, if you have a dotmac address for each individual. You can try iSyncing two different people's contact and calendar, but be forwarned that things will get messy, your iChat will report you to be the other person, and your contact/calendar information will quickly become a confusing mess. We can publish and view each others calendars, but then they will not be editable save the computer that originally created them. A combination of iSyncing and publishing will require two dotMac addresses, and will still only allow viewing of the other person's calendar information and tasks. It seems that the apple suite of apps is so "me" centered that collaboration is not an assumed factor.
movabletype has its one year anniversary and the release of version 2.5. Lots of fixes/tweaks/updates and some nice comments from the MT team.
Do you understand new topics better when pictures are included in the explination? I do. That's why Ease: What does XFML look like? helped me out. This is exciting stuff, I'm thinking of different ways to incorporate this into webgraphics.
This month Digital Web Magazine will focus on the theme of User-Centered Design. Kicking things off this week is an interview with Peter Merholz and Nathan Shedroff on User-Centered Design.
I've been futzing around with iCal and iSync lately. My first mistake had nothing to do with the software or my hardware configurations, I simply didn't understand that a "published" calendar is only editable via the computer that originated it (if only using iCal). Then I learned that iSync is not just for using up all the memory on that phone you just purchased, it can be used to keep multiple Macs synchronized (contacts and calendars), assuming you have a dotMac account. So if you move around to various locations/computers, you can keep your essential data moving with you. If other platforms are part of your workstation rotation (specifically Linux or Windows), you can even view your calendars using the beta of Mozilla Calendar application quite easily. What I'm not yet seeing, is a good way to make a calendar or group of contacts "collaborative" - so that, for instance, my wife and I can update a portion of each other's contacts, while retaining our individual work contacts, and if this could be done with her preferred windows machine and my preferred mac, all the better. Do you have any suggestions? Perhaps I am asking too much.
I encountered the problem of phantom links in floated divs using Mac IE5 for the first time. Check out this insanity using Mac IE5 (Footer 2 shows the bug and Footer 3 shows the fix). I sent a message to CSS-Discuss and Philippe pointed me to MacEdition CodeBitch's excellent IE5 Mac CSS Bugs page, which should help explain some of these issues.
Do you have those three items? Any insights into why Mac IE is not bringing up Liorean's bookmarklets would be a significant contribution to the greater good, and very much appreciated. Liorean's bookmarklets are sort of like bookmarklets on steriods, they perform greater tasks than a typical bookmarklet because the normal limited space for in-link scripting is avoided by use of an external javascript file. I dare not try to explain any further because I am only a javascript tweaker, and run a likely chance of miss-representing the functionality.
This is the first post made to webgraphics using kung-log, an os x desktop weblog posting app made for Moveable Type. Found at another excellent os x software site ranchero.
Thankfully Youngpup continues to grace us with more genius code bits, this navigation menu animates, validates and is made of HTML and isolated Javascript and CSS. Youngpup's willingness to share, solid coding skills and documentation make his library of widgets and scripts a must-bookmark resource.
Currently I have 3 working locations, my office, part of a cube at Georgia Tech, and my old windows box at home. Given that home computing is limited to Windows for the time being, the download and install of Phoenix has been a breath of fresh air. It seems to have all the good rendering of mozilla, without any of the interface baggage and featuritis. I would guess that this Mozilla port is inspired by the genius of Chimera:
Where's the mac version?There is no mac version. While Phoenix could be made to run on Mac without much trouble, we see no point in competing with Chimera. Chimera is the lightweight, standalone Mozilla browser solution for Mac OS X. We have received requests for a Mac classic version, and are considering the idea.
New Product Review: "Adobe LiveMotion 2"
by Jesse Nieminen
New Book Review: "Special Edition: Using HTML and XHTML"
by James McNally