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• Reported by Russ

WE04 kicked off in Sydney yesterday. It was an amazing feeling to be in a room with over 200 developers who are all keen to learn more about developing with web standards.

Needless to say, Dave Shea, Doug Bowman and Joe Clark were exciting, entertaining and inspirational.

The local presenters did not let the side down either, with John Allsopp,Dean Jackson, Bruce Maguire, Roger Hudson and... me.

You can follow the daily progress on the WE04 blog if you feel the urge.

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• Reported by Russ

Roger Johansson has an iteresting post on the joys and sorrows of styling form controls. Well worth a read.

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• Reported by Nick

For those in the Bay Area, you may want to take note of this. The co-chairs of BayDUX, Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Fred Sampson, and Mike Van Riper, are pleased to announce the debut of BayDUX. BayDUX is a coalition of San Francisco Bay Area professional organizations that grew out of our joint participation in the DUX2003 conference. UXnet is a new organization whose mission is fostering cooperation and collaboration among the many organizations that serve the international user experience design community. Because UXnet and BayDUX share a common purpose, BayDUX is now the local presence for UXnet in the San Francisco Bay Area. BayDUX co-chairs also serve as UXnet Local Ambassadors.

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• Reported by Tony

Ran across yet another neat color selector the other day. This was hard to figure out at first, but the more I used it, the more I was impressed. And then I read the manual. They've really created a very nice, robust online application. Something to add to your color-picking toolkit.

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• Reported by Nate

Kevin Byrd, both photographer and designer (as well as architecture aficionado and other things) is the newest addition to the webgraphics author list. Kevin and I both wrote articles for the first issue of design in flight, but of course his very enjoyable byrdhouse blog has been on the reading list for a long time now. Welcome aboard Kevin.

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The Man in Blue has found a possible solution to the liquid layout debate: "The solution is to add a little vitamin J. JavaScript can tell you what the width of a browser is, then react accordingly. By default the content is displayed in a single column. Non-JavaScript enabled browsers, or lower resolution ones, will stay that way. But if you're 1024-up, with JavaScript, an alternate stylesheet gets put into action."

See an example in action

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Jon of Hicks Design talks about standards, his site, IE whitespace, logo designs and browser resources. Read more:
Ten Questions for Jon Hicks.

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• Reported by liorean

Oh no! It's that deranged geek again, with his ridiculous self replicating programs!

Well, I thought a followup would be nice. Quines are normally not useful, but are fun challenges that hone your programming skills. Creating quines isn't really that hard once you have found the secret "what", but if you want to vary the "how" of them you have to start thinking.

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• Reported by liorean

Recently the question What's with the neverending table fixation? Did I miss that meeting too? Not to sound flippant, but wtf is wrong with you people? was asked in a thread in the feedback forum on CodingForums. This is my answer...

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• Reported by liorean

The JavaScript Quine Contest started 2004-08-31 has now ended. The entries are listed on a separate page at JavaScript Quine Contest - Entries. The winning entries for the respective categories are as follows:

First Submitted Quine

Patrick H. Lauke, 193 characters

Smallest Quine

David Lindquist, 47 characters

Most Elegant Quine

David Lindquist, 67 characters

The motivation as follows: A single expression statement, no nested quotes, uses only one assignment and two function calls. Beautiful, slim and contains only the absolute necessities.

Fastest Quine

Not really relevant category, so I dropped it.

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• Reported by Russ

John Gallant (Big John) of Position is Everything fame talks about bug hunting, three column layouts, creating full css layouts and browsers. Read more:
Ten Questions for Big John.

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• Reported by Russ

Some of you may have seen a lot of these before, but for those of you who've been too busy, a quick link dump...

• Amnesty International USA
• Ten CSS tricks - corrected and improved
• Standards Resources for Beginners
• Web Development Mistakes
• The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes
• Best practices in online captioning
• Web Essentials cleared for take off. Cabin crew arm doors and cross check
• W3C uses presentational markup - oh the horror
• The perversion of Web Standards
• Sliding Faux Columns

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"This time 6 years ago we released the first version of Style Master into the world.."
John Allsopp, Dog or Higher.

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• Reported by Nate

Update: Thanks to helpful commenters, a 2 step method has been discovered, it is much cleaner and produces all the same results See this comment for a summary.

If you use Mac OS X as you're primary computer, and as a web designer, you'd like to test drive your websites without having to upload files via FTP repeatedly, then you might benefit from setting up your machine as a staging server to host multiple websites.

There are a number of ways to do this, probably the easiest being to simply turn on "Personal Web Sharing" in the "Sharing" preferences panel and start putting sites in your "Sites" folder (found in your home directory). This works pretty well, but you have to address things relatively (e.g. "../../something") since each site won't have their own root, and are in fact found in a subfolder that has your username. Example:

192.168.0.101/~nate/clientalpha

Now if you only ever intend to test one website, a lot of this may not apply, but I've compiled a few links that helped me with my setup so that hopefully others can benefit (read on).

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• Reported by liorean

Just a quick summary of the JavaScript Quine Contest (started last week) so far: Six persons in total have submitted entries. Four of these have produced one or several valid quines. The contest will run this week out, so there is ample time for you to write and submit your entries.

Well, that was the summary, now let's blather a bit...

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• Reported by Nate

Doug has experimenting with CSS, and applying the results on his website. Today he posts some very helpful notes for those interested in working with liquid layouts.

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• Reported by Russ

Are you proud to be a black-turtleneck-wearing-latte-sipping-mac-worshipping designer or are you a design-impaired-average-Joe-with-puny-cones?

Find out how to vote for your favorite colour

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Westciv's Style Master is 6 years old. To celebrate, Westciv are holding the Style Master Templates Competition.

"With over $US1000 in cash as well as other prizes on offer the competition challenges you to develop stylish, standards based CSS + XHTML templates that can be reused and adapted by developers around the world."

Find out more