This is a follow-up on my earlier posts about .mobi. Today's Slashdot points to a recent Builder.com article about mTLD:
mTLD, the operator of the .mobi domain space, has stipulated that anyone wanting to register for a domain must abide by a code of practice.
Back in July, there was already mention of "a series of style guides and policies", about which I had my doubts, as I didn't see any reference to web standards.
But let's go back to the article:
Get ready to click "Add to bookmarks" or whatever you're using to track must-read links. Alex Robinson has published In search of the One True Layout over at the Position is Everything site. The article details the results and findings of Alex's quest to create a universal layout system that can be applied to all sorts of situations. It's really more of a CSS framework if I understand it correctly. If you want to cut to the chase, check out the examples page. I'm looking forward to reading it all more in-depth but I wanted to go ahead and spread the word since it looks so promising.
In the video linked from this page, old friend Andy Edmonds can be seen discussing with Robert Scoble how MSN Search works and how they've been striving to make it better and smarter.
I mention this partly because it's an interesting discussion to watch, and also because Andy's position with MSN Search brought back some memories of the pre-blog version of web-graphics. Note, the rest of this post is just reminiscing.
Jeremy Keith talks about the DOM, Javascript, ECMAscript, bad reputations, good and evil, learning resources, a new book, liquid layouts and more.
John Allsopp has been slaving over a hot computer, creating podcast remixes from the Web Essentials 05 event. Check out the ultra-moody deep remix and the upbeat remix.
DomCorners is a very simple technique for getting rounded corners, which has been presented on pro.html.it, the italian portal I write for, on the 31 of August 2005. When I developed it in July, I wanted to get a lightweight solution, simple to use and flexible. So I started thinking and came up with a solution that relies entirely on javascript and images, it's unobtrousive, has very good browser support and is very minimal.
Until recently, I never had the occasion to employ links that scroll the browser viewport back to the top of the page. When a client requested them however, I had to look up how to make them. I didn't like the options I found:
<a name="top"></a>),id attribute on some element near the top of the page (id="top")Combined with a link whose href is a fragment identifier (<a href="#top">Back to top</a>), these constructs produce the desired result. But the overhead—at least to my delicate sensibilities—is undesirable:
#top is useless when the URL is bookmarked.A bit of JavaScript in an unobtrusive fashion solves the problem:
WetFloor is a Photoshop "action" that will add a glossy style reflection to any image, it's modeled after the effect found in iTunes when browsing videos and also featured in the new OS X app "Front Row". The action file is available for your use and tweaking over at the twinsparc site, but I thought folks here might be interested in a little more background info.
When you're faced with some sort of routine image production work, like for instance resizing 200 thumbnail images, not much is as flexible and powerful as the Photoshop batch processing tools like actions and droplets. You can open the actions palette, open one of your 200 images, hit "record" and run through the processing, hit "stop" and you've got your action. You can apply this action to the other 199 images and let your computer take care of the job while you pour your 12th cup of coffee.
During the last couple of weeks, Paul Baron, Olivier Thereaux, Chris Kobayashi, Chris Palmieri and I have been fairly busy with preparing the relaunch of Tokyo Art Beat, "Tokyo's Art and Design Events Calendar".
Besides a fresh design and IA, Tokyo Art Beat now also has a Japanese/English blog with art reviews, extended MyTAB functionality (including shared event list pages and other community features) and cell phone users are presented a special light-weight version of the site. Be sure to have a look - and while you're at it, a link to the Flickr pool of our amazing 1 year TAB party, attended by more than 400 art loving Tokyoites :-)
Patrick Lauke talks about photography, CSS, the Zen Garden, accessibility, SMIL and the WASP accessibility Task Force. Find out more in "Ten questions for Patrick Lauke"
Have you ever seen a presenter show a code example and then heard the entire audience then break out into applause? It happened at WE05, and it had nothing to do with the evacuation.
The presenter was Derek Featherstone and the presentation is now online at his new site - simplyaccessible. You can also see Derek in action, and listen to his podcast.
I was fascinated by this page describing a Noguchi Filing System (via Todd). It's interesting because getting the most out of it is almost unavoidable. Through use it naturally evolves into something more and more convenient. Read the linked page for more details, but the 5 second summary is: don't group files together, instead, package them, label them, and put on a shelf. Move files to the left side of the shelf after use. Repeat, repeat, repeat - eventually your shelf contains most frequently needed documents on the left. It's a frequency-of-use sorting system.
Might this not be a nice implementation for tag based navigation? Rather than the visually weighted and alphabetically sorted tag cloud, how about a list of tags in order of "most clicked". Or actually do the sorting every time you click an item - although that might need to be limited to individual users.
I think a nice implementation of this might show an alphabetical listing, then upon clicking an item, an "alias" of the item is entered into a separate area above the alphabetical list. The alias area would work Noguchi style, shifting the most recently clicked item up top, but the alpha list would remain below. In my illustration here, the Noguchi area has a dark red background, it would constantly shift to show the most recently clicked item up top (probably most recent that *you clicked* only). Perhaps it would be limited to a certain number of links so that infrequently clicked links would not persist.
So anyway I thought I'd share this since it's been floating in my brain and I unfortunately don't have the time to pursue it, but maybe someone else does. Or maybe this is completely unintelligible, I can't yet tell.
Xyle scope is an interesting addition to the tool-belt of any XHTML/CSS worker who happens to use OS X. With this desktop app, you'll find the ability to select elements of any web page, see the margin/padding relationship applied to it, and a list of all styles that effect it. You'll see a multi-column finder-eske navigation to browse the HTML elements of the page - a very effective way to see the structure. You might even have reason to consult the built-in DTD browser.
What I like about this most is it's ability to decipher the CSS that is being applied to any particular element, including styles applied to parent elements. As a diagnostic tool, this might be the best all-in-one solution I've seen yet. The fact that you can tweak settings in the CSS and preview instantly and export in a number of ways is even more reason to give this a try. Link found at coolosxapps.