Simon points us to QuirksMode, Peter-Paul Koch's reworked uber website with boatloads of useful stuff for web developers. From the site description:
It contains more than 150 pages with CSS and JavaScript tips and tricks, and is one of the best sources on the WWW for studying and defeating browser incompatibilities.
The recently released new version of Mac OS X, 10.3 now includes Safari 1.1, the most recent version of Apple's web browser. Amongst the enhancements in this version are support for the CSS level 3 text-shadow property, rgba() colours with alpha values, and the ::selection pseudo-element. Frank Limbacher has put together an excellent little demonstration piece of two of these properties in effect (Screenshot available here for those without 10.3).
As has been pointed out, Internet Explorer has supported text-shadows for some time, but only via a proprietary pseudo-style filter. Apple seem to be pushing the bar even further than Mozilla; how long will it be before Firebird et al support these properties, I wonder?
(Hat tip: Todd Dominey)
"Forget the bunk markup; there's actual content in there that we need to rescue!"
A wonderful cartoon-based presentation by Bill Merikallio and Adam Pratt on building sites with web standards.
"For most websites, authoring in HTML 4.01 is perfectly sufficient. Most of the features available in XHTML are available in good old HTML. However, some sites may wish to take advantage of the extensibility of XML, so delivering in XHTML with the correct MIME may be important."
Simon Jessey of Keystone Websites has developed a technique that takes advantage of the PHP server-side scripting language. Web pages can be served as either XHTML with application/xhtml+xml, or HTML with text/html. An excellent article!
Color picking seems to be a recurring theme here on WG, so lets add another one to the list. This one is brought to you by Behr paints. You can pick a color, and it will return you with some nice color schemes (this does not seem to work in Firebird, so fire up IE). There is also an inspiration section, which not only explains a lot about color but additionally provides you with a huge list of color schemes. Fun for days!
Ah! This is where that CSS house came from. It looks like a really fun contest: CSS Border Design Challenge. Remember back in the IE/Nets 3 days when all CSS was pretty much just for fun? I vividly remember having a lot of trouble grasping the idea of a CSS "sheet" that was somehow linked, and then there was the whole thing of cascading. Of course, I don't mean to imply that the learning is over, far from it. I do think there's still value in experimenting like this, who knows what type of aesthetic tricks we might learn. Link via Dave S.
Jeffrey does a beautiful job redesigning ALA, while Joe Clark, Douglas Bowman, and Dan Benjamin kick it off with great articles.
Meryl put a lot of work into the new InformIT Web Design Reference Guide. Meryl serves as host for this section of the InformIT site, this section alone covers a wide gamut of web design subject matter, here's the current major sectoins: Web Basics, Publishing on the Web, Web Design Process and Workflow, Mark My WWWord: HTML and XHTML, Standards Compliance, Layouts, Forms, Usability, Accessibility, Enhancing Web Page Interaction, Web Graphics, and Multimedia.
This is a great all around resource for many skill levels, I'll add a link to it in the resources page here. Also of note: it has it's own RSS file.
Alex of handcoding was the lead developer for a new XHTML/CSS site that passes even the fussy parsing in the W3C's beta validator. Check out Alex's sharp looking and extensive work at plainscapital, and be sure to see the associated overview.
Back in the day, way before any WYSIWYG HTML editors, I was trying to learn the basics of HTML with the aid of htmlgoodies. If I wanted to learn how to make a web page on today's Internet, I would use htmldog. A most excellent resource for everything HTML/CSS with the emphasis on web standards. I would like to see the site more open though. With a comment system à la php. Where people can help other people by leaving comments.
He's known around these parts as a longtime and frequent commenter. A quick search brings up 32 posts he's commented on here. Although modestly describing himself as a lurker, huphtur exemplifies the collaborative nature this site was built for. I'm glad to welcome huphtur as our newest author.
Chris Hester has created a picture of a house using nothing more than CSS - no images.
Spotted by LiteraryMoose.
CSS Border Test is a cool little tool that allows you to test a wide range of border options. It also gives you the CSS code. My only critiscm is that this tool should have been called "Border-o-matic". : )
Congratulations and kudos to huphtur, who has just completed a web standards based site for Emerica. huphtur's XHTML and CSS work makes Emerica the first skateboard site to follow the those highly advised web standards practices that we discuss here so often. Even better, huphtur put together a tech doc describing what was done. Good job huphtur!
Lot's of things from our favorite lizard recently... Mozilla Firebird 0.7, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3, Mozilla Application Suite 1.5 and a beta of the Mozilla.org redesign preparing for the relaunch of Mozilla.org. The new design is made by Dave Shea of mezzoblue fame, more about it on mezzoblue.
How many times have you heard a client say "but everyone does it that way. It's standard"? I've heard it plenty of times... but what is "standard", how would one know, and what's its value — is a practice's ubiquity a compelling argument for its adoption?
In a recent article over at Boxes and Arrows — a design resource worthy of its own post — Heidi Adkisson discusses her study of common design practices across a wide spectrum of important web sites... practices such as using a hot-linked logo to return to the home page, using horizontal header links for primary navigation, and the like.
Heidi then gilds the lily by announcing a new site that features a larger investigation of her findings, and an open call to the design community for new research topics.
Floatutorial explains the basics of floats as well as giving some step-by-step tutorials on floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts.
When reading today's newspaper (a Belgian one, with a name contradictory to the sloppy markup its website is made of), I found out that the to me unknown HetPaleis website was nominated for the World Summit Award, a concours organised by the UN. Curious about the nomination, I fired up a new tab for viewing the HetPaleis site...
Promised to get back to you on this issue: The final name for the project has been chosen: DASDUA (Developers Against Standards Deficient User Agents). The purpose will as I mentioned in the first post be to make the end users aware of the competitors to primarily ie4-6w but also other standards deficient browsers, and trying to promote the usage of standards compliant browsers. For getting involved, have a look at the forums set up for the project. We welcome anybody that wants to participate. What we are in need of for the moment, especially, is someone able to make a nice set of logos and banners.
Andy Arikawa of Modulo 26 asks: "Would a print layout translate well to the Web? The most obvious obstacle might be the text-flow from one column to the next"
Check out his Economist-inspired mock-up.
A hearty welcome to Silus Grok, who has just agreed to join the Web-Graphics authoring team. Weighing in as author number 26, the fine group of folks that I've somehow swindled into joining, swells once again.
Because of the Eolas lawsuite, Microsoft has changed the way IE works when it comes to embedded ActiveX objects created by the embed, object and applet elements. More about this on MSDN > Information for Developers about Changes to Internet Explorer and linked pages. See also articles by Apple and Macromedia regarding the subject. (Seems like the same article with the only changes lying in what plugin is used.)
Tantek has a new CSS filter for us: the Midpass Filter, which can be used to target Windows IE 5.x only (lesser and greater browsers ignore it). This reminds me that I need to add the various helpful filter description pages to our resource page here. This was via Etc.
Anton Andreasson has been doing some interesting mimicks of magazine layouts using CSS and has now collecting them all on one page.
Ben Bishop has just released Aura, an xhtml/css template system that can be
easily adapted into content management and web publishing systems. Comes with simple downloadable components that allow you to build a standards compliant content management system or website quickly and easily.
Dan Cederholm (of SimpleBits) has recently developed a way to combine Pixy's rollovers and Stuart Landgridge's accesible image replacement. This combination creates Accessible Image-Tab Rollovers, which were recently rolled out for Fast Company.
He uses XHTML and CSS with three images, creating lightweight, valid, accessible and styled navigational tabs.
Lick Me, I'm a Macintosh - San Francisco Chronicle
I'm not sure I've seen such a good description of the more intangible reasons why Mac product owners seem to quickly become Mac product zealots. Many of the descriptions mentioned can cross mediums, and are familiar to anyone working to create great design and user experience. [via J. Veen]
