Andy of The Daily Flight has put together a beautiful PDF document designed for print that highlights posts he's enjoyed making and that have elicited positive reader feedback. The Year in Review post explains the motivations for his creativity and generosity, and provides a link to download the PDF. I'm printing out my copy now, I highly recommend this - lots of valuable info here.
Different people doing different things with Powerpoint.
Liquid layouts have received a bit of a hammering over the last few weeks. There have been a lot of comments about how hard they are to achieve. So, here is an article on how to build liquid layouts, the easy way.
The article ends with an example of Liquid Insanity.
I'm working over here on a CSS redesign. Scotty (site owner and longtime buddy) has completely stripped the site and reworked all the markup to be more semantic. My goal is to get the site looking as close to Pepe's design layout as possible, here is a PDF of the target design (this pdf is 308k). Feel free to comment with suggestions and/or derision. Until I update this post, consider the work unfinished.
Clagnut- A brilliant article on liquid layout using concertina padding, and CSS controlled images.
The Man in Blue - an interesting article on Web page liquidation.
And, of course, you cannot pass up CSS-based T-shirts
Advanced Tables Tutorial is actually quite good. Now that CSS can/does the layout work, it frees up tables for what they were meant to do, which is displaying tabular data. Covers all of the forgotten tags, such as <thead>, <tbody>, <tfoot>, <colgroup> and more.
Jeffrey Veen: The Easiest Way to Publish del.icio.us Links on Your Site - a javascript solution that uses document.write() to keep the links fresh.
This morning I had a harsh discussion with an ASP programer. He was claiming that XHTML/CSS is not coding; "It's just arranging a bunch of predefined tags to create a visual result." Lets look at what the dictionary says:
Code: A system of symbols and rules used to represent instructions to a computer; a computer program.
Isn't that what we do? With XHTML/CSS we instruct a web browser to display a message. Sure, it doesn't really involve any crazy math and it is probably not as complicated as ASP, PHP, Javascript, Python, C++, etc. But in my eyes, what we do is still considered "coding".
Or am I wrong?
When a weblog post receives many comments, it becomes somewhat of a visual chore to chunk through all that text and decipher each commenters name/alias or the associated URL. Understanding who said what can be very valuable in an extended group discussion. Many forum applications allow registered users to add an icon to their profile, but how about those of us who prefer not to use registration systems?
Victor of has created a nifty solution in the form of a Movable Type plugin called MTIcon. It's quite simple and elegant - if a commenter includes a URL, and if that URL has an associated favicon (the little graphic that shows up in the address bar), it will be added as a graphic along side their comment. Where the icon shows up in your template is up to you.
The 4096 Color Wheel is another color chooser. What I like about this one is the auto-columns of the web-safe, web-smart, and unsafe colors as you hover over the color wheel.
Lately I've been inspired by the Veen's work in getting del.icio.us links folded into his site in various ways, first javascript, then perl. Orignially I had used this php script from Aramchek, but I had to remove it since it did not include a built-in cache method. For whatever reason I didn't feel like using the javascript method, and because of my own ineptitude, I couldn't get Veen's perl method rolling, so I realized that I'd have to figure my way around adding caching to the original php script I was using (the one from Aramchek). I think people who actually know this stuff can set up caching 5 ways while blindfolded, I'm not that person so, Simon Willison came to the rescue...
The new typography - clagnut on font choices.
From the CSS stylings of Dan Benjamin’s Automatic Labs comes FileHosting.com. Clean, simple, and valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, FileHosting’s motto “Faster is Better” applies equally well to the site itself.
Strong work Dan!
I've said it before and I'll say it again: According to [CSS2], there is no way to get a float to size according to it's content.
Via Jeff Croft comes Matt Round's blog Malevole. It's multi-layered, full CSS and valid XHTML 1.0 - what more could you ask!
Christina Wodtke has created a wonderful resource site. Widgetopia is a collection of widgets, UI elements, form fields, search boxes and more, from various websites. She's noted where each is from, and what is good and/or bad about each one.
Graphical Headings is an alternative to the Fahner Image Replacement technique, that works even if the user has images turned off. [via Andy Budd]
After some two weeks of mailing, testing and intensive programming, Henrik Just has released a new development version of his Writer2LaTeX tool. The interesting thing is that this release fixes a lot of the problems people might have had with the previous version. The new version features:
<title> supportids instead of <a name="" /> anchorsblockquote support; that is, with p tags wrapped around quoted paragraphsp tags anymore inside of li (yep, Tristan)classes, even with styles turned off (useful when defining your own stylesheet)And, to make things easy: I've updated my quickguide.
Westciv Free CSS1 course is now starting. Every week a new major section will become available, but the old installments will disappear.
Nemesis article: Two columns with color - a simple step by step tutorial on how make a two column CSS layout with columns in color.
Tables for Tabular Data - a great article by Mark Lynch on using CSS to style data tables.
Via Literary Moose, check out a CSS lamp that would look great inside a CSS house.
More to come...
Watch a live real-time redesign towards cleaner validating XHTML over at Scotty's halfass weblog. He's going through it all and making sure semantic markup controls the content, it's all part of a good solid underpinning for CSS/XHTML site design.
I can't help it: kat+eric:first-child {name:carolyn;}
I've learned so much from Eric's postings to the CSS-Discuss list, his tireless tutorials and charts. It seems natural that, despite never having met him or Kat in person, well-wishing enthusiasm is shared on the occasion of their new family member. Thanks for the linking z.
This may be a weird question, but are today's email applications able to handle XHTML 1.0 Strict Documents? If so, which ones? If not, what can one do to still make eligible newsletters? Does anybody know of any good write-ups about this?
Check out the interview with Todd Dominey over at WASP regarding the PGA redesign, lots of informative stuff there.
Have you read ETC? I've found it to be regularly informative, every post is a gem. So I'm extra pleased to announce that Jennifer has agreed to hop on as the second female web-graphics author. As the planets would align, Doug of StopDesign just made this post where he wonders about the number of women interested in design/standards/css.
How much fun is this? Lightboxing over at Veer. From the site:
Two designers are invited to create designs based on a particular theme, from products in a lightbox. The lightbox contains 6 images and/or typefaces, chosen by the Veer creative team.
Having a common group of photos and typeface to start with is a nice differentiator to the other creative exhibitions (e.g. the very excellent Coudal photoshop tennis), and a smart way to tie in the excellent Veer product line.
About 3000 birds just flew into the trees around my office. Branches and leaves started falling, the squawks were deafening. Weird morning.
CSS Design:Creating Custom Corners & Borders by Søren Madsen and Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards Part II by Daniel M. Frommelt (part I).
TheScholar writes to tell of a new weblog about "making things easier". The layout and design of elementary is clean and simple (extra appropriate given the subject matter), but I also find it quite pleasing.
For OS X based web developers and designers I think skEdit is a web development app to keep your eye on, Sean Kelly has made significant leaps and bounds with the new version 3.3, ground-up improvements all around the app, including pretty icons from the talented Jon Hicks. There are too many notable and intuitively placed features to list here, download the trial and check it out.
Nice new revisions to the original Nice Titles can be found at 1976design. via etc
Follow on from Listamatic, Listutorial and Floatutorial comes Selectutorial - CSS selectors.
Includes basic information like the structure of rules, the document tree, types of selectors and their uses. There is also a step-by-step tutorial showing how selectors can be used in the process of building a 3-column layout.