Post Archive

› February 24, 2004

Interview With Rodolfo Quevenco, Web Editor at the IAEA

The International Atomic Energy Agency, headquartered in Vienna, Austria, is the UN's nuclear energy organization. The Agency's work has been much in the news lately as the professionals with the IAEA work long, hard hours to harness nations' nuclear capabilities for the good of the world's citizens -- from energy to drinking water.

Behind the scenes, teams of IT and web professionals work equally hard and long hours ensuring that information regarding the Agency's programs is available to the public and internally for the important work at hand. Recently, I communicated with the site's web editor, Rodolfo Quevenco, regarding the massive redesign of the Agency's primary website, which utilizes web standards such as XHTML and CSS.

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Textpattern Gamma

Textpattern by Dean AllenDean Allen has made Textpattern available for download. As you might expect, Dean's attention to detail makes this Gamma release highly anticipated, and well worth a try out. There is also a forum and a bug-tracker for those interested in getting a peek at the rapid development cycle, or participating in it. There are really too many features to list here, but check out the textpattern homepage for all the details.

› February 23, 2004

Live CSS Help

I have been idling in #css on EFNet IRC for a while now and it's very interesting (and sometimes disturbing) to see what kind of CSS questions people come up with. Most are about the fact that people have heard that tables are bad and want to switch to CSS but have no idea where to start.

We try to help people out by answering their questions and point them to all the available resources, but if you are an ultimate newbie the amount of information can be rather overwhelming and confusing. Rick Yribe (xfreakaa) and I are working on setting up an FAQ which hopefully should help a lot of CSS newbies.

So, if you are pretty confident with your CSS skills, feel free to idle in #css and help out.

Web Standards... your visitors, your clients and you

"The benefits of Web Standards to your visitors, your clients and you!"

Bullet-point notes from last nights presentation to the Web Standards Group, Macromedia User Group and Cold Fusion User Group - MXDU2004: Day Zero

› February 22, 2004

CSS links, old and new...

A few CSS links that have been doing the rounds in the last week...

WhiteSpace - Absolute and Relative Positioning
The Imposter - Simple clean CSS rollover menus with lists
ALA - Designing for Context with CSS
Dreamweaver Article - Why Use CSS? - via Dezwozhere
Ruthsarian Layouts - via ETC
W3C CSS tips & tricks - Drop shadows - via Meryl
Cascading Style Sheets, oh my!
Max Design - Sample CSS Page Layouts
Minimizing Flickering CSS Background Images in IE6 - via Blog-Fu

› February 20, 2004

Veer Lightbox - Segrest vs Steiner

Veer Lightbox TitleThe latest bout of lightboxing has been announced, this time with Jen Funk Segrest (girl) versus yours truly (geek). It was a lot of fun to participate and I really enjoyed the lightbox of images and typeface we were challenged with. Many thanks goes to Jon and Grant and the other great folks at Veer for the opportunity.

› February 12, 2004

4096 Color Wheel Updated

Remember when Tony posted about a 4096 color wheel? Comments reflected the antiquated terminology of "web-safe", which (as a self-imposed limitation to one's color palate) is fine, but not really relevant. I liked the way this color picker worked, so I emailed the author asking if it would be possible to save the "unsafe" color choices; turns out - that's now been implemented.

The 4096 Color Wheel saves "smart" and "unsafe" colors in a hidden list that can easily be revealed by clicking the "show full list" link.

› February 11, 2004

What's the point of using pixels?

Well, yes, this is another font sizing post. In it I'll tackle why I think points should be used instead of pixels for absolute sizes, as well as the reason for the pixel/point size discrepancy between platforms.

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› February 10, 2004

Accessible Web Typography

Certainly worth a look: Jim Byrne's Accessible Web Typography eBook. You have the choice between a 5$ PDF-version and a free HTML-version of the eBook (or maybe better: extended eArticle).

Link via the excellent UMD Web Design Reference.

Web Standards Awards

Although web standards give us a better, faster Internet, not many sites use them. The Web Standards Awards aims to promote web site design using W3C standards by seeking out and highlighting the finest standards-compliant sites on the Internet.

From Andy, Cameron and Johan comes The Web Standards Awards

› February 9, 2004

FireFox

Rob Green writes in to let us know that the Mozilla Project has renamed their Firebird browser to Firefox, and version 0.8 is available for download. I'm having trouble connecting to the site today (probably overloaded), but I'll be downloading as soon as possible. There are some very interesting rebranding notes at hicksdesign.

› February 6, 2004

Sean Corfield to talk about accessibility and web standards

The Web Standards Group, Macromedia User Group and Cold Fusion User Group have joined forces for a big web standards/accessibility meeting in Sydney on 23rd February - all welcome. Presenters:

Russ Weakley: "Practical benefits of web standards for your visitors, your clients and you".

Sean Corfield, Director of Architecture in IT at Macromedia: "Accessible & Compliant - a brief look at accessibility and web standards compliance on macromedia.com".

All part of a lead up to MXDU2004 in Sydney.

› February 5, 2004

Apple Safari 1.2

If you're a mac user you have probably already heard it, the new version of Safari is out. Like version 1.1, this is an OS X 10.3.1 (Panther) specific update. Improvements include LiveConnect support (Java and plug ins are scriptable from JavaScript), personal certificate authentication, much improved site navigation interface with full keyboard navigation, improved event handling, improved HTML error correction, title attribute tooltips, support for the IE propriatary marquee tag, DHTML performance optimisations, better cache handling, smallcaps support, outline support, cursor support, improved tables rendering, saving images and downloading linked files from the context menu, and support for resumable downloads.

There are a few complaints and issues you can see on mac related forums, that I will talk about.

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› February 3, 2004

A New PDF Design Magazine

From Andy Arikawa, of The Year in Review and the excellent Modulo26 weblog, a new endevour.

Design In-Flight magazine, a new digital (PDF) magazine devoted to graphic design, web design and web development.

The companion site includes all kinds of exciting details. If you enjoyed Andy's year in review PDF, this is something not to miss. First issue due July 1st 2004, submissions are being taken till May 15th.

› February 2, 2004

Style RDF Graphs with GSS

I can't say I really understand this, but it looks interesting: Styling RDF Graphs with GSS (Graph Style Sheets), found via muxway.

CSSVault has new address

Time to update bookmarks, the excellent showcase of CSS based web designs can now be reached at it's own domain: http://cssvault.com/.

Update: More news from the prolific Scrivs: Version 2 is a monthly CSS/XHTML redesign contest. Read more details at his announcement post over at whitespace.