Last week, the Google Print bèta went live. Google Print is the interface to Google's massive Library Project, an impressive attempt to make offline material searchable online. However, the project is not without controversy: last week, some publishers disputed Google's claim of fair use and said the whole thing is a massive copyright infringement. The future will tell whether that statement is true or not.
One of the most underestimated part of CSS are inline boxes. Probably most of you know the CSS specifications on the subject, but if you haven't read it, I suggest to look at the article on inline formatting model, by Eric Meyer, one of the most in-depth articles on CSS I've ever read for its level of detail.
Personally I tend first to use display:inline to make horizontal navlists for two main
reasons:
text-align propertyWith the helpful concepts explained on Eric Meyer's article, a while ago I turned to inline one of the nicest horizontal menus in its simplicity: the famous Mini Tabs by Dan Cederholm. I thought I'd share here the results.
A good stylesheet optimization in my opinion should be adopted firstly at design time, ie when writing the CSS. There are some good readings on the subject I'd like to suggest:
But, apart from using shorthands, three-digits colors or so.. is there something we can do to trim down further the size of a CSS file?
Derek Featherstone talks about accessibility, semantically correct mark-up, Tabindex, skip links, link styles, the link element and accessibility myths.
Articles on CSS organization and optimization are always welcome by webdesigners. Recently, two articles have catched readers' attention on the subject. The first one is CSS Organization Tip 1: Flags by Douglas Bowman and the second one is Modular CSS by Mike Stenhouse. Both articles advise the precious practice of organizing your CSS by sections but in quite opposite directions.
First, I'd like to say that's a real honour to join web-graphics: I hope to contribute my best, I already have some entry ideas in mind.
My fourth article in English has been published today: it's about Progressive Layout. This new kind of layout combines the advantages of both fixed and fluid layout. It's a fixed layout under and over certain resolutions, but it's fluid between. In the liquid stage the layout is quite different from the classic fluid layout, since the width and the margins of the layout vary accordingly to the browser width.
This is done with a really tiny script, that can turn almost any CSS-based layout (fixed or fluid doesn't matter) into a progressive one. You can read the article here.
New authors seem to come in pairs, sometimes triplets. Please welcome Alessandro Fulciniti to the web-graphics author's list. You might recognize Alessandro from Nifty Corners and More Nifty Corners. He has written these articles for http://pro.html.it/, and is putting the finishing touches on a brand new article. Welcome aboard Alessandro!
Yasuhisa Hasegawa has joined the Web-Graphics team here. Yasuhisa is a freelance web developer with a Japanese blog, who wrote a book called Stylesheet Stylebook, writes for Web Designing, and has written two articles for Design in Flight (Issues Two and Four). Thanks to Andreas for making the connection and inviting him. Welcome aboard Yasuhisa!
And all that Malarkey has just had a major overhaul. You can also open up Andy's head and see his early Designing scraplets.
Joe Clark talks about fonts, "more" links, opening new windows, skip links, source order, titles, accessible PDFs, forms, data tables and more.
I'm currently at the WWW2005 conference in Chiba, Japan. Some notes from the W4A2005 workshop:
Jason Santa Maria, talks about revamping blogs, web standards influences, awards, learning new skills, sketchbooks, grey boxes, design trends and more:
Web Essentials 05 - Sydney Australia
Thursday September 29 and September 30, 2005
There will be 22 in-depth sessions on Usability, CSS, XHTML, emergent semantics, Javascript, AJAX, and much more.
An amazing international line-up including Molly Holzschlag (Keynote Speaker), Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Veen, Tantek Celik, Kelly Goto, Douglas Bowman and Derek Featherstone.
There is also some great Aussie talent including Dean Jackson (World Wide Web Consortium), Cameron Adams, John Allsopp, Russ Weakley and James Robertson.
Oh, and you can also grab those little banner things...
The GNU licensed Synergy is a real workflow changer. With a very simple config text file, I've got this tiny server running here on my powerbook. Moving the mouse all the way to the right side of my screen it seamlessly slips over to my Windows PC screen. It works just like when you have two monitors hooked up to your Mac, except in this case, you can start using another operating system without the clutter of another keyboard/mouse, and without slowing your primary machine down through emulation or screen drawing (like you would with Virtual PC or VNC). Found via aplus moments.
The app is extremely small, works on various flavors of Windows, Mac OS X 10.2+, and Unix. Any machine it runs on can be the server; others: clients (same app for both). Configuration is really very simple, although I think the help instructions could be a little friendlier. One tip for OS X users, if you start out by modifying the config file that comes in the download, open it in BBEdit and chose "Show Invisibles" to get rid of stray characters that may keep the config file from being read.
May 1st brought the CSS Reboot.