Post Archive

› April 26, 2004

Ten questions for Keith Robinson

Keith Robinson, of Asterisk fame, talks about web standards, frustration, validation, accessibility, usability and the Golden Triangle. Read more: Ten questions for Keith Robinson.

Mozilla looking ahead

I've said it before - albeit not here. The web is not the next battlefield of Microsoft's chosing, and is inconsequential as battlefields go in the software market nowadays anyway. No, the next battle will stand on the fields of close network integration, platform unification, ease of construction of small applications and useful utilities - web based and client based both. It's mayor weapons will be Longhorn, .NET, Avalon. Apparently, Brendan Eich have about the same thoughts on this. That is the area in which the open source projects need to cooperate and stand as one - not as many alternatives. Mozilla can't afford to not counter XAML by enhancing SVG, XUL, XBL, JavaScript 2; or try to stand alone while the Linux community around them moves to counter Microsoft. They must be a part of the unified platform that the Linux platform will, sooner or later, create to counter Microsoft.

So, what part should Mozilla take in the future? Where can we take this ship built out of smaller boats and driftwood, so that it will eventually come out if not atop, then at least in one part, after the clash with the Microsoft ironclad, in a not too distant future?

Hat tip Craig Saila, who has a few other links of interest as well...

› April 23, 2004

Happenings in browser space

While developers are standing still, watching Internet Explorer 6 numbers rise and trying to figure out how to make it do the things that it wasn't made to do, things are happening elsewhere. In the news, Opera moved 7.50 ahead on all desktop environments, it's now in it's first beta. This browser maybe doesn't add that much on Opera 7.23 when it comes to styling, but as the JavaScripter I am I certainly welcome the additions in DOM and scripting in XML - and a speedup that makes it a very worthy opponent to Firefox. At the same time, Mozilla aren't standing still. Firefox 1.0 is going to be developed from Mozilla 1.7, and this made Mozilla change which release is going to be the next stable one from 1.8 to 1.7. A first release candidate for Mozilla 1.7 has been released. Also, the no-as-dead-as-we-have-been-led-to-believe Netscape will release a 7.2 version based on this release sometime in the future, which is certainly a welcome improvement on 7.1, which is based on the 1.4 release.

Fuzzy Shadows

The latest article at A List Apart is out. CSS Drop Shadows II: Fuzzy Shadows further details on how to create proper drop shadows, without the sharp edges of the shadow.

Rich typography with IFR

I am a bit late at the party, but hey: over at ShaunInman.com, a long introduction to his excellent and amazing Inman Flash Replacement technique.

I am wondering if it is possible to use this technique with non-ASCII characters though. As for now, apparently not yet.

› April 20, 2004

Ten questions for Eric Meyer

An interview with Eric that covers his new books, image replacement techniques, font-size, CSS hacks and more.

Link dump - web standards, CSS, SEO

WestCiv have just started their free course program again, kicking off with HTML and XHTML for CSS. Great stuff as always...

An exercise in clarity: Web Standards - interesting answers to a question posed by 37 Signals

Web standards. They're big, dumb, and they dont work - A strange perspective on web standards

CSS tutorial - starting with HTML and CSS - by Bert Bos

Good web page titles - another excellent short post by Keith Robinson

› April 16, 2004

Flash Slide Show

Another Flash resource - this time from Todd Dominey. Note that Todd has actually provided the FLA source file - so you can customize this to your hearts content. Also Read the details posted on his site, he's separated the photo specification into an external XML file, so it's ready to use as-is without even modifying the FLA if you prefer.

› April 14, 2004

Flash Gallery

Jennifer points to a very slick Flash based photo gallery called SimpleViewer from Airtight Interactive. The documentation shows how simple it is load up with your favorite images (save out images, thumbs and edit 1 xml doc), and the demos show how the gallery indicates load-progress and includes slick transitions.

Perhaps you're interested in a nicely thought-out and pre-packaged gallery system like this, but you'd prefer an XHTML solution? I suggest you try out PhotoStack, you won't get load progress bars and animated transitions but both are cool solutions to the common need of a web based photo gallery. Do you have photo gallery solutions you've tried and would recommend to others?

Developing with Web Standards

Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street has constructed a document introducing the core concepts associated with web standards based development. "Developing With Web Standards Recommendations and best practices" looks to be quite bookmark worthy, and great for sharing with friends who haven't yet tasted the W3C kool-aid.

Ironing out all the details and sub-topics is not an easy task to accomplish in one easy to read document, kudos Roger.

› April 13, 2004

Flash sans Embed

Sometimes I wonder if the casual WG reader prefers an occasional list of "quick picks", much like the prolific Russ has provided in this post from last month. Or a higher posting volume, where individual posts point to fewer things, like this: Embed Flash without <embed> - Hixie explains how to do so, and provides a sample page.

› April 12, 2004

CSS Variables with PHP

Monstrosity! And yet, I can't turn away. I'm talking about these simple guidelines from Jeff Croft for using PHP to create stylesheets that accept variables. Such a technique can be used to set colors that can be re-used throughout the CSS. I can imagine some folks finding this a distasteful mixing of technologies, but I would not be one of them. What I like about this is concept is that it works hand-in-hand with the practice of creating a limited and defined color palate - important for most any design. Although this sort of contradicts what I just said, I think one could also make some pretty fancy style switching options by passing variables into the CSS, rather than defining them within it. But I'm not interested in that, and I'm sure you're not either.

Visualizing Menu Mousing

Longtime WG contributer Andy Edmonds is finishing up his masters thesis. Check out this cool preview doc and pretty pictures that show how much he's been learning about how we mouse.

Nice Firebird (um, fox) Theme

I'm a little late in catching this, but (in case you are too): "Le Breeze" from Kevin Davis is a really nice theme for Firefox. Really nice - as in: clean, trim, and very pleasant to look at. In short, very aesthetically usable. You'll see he's also got a matching theme for Thunderbird.

› April 10, 2004

Kinja

I'm trying out Kinja on behalf of the crew here. I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to simply link to wg kinja rather than the weirdness that is the current blogroll page. It would be quite neat if one could subscribe to their kinja roll as rss, or fold their kinja roll into their own site - of course inclusion of the subtle sponsored text links would be a reasonable price for this service. Who knows, it's still "beta" so maybe that's in the works. Website owners, note that you can submit a 32 x 32 pixel icon via email to Kinja that they will associate with your site (more on that). Also I was interested to see that Kinja will sometimes text scrape a weblog for content rather relying on the rss - I discoved this when I noticed that a WG post as seen in Kinja included authorship and comment data that isn't currently included in the syndication file. If you'd prefer Kinja to stick to your syndication file there's some info on that in this faq answer. What do you think of this Kinja system?

› April 8, 2004

OSX - When MP3s Attack... **UPDATED**

Yesterday, Intego, a Mac security specialist, had posted a warning regarding the MP3Concept virus. Like many others, I rushed to spread the word of this impending scourge not knowing that the this "virus" was essentially written to illustrate how a backdoor COULD BE opened for malicious reasons. More info can be found here.


So before you rush out and buy anti-virus software (which may not be a bad investment anyways), understand that the current threat is a little overblown. Hopefully I won't be eating these words later.

› April 6, 2004

Software update...for the rest of them...

This looks promising. Renew is a "OS X's Software Update" for the 3rd party applications that reside on your system. Renew scans your drive for available applications and then searches the internet for any available updates. Before the updates are installed, you can review which apps are candidates for revision.

Currently, it's free during a trial period ending May 2nd. Afterwards it will be sold for $10. For more information, visit Renew.

Web Standards Awards winner

This months Web Standards Award winner is Jason Santa Maria. Well done, Jason!

› April 1, 2004

Version 2 Contest

This month's contest over at Version 2 is to redesign the IMDB homepage. It's been really interesting to see all the contributions, if you missed it, here's the full list of February entries for the Project Gutenburg homepage, and March entries for The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project.

Basecamp is Best

Basecamp is the web based project management tool from 37signals. The other day it occurred to me that this is by far the best web application I've ever used.

Why am I writing about it? Basecamp has received a lot of press, especially when it first came out - but I imagine that there are other folks who had the same initial reaction to it that I did: A hosted solution? No thanks. If you've wondered about Basecamp, but haven't tried it, maybe my opinions will be of interest.

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