August 18th, 2008–August 19th, 2008 in San Francisco, CA
Safari is probably the most reliable browser out there when it comes to rendering things as a standards-aware developer would expect, but there are those rare times when you need to target it specifically with some unique rules. For those cases, this article will point you in the right direction. Visit site »
Sara’s got a short little how-to on using clipping and transparency in web design to create some screens over photos and other similar layout options. Good stuff! Visit site »
So it appears that, short of a set of stone tablets carried down from the hills of Mountain View, we do have a fairly clear answer. Using CSS image replacement in a responsible way, where the image truthfully represents the content it’s replacing, is safe to use. The simple act of hiding text from users is not enough to get your site banned from Google’s index.
I think most of us have always suspected non-shady use of image replacement would be fine by Google, but now we (mostly) know for sure. Thanks, Dave! Visit site »
Talk about scratching your own itch… Visit site »
Oh man, this looks sweet. I’ll say it again: the WebKit team is totally doing the right thing here by continuing to innovate with these new features. Dear WebKit: web designers everywhere thank you! Visit site »
September 23rd, 2008–September 26th, 2008 in Sydney, New South Wales
WebKit now includes support for gradients specified in CSS. The syntax looks a bit confusing for us designerly types, but massive kudos to the WebKit team for continuing to embrace the “browser wars” mentality, offering exciting new toys for designers and developers to play with, while at the same time maintaing interoperability with other browsers. Now, if we could just get Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft on board, we’d probably see some fast and furious innovation in the CSS arena. Visit site »
Yet another front-end web framework, consisting largely of CSS (but this one also has some JavaScript). I haven’t really looked into it yet, so I can’t really comment on it.
For my tastes, I’ve yet to see the “perfect CSS framework,” (Blueprint’s first release was the closest — since then, it’s moved away from many of my preferences), but I’m really happy to see the concept taking off, since I wrote about it in A List Apart. Despite some negativity from other prominent members of the web standards community, I still really believe in the ideas of code re-use and standardization amongst teams on things like class names and markup conventions.
It still baffles me that some of the same people who go on and on about microformats don’t want to see standardization in class name for other things. Weird. Visit site »
Nathan Smith talks about the 960 Grid System CSS “framework” (I say in quotes, since that word seems divisive when applied to CSS) he recently released. It all looks very impressive to me, and I’m quite tempted to use it over Blueprint. Blueprint has changed several things since the work Nathan, Christian, and I did at the Lawrence Journal-World, and much of it is not necessarily to my liking (that’s not to say it’s bad — just not now I want it). Nathan’s 960 is a bit closer to what I want, grid-wise (and is a bit lighter weight, as it doesn’t really bother with typography). I’ll definitely be giving it a closer look in the near future. Visit site »
The awesome Nathan Smith has released a CSS framework for grids. It’s very similar to Blueprint, but uses some different naming conventions and a 12 or 16 column default grid, instead of Blueprint’s 24 columns. Looks very useful. Nice work! Visit site »
The new Safari build includes several items of interest to cutting-edge web designers and developers: CSS animations, HTML 5 audio and video elements, and downloadable fonts. Visit site »
May 22nd, 2008–May 23rd, 2008 in San Francisco, CA
Cameron kicks off what looks to be a really good series on creating extensible interfaces using CSS. Visit site »
Paul Annett of Clearleft shows you how he put together the cool parallax effect on the Silverback site. Visit site »
Smashing Magazine has a nice selection of website navigation examples. Some clever stuff, here. Nathan’s awesome playgroundblues flyout tabs get a special mention. Visit site »
Rob Goodlatte and Dan Romero use Twitter to conduct brief online polls. Fun idea, fun site, and nice implementation. Word of warning to would-be parallaxers: I believe think effect is this close to jumping the shark, and I’ve only seen it on like four sites. Rob and Dan do it really well, but still… Visit site »
Very cool layered element trick on this new site by Clearleft. Looks like they’ve anchored stacked elements to alternate sides of the viewport, and then used transparent PNGs in them to get the layered effect. Simple, and yet clever enough that I’ve never seen anyone else think of it before.
Oh, and: what the web doesn’t need is more one-page sites for upcoming web apps that don’t even tell what the app is. Seriously, if I see another one of these, I might shoot myself in the head. The irony, of course, is that I’m totally contributing to the buzz-building they’re looking for by doing this.
Oh well. Visit site »
October 30th, 2007, 6 PM in Seattle, WA
September 21st, 2007–September 22nd, 2007 in Dallas, TX
I don’t really see using transparent PNGs as a new effect — I wrote about it in Web Standards Creativity, and I know several designers who have been doing it for quite a while. Still, it’s a great effect, and this is a nice demo of how it’s done. Visit site »
Wow, very nice. This is impressive. It also makes Opera look very, very silly. So now that all the majors can claim reasonable standard compliancy, can we please get those browser wars started again? :)
Congrats, IE8 team! Visit site »
Stuart responded to the same Alex Russell piece I did, only less positively. Stuart makes good counter-arguments to many of Alex’s points. Alex then shows up in the comments and the two politely debate back and forth — it’s a really great discussion. The conclusion? Stuart seems to be coming around to many of Alex’s ideas.
It’s tough to talk openly in this community about things that aren’t “compliant.” The second you mention trying something outside of the standards world, you get clubbed with the giant Internet stick, even if you’re a standards advocate 95% of the time. I’m glad people are starting to talk openly about what’s *really important — innovation and moving forward — rather than just about how we can all fall in line and be compliant all the damn time. Visit site »
Alex Russell, proprietor of the Dojo JavaScript library, has written a provocative new piece that is so incredibly spot-on, it’s scary. It’s an absolute must-read for any web ...
Andy says that Opera’s latest filing against Microsoft is evidence that the CSS Working Group (which contains mostly representatives of the various browser manufacturers) must be disbanded and a new strategy put into place — one which includes more representation from designers and developers.
I’ve written about this before, so obviously, I generally agree with the general principles. However, I’m unsure what motivation browser makers would have to implement standards if they were less involved with creating them. And, quite frankly, I’ve pretty much give up on the idea of the W3C as a relevant body in our industry. The W3 basically feels to me like the 55 year old store manager who has been working at your local WalMart for 30 years. He’s slow, old, tired, obsessed with policy and procedure, and resistant to change — people just kind of let him think he’s in charge while the rest of the company moves on around him.
Bottom line: I generally agree with Andy, but I see no reason to believe a change will ever happen. Visit site »
Bainbridge, a small studio here in Seattle, is looking for freelancers to do both web design (potentially with HTML/CSS work) and [Flash development[(http://www.authenticjobs.com/jobs/1576). Visit site »
Jina’s article over at Vitamin gives several tips and tricks as to how to best organize and write your CSS code. I’ve often thought this was an overlooked aspect of CSS (and probably other languages, too). I’m glad to see Jina giving it some attention.
Every single thing she recommends is spot-on. Almost none of it makes your website any better than having a haphazardly-put-together stylesheet, but it makes your code more readable, which makes it that much more maintainable by humans — especially when those humans happen to be someone other than you. Visit site »
Jonathan has a nice follow-up to the CSS framework discussion here. At one point, he says:
It seems for many of the arguments either for or against CSS frameworks have a related counter-argument, which could be the reason this debate has been circular for so long.
Indeed. What it boils down to is that the decision whether or not to use a CSS framework (or whatever you want to call it) is a personal one. Therefore, it’s probably a bad idea for anyone to say definitively, “you should/shouldn’t be using CSS frameworks.” It’s roughly the same as saying, “you should/shouldn’t be using Fireworks instead of Photoshop” or “you should/shouldn’t be using the CSS shorthand properties (i.e. background instead of background-image and background-repeat).
They’re all just tools, and which one someone choose to use or not use is just personal preference. We should all probably just let people have their preferences in piece. Visit site »
Jon’s post is really good and worth reading, but I’m actually linking to Joe Clark’s comment on it, in which he states, “Jeff is getting craftier at restating his ‘Real code isn’t all that important’ ideology.” I’m not quite sure what “real code” means, but I found it amusing to hear Joe put words in my mouth.
Since I don’t know what he means by “real code,” I can’t speak to whether or not he’s accurately paraphrasing my thoughts. The only code I can call myself any kind of expert on is HTML and CSS, and in the case of those, my only “ideology” is to write clean code that is as semantic as possible (in the case of HTML) and as valid as possible within the constraints of a given project (budget, timeframe, etc.). I can only presume this is what Joe’s referring to. Visit site »
Today, as I was looking through the referrers for this site, I found a comment from my now-co-worker D. Keith Robinson, dated December 4th, 2003. A few excerpts from the ...