Post Archive
› November 24, 2004
- 6 comments made
- Reported by Andreas
Chris Palmieri has published two fine articles on Japanese typography over at Functioning Form. In Chris' own words [links added]:
This two-part series offers a primer on Japanese typography for Western-trained designers. In [the] first installment, I will discuss basic typeface classification and white-space characteristics, explain some of the options and limitations of web-based Japanese typography, and make a few suggestions for creating attractive, legible type. In Part 2 of this series, I will address additional type issues, including analphabetic glyphs and the role of English in Japanese design.
Certainly worth your time.
A small note: as I expect the accompanying comparison chart to be illegible for those without Japanese fonts installed on their system, I took a screenshot of the top chart (Japanese WinXP SP2, FireFox 1.0, ClearType on, 96 DPI). Note that only the x-large fonts are antialiased—other sizes aren't... And yep, these two (four?) fonts are basically your only choice when it comes to rendering Japanese text on the web (under Windows, that is).
Update: FF1.0 renders the chart's "normal" line all in MS Mincho. IE6 does the opposite. The 10px and 11px lines are also partially rendered incorrect. Anybody an idea?
› November 21, 2004
- 1 comment made
- Reported by Russ
Cameron Adams, aka the Man in Blue, talks about standards, his amazing site, design, CSS Scrabble, the Web Standards Awards, accessible forms and more:
Ten questions for Cameron Adams
- 1 comment made
- Reported by Russ
Did you miss WE04? Well, Jeffrey Zeldman did too. A small matter of a baby got in the way.
Unable to attend, Zeldman sent us a short film directed by Eric Etheridge. This film is now available for all (9mb Quicktime).
Patrick Lauke has taken the trouble to caption the video as Quicktime SMIL 1.0
› November 18, 2004
- 7 comments made
- Reported by liorean
Due to the harddrive that held my Windows partition (among other things) dying a loud, screeching, horrible death I wont post the nice XHTML and accessibility post I had prepared for some time. Instead, I'll give you two questions, school-book style:
What does, according to you, the 'text/html' media type signify and imply? How do user agents and specs differ in what they interpret it to mean?
What is the reason for these SGML heaven - Tag Soup - XHTML documents, which all are valid and hold the same structure, to have such radically different treatment?
› November 15, 2004
- no comments made
- Reported by Russ
Are you in the Wellington area and interested in web standards? The inaugural Wellington Web Standards Group meeting will take place on 9 December.
- 10 comments made
- Reported by Scotty
Tech giant EDS redesigned its site using web standards. It even validates.
Since I work for said tech giant, I was able to discover some additional information concerning the improvements over the old site. For starters, pages are fifty percent lighter and fifty percent faster to load. Additionally, browser support increased, as did accessibility. We all knew that would happen, didn't we W-G readers?
Coupled with this standards-based redesign was a thorough overhaul of the User Interface and Information Architecture of the site. According to studies, most visitors to the old site reported difficulty in finding what they were looking for. EDS took this to heart and re-worked the site to contain more meaningful navigation and, dig this: sixty percent fewer pages. Upgrades search technology aims to complete the upgrade.
So, w-g readers, was EDS successful? I haven't lived and breathed the site too much, yet, but I have to say, over the table-based, image-sliced predecessor, I already declare this a huge improvement.
I work for EDS, but I won't take it personally if you decide to trash this site in the comments, as I had absolutely nothing to do with it and feel that criticism is part of learning and improving.
- no comments made
- Reported by Russ
Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street talks about web standards, round corners, development mistakes and ampersands. Read more:
Ten questions for Roger Johansson
› November 12, 2004
- 9 comments made
- Reported by liorean
Mozilla is not the only browser developer that can produce high quality, high tech products - Opera is on the march too. Today they released the third preview of Opera 7.60 on the Windows platform, a browser that is (user-interface-wise) very like the current Opera 7.54, but has many improvements under the hood. Notable changes from 7.5x versions are new versions of the linear_b ECMAScript engine and the Presto rendering engine, support for CSS3 Speech module, XHTML+Voice1.2, XMLHttpRequest, XMLSerializer, DOMParser, DOM3 Load & Save, experimental TLS support, and wmode support for plugins. This means it fixes, among other things, GMail support and handles plugins with transparent backgrounds.
Actually, the updated capabilities makes this feel like a bigger update than the 7.54 to 7.60 jump might indicate. Take it for a spin and see how you like it.
› November 10, 2004
- 21 comments made
- Reported by Andreas
This blog entry is a small experiment with how the :target pseudo-class and the ^ substring matching attribute selector can make browsing better. For this CSS3 experiment, you'll need to open up your brand new copy of Firefox 1.0 or another :target and ^ aware browser.
view rest of article
› November 9, 2004
- 16 comments made
- Reported by liorean
You all know it, but it's worth being said out loud - today marks the end of the single browser web! Mozilla Firefox, the single browser so far that has been able to take market share from Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows, has reached 1.0 status. Downloadable from one of eight American mirrors or one of three European mirrors as of today, it's perhaps the biggest event for the open source movement yet.
And even more Mozilla Firefox - there are a number of third party, optimised builds out there, if you feel if's sluggish. If you have a Windows PC (x86-32/IA32 or x86-64 processor) you might want to check out MOOX:Optimized Firefox & Thunderbird Builds. If you have a Macintosh, you might be interested in the G4 (PPC 7450/PPC 7400) optimised Firefox builds or the G5 (PPC 970) optimised Firefox builds. More third party builds can be found at MozillaZine:Third Party/Unofficial Builds.
I usually talk about the new features of the releases, but today I think there's no need to. There are no major feature changes since the preview release or the release candidates.
On another note, on Kevin Gerish's blog you can read about:Aquafication which talks about both the choice made to release the 1.0 version of Firefox on the Macintosh platform at the same time as for Linux and Windows, and the delay in aquafication of Firefox that this means.
› November 8, 2004
- no comments made
- Reported by Russ
John Allsopp of Westciv talks about CSS Samuari, standards, Dao, dogs, line-height and font-size inheritance. Read more:
Ten questions for John Allsopp
› November 2, 2004
- 2 comments made
- Reported by Russ
WestCiv have announced their template competition winners from almost 50 entries.
