Post Archive

› June 30, 2004

Ten questions for Richard Rutter

Richard Rutter, of Clagnut fame, talks about liquid layouts, scaling images access keys, ems, and the standards-based rebuild of Multimap. Read more:

Ten questions for Richard Rutter

› June 28, 2004

Safari RSS

According to macminute, a new version of Safari will include RSS support. This seems to me like a very natural evolution for our web browsers to make, but I wonder how it will be implemented.

› June 24, 2004

Adobe Illustrator Scripting

Do you use Adobe Illustrator as a regular part of your workflow? It might make sense to look into the scripting options available to optimize some of your tasks. Naturally the first place you might go is to the Adobe Studio Exchange, but the choices there seem paltry. I found another place for such scripts that seemed worth noting. This 2002 book (Adobe Illustrator Scripting) on the subject has a big download file with tons of scripts, find Mac and Win versions linked here. If it's time to craft your own script, you might appreciate this big PDF tutorial (direct PDF link) found via googling. Do you have any tips or sites worth checking out on the subject?

› June 23, 2004

LZW patent expired

The U.S. and other countries patents for LZW compression are now expired, the Canadian version will follow shortly (July 7). LZW compression is the brains behind the GIF format. I'm thinking that this should help designers indirectly. Even in the current days of better PNG support, having the GIF format un-patented should enable more software developers to fold it into their products without worrying about hefty licensing fees. (noted via eyebeam reblog)

› June 21, 2004

Project Mars

Peter Ottery put together a presentation titled "Project Mars - Redesigning smh.com.au & theage.com.au with css" for the Sydney meeting of the Web Standards Group on Thursday June 10, 2004. It outlines the process he and his team used to take the Sydney Morning Herald and Age sites from table-based layouts to full CSS.

The presentation is available as a 1mb PDF.

Ten questions for Molly Holzschlag

Molly talks about her books, standards, CSS vs tables, the IE factor, the Web Standards Project and more. Read more:

Ten questions for Molly Holzschlag

› June 20, 2004

CSS Naming conventions

Andy Clarke is at it again. It began last month with What's in a name, and is followed up today with What's in a name part 2, where Andy gives his conclusions.

› June 18, 2004

“Using Movable Type 2.6x/3 for non-weblog content management”

A while ago, after upgrading the K.U.Leuven Japanese Studies website from a bunch of handcoded pages to a small, CMS-powered & standards compliant site, I decided to write a short howto-article. 'Howto', because we used the weblog CMS Movable Type 2.6x for the content management of a non-weblog site - certainly not rocket-science, but well, there was some template and system tweaking involved, so hence the write-up. However, due to several reasons, the article stayed in a forgotten folder on my harddrive. Then, about a month ago, there was the launch of Movable Type 3 (including a new much talked about licensing system), which made a lot of people move to open source alternatives and rendered my article sort of obsolete - or not? Anyway, I decided to give the Web-Graphics readers the last word - feedback, suggestions, additions are welcome (like: does it also work with Movable Type 3? Update 2004-07-12: It does work with MT3! Thanks, Seth.). Here it is: Using Movable Type 2.6x/3 for non-weblog content management

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› June 15, 2004

Firefox 0.9

Two friendly readers suggest posting a note that Firefox 0.9 is out now - good idea, it's a great browser and worth your minute or two to upgrade.

A bit of web standards linkage 2

It seems I fogot to mention a few other web standards related posts:

John Allsopp's girlfriend on Catching web standards
Veele - Web Standards, Where do we go from here? A few ideas...
Tomas Jogin - Tables
Tom Werner - Web Standards and the Novice Editor via Dez

And finally, Patrick Griffiths has written an interesting article on HTML and CSS for Mobiles which includes a test page. It'll be interesting to see the final results.

› June 14, 2004

A bit of web standards linkage...

It started a day or so ago on a slightly down note...
Keith Robinson - Sick Of Web Standards
Nick Finck - Burnt Out on Web Standards
Keith Robinson - Sick Of Web Standards: Reloaded

Then a bit of rallying...
Simon Willison - Embracing Best Practice
Molly Holzschlag - Standards backlash
Andrei Herasimchuk - The real reason you should care about web standards

And ended with some silly stuff...
Banners Promoting Standards-based Products / Services

› June 10, 2004

Cruise Ship Illlustration

Want to suddenly feel like your job is cake? Check out the process outlined by Kevin Hulsey for this technical illustration of a cruise ship (try the Google cache version). It looks like it look a lot of work, and sure enough it did, 720 hours in less than 2 months, including 9 hrs just to export from Illustrator to Photoshop. The end result is quite stunning. Thanks k10k news for this inspiration.

› June 9, 2004

CSS Teaser or Lead-in Box

From 456 Berea Street comes this slick method for making a teaser or lead-in box with CSS. CSS Teaser Box. I think consolidated, stand-alone tutorials and suggested methods like this are super useful. It's why so many of the a list apart articles are handy to reference.

Font Classification System

Chris writes in to let us know about Type-Expertise which is a new "Universal Font Classification System." It looks to be an interesting concept aimed at maximizing the metadata available for each font. Will such a system actually provide valuable (and valid) time saving information so that designers can pick appropriate fonts quickly? We may not truly know until this patent-pending system is available for actual use. Meanwhile, the Type-Expertise website is encouraging feedback in their discussion forum. The first question that comes to mind: does this system have some way to filter for the thousands of crap fonts floating out there? And more generally, will uber-classification really help what is ultimately a subjective process?

› June 8, 2004

"JavaScript is the worst invention ever"

Well, that is the position taken by Bert Bos (W3C) at the Web Applications and Compound Documents workshop W3C held recently. Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and maintainer of the Mozilla roadmap, reacts on his blog Brendan's Roadmap Updates.

Now, I'm wondering what gripes Bert Bos have with JavaScript, really. He don't back his statements up by any examples of why JavaScript is such a bad invention, or really what is bad about the language. From what I can gather from his statements there, I really see very little in his statements there that does in any way target JavaScript specifically, so what is it that he really attacks with that statement? I wasn't at the workshop, so I'm probably only half wrong here, but let me give you my take on JavaScript's place in the world at large.

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Welcome Jason!

Jason Santa Maria is the newest addition to our crew here at web-graphics. If you haven't been reading his weblog, you've got some valuable tutorials, engaging writing, and superb design to catch up on. Welcome aboard Jason!

Web Essentials 2004

Web Essentials 04 is taking place in Sydney Australlia on September 30th - October 1st of 2004. Check out the top-shelf top-notch line up of presenters, including everyone's favorite interviewer, tutorial maker, and WG author Russ Weakley. This looks to be a value packed event, mark your calendars!

› June 7, 2004

Ten questions for Dan Cederholm

Dan talks about web design, standards, semantically correct markup, SimpleQuiz and his hot-off-the-presses book. Read more:

Ten questions for Dan Cederholm

› June 6, 2004

Plug-in support on the Mac

Liveconnect is the Netscape technology that allows JavaScript and Java or plug-ins using the Netscape Plug-In Architechture to communicate, both ways. Since Netscape Communicator 4 waned from the userbase, the Mac platform has been largely missing liveconnect support, Mozilla and derivates being the only browsers supporting it. Recent browser development has given us this feature back, however. Safari now supports Java-JavaScript communication through liveconnect, and Opera have restored liveconnect support in 7.51. It's not complete, but we're getting there - soon this capability, which has never been missing on the Windows platform, will be back on the Mac platform. Why is this good for the Mac platform? Well, for a number of reasons. One of them would be that as plug-in support increases, Mac users can use a larger part of the web. Another is that this increased plug-in support can be used as an argument to get users to move to more standards compliant modern browsers from the old and good but buggy and aged, Internet Explorer : Mac.

› June 5, 2004

WHAT is the future of the web?

Anyone listening to recent ramblings of Anne van Kesteren, Ian Hickson or myself will by now have heard of the situation with the W3C members and their standpoint on web applications. The Mozilla and Opera methodology seems to be severely out of favour among the W3C members, who seem to consider the web browser something of the past, something with no real importance for the future of the web. I strongly believe the opposite. The web browser is the single most important piece in the puzzle that is the web - from the user perspective. The user doesn't want to download plug-ins. If they come with the browser, fine, but they don't want to download them. Same goes for client-side applications, whether running in the background or running as application windows. For a web application technology to work, one of the requirements, as I see it, is that it works from out of the web, out of the browser, without requiring any additional runtime engines or virtual machines. Sending such runtime engines or virtual machines with the technology is not a viable option from many perspectives.

WHAT the Web Hypertext Application Technologies Working Group is a newly created open and public collaboration, consisting of browser vendors and other interested parts, which will be working on extending HTML and other browser technologies in use today into a web application platform that is widely interoperable and easily deployable. If you are interested in the future of web applications, join the WHAT mailing list.

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› June 4, 2004

Color palette creator

Steve of Slayeroffice.com has made an awesome color palette creator based on Andy Clarke's recent article about creating colo(u)r palettes. By the way, in the comments following this article, there are links to other color picking tools. Something for the bookmarks.

Via the Web Design Reference.

› June 3, 2004

Simon Jessey's 10 reasons for web standards

Simon Jessey has outlined 10 reasons for web standards. Do you agree or disagree? Are there more that should be added?

› June 1, 2004

Ten questions for Simon Willison

Simon Willison talks about his blogs, web standards, killer tables, CSS, Longhorn and WaSP. Read more:

Ten questions for Simon Willison