Thursday, 24th October 2002
Tweaking sites for readability
Jeffrey Zeldman’s new design continues to develop, but remains virtually unreadable on my monitor (without extensive tweaking of the settings). I’m not griping though as this was an ideal opportunity to play with Mozilla’s DOM inspector. This handy tool allows you to load up a page and browser through the DOM of the page, tweaking as you go. More importantly, it lets you modify the CSS rules for each individual element. It took a matter of seconds to fire up the inspector, browse down to the CSS rules for the body element and change the colour setting to rgb(255, 255, 255)—not particularly pretty but a lot more readable on this monitor than the default black. Of course, a bookmarklet to do the same thing would be much more convenient...
[... 135 words]Office goes XML
Co-Inventor of XML Says Office 11 is “A Huge Step Forward for Microsoft” (via Slashdot). The comments are full of speculation over why Microsoft would open up their file format in this way having gained so much from having an obfuscated format.
[... 221 words]