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CSS could be so much more
Stuart Langridge discusses the nature of minimalism and CSS design, following a post by Sarabian. Stuart wonders if the current trend for relatively plain site designs is an interim period while we find our feet in the relatively new medium of CSS. I am sure it is—while I personally love the elegance and simplicity being showcase in many pure CSS sites, it’s not going to help convert die hard table fanatics. The annoying thing is that CSS is capable of so much—the power it gives us over background images should free designers to do things that were difficult or impossible with tables. I’m a rubbish designer, but I’m considering taking on the challenge of “interesting” CSS design in the not too distant future. If I can make things look good, anyone can ;)
Accessible headers
Mark’s latest accessibility tip concerns header tags (<h1> through <h6>). Mark explains that using headers in the right order helps screen readers to interpret the structure of your pages, and shows how to use CSS to effectively style headers. Mark once again demonstrates the comment hack as a way of bringing Netscape 4 in line with other browsers, a technique that has been criticised by the More Like This Weblog as unnecessary encouragement for NS4 users. Incidentally, Johannes Koch has an excellent summary of CSS hiding techniques.
More CSS demos
Chris Smith has an interesting set of CSS demos, including some attractive CSS buttons and an excellent example of a more complex layout. There’s a lot of interesting creative work going on with CSS at the moment as more developers start exploring the possibilities it brings—Eric Meyer’s css/edge is just the tip of the iceberg.
Fun with the link tag
Things I learnt today part two: The <link> tag is fun. I’ve been building support for it in to IncDirectory (not long now)—it took a while to find the necessary background information but Mark Pilgrim, www-html, and the W3C gave me everything I needed.
XHTML nested lists
Things I learnt today part one: Nested lists in XHTML are possible, but you can’t just put a list inside another list. You have to nest the nested list in a list item. References: W3Schools XHTML differences and the www-html mailing list.
EyeDropper
Handy software tip courtesy of Tim (my colleague at Incutio). EyeDropper is a tiny shareware program for Windows which adds a magnifying glass to your mouse pointer, displaying the hex colour code of the pixel under your mouse pointer. The download is a measily 27KB and it saves having to print screen and load up a graphics package just to find a HTML colour code. When not in use it sits in your systray.
Pretty link on Kottke
In a discussion on css-discuss recently about underlines a on links, I pointed to kottke.org as an example of clever use of CSS for links where by the link underline is a slightly later colour than the link text. Today, Jason explains the technique and the thinking behind it.
Blogchat rocks
I spent a while today over at Brent Ashley’s blog chatting away on BlogChat. BlogChat is Brent’s impressive DHTML chat system (backend in PHP, front end via JSRS) which allows anyone visiting his blog to talk to him (and other visitors) in real time, provided he is online to host the session. During the afternoon I got to talk to people from all over the world, all with similar interests because they all had the same taste in blogs. I am hoping to install a version of Brent’s system on this site in the not-too-distant future.
Via Blogzilla...
A couple of Mozilla pieces, courtesty of Blogzilla. First up is the news that Dave Hyatt is leaving Netscape to work for Apple (Hixie mentioned this the other day). Blogzilla’s jeffp wonders if this could mean the beginning of iBrowser, considering Dave’s previous work on the Chimera browser which builds a Mac interface on top of Mozilla.
[... 143 words]Accessible fonts
Mark has out-done himself today with his long awaited coverage of relative font sizes. This is a notoriously tough topic (thanks to a whole bunch of strange CSS bugs and browser differences) but Mark carefully and comprehensively explains the various work arounds and CSS hacks needed to get the right effect with maximum accessibility.
XML fun
Peter has upgraded his blog to the latest version of Moveable Type. As a result, his blog now pings weblogs.com via XML-RPC whenever he makes an update. blo.gs grabs the weblogs.com changes.xml file once an hour and uses it to generate a smaller file listing only sites on my blogroll. My site then grabs my personal favorites.xml file once an hour and uses it to render my blogroll ordered by the time each blog was updated.
[... 95 words]MySQL best practise
O’Reilly have a new article up entitled Ten MySQL Best Practises. Jeremy Zawodny has a few problems with the article, and Tony Bowden throws in some comments as well. There’s plenty of useful information distributed between the three viewpoints.
Which power puff girl is your blog?
Oh wow. Which PowerPuff Girl is your blog?. I’m Blossom—yay! Thanks Mark-from-uni for the tip off :)
Maybe splash screens have a purpose
I never thought I’d say this, but there is a place on this earth for web site splash screens and time wasting intro animations (now I’m feeling dirty). This comes after an interesting if slightly heated debate about the merits of splash screens over on the SitePoint Forums. I still can’t stand splash screens, but I can acknowledge that there are some web users who see the web primarily as an entertainment platform and have their surfing experience enhanced by a bit of glitzy animation along side their information. Thanks Bill Posters for helping me understand this bizzare side of the surfing demographic ;)
Mozilla web author FAQ
The Mozilla Web Author FAQ answers questions on doctypes, broken stylesheets, image table gaps and javascript detection—the most common problems faced by web developers new to developing for Mozilla all on one handy, concise page.
Less is more
The Minimalist Web Project is a collection of good looking web sites adhering to the minimalist style, based on the idea that “less is more”. Some beautiful sites are listed, including 37signals’ brand new CSS/XHTML design.
An excellent rant
Lobowalk is a “somewhat daily” blog that has just made the transition to using CSS for layout. The decision to go CSS was accompanied by an excellent rant:
[... 168 words]Wiki fun
Yesterday I set up a Wiki for Smarty as well. I like Wikis. The WikiEngine used for Smarty and MACCAWS is called TaviWiki, and is implemented in PHP with a MySQL back end. I had previously deployed PhikiWiki for a couple of university projects, which is good in that it is the only PHP Wiki I know of that works from the file system, but bad in that it has no support for version tracking (essential if your Wiki is accessible to the public).
Jonathan on longdesc
Jonathan has insider knowledge that Mark will not be covering the longdesc attribute in his accessibility series. This it not because longdesc is not a useful accessibility tool, but simply because it does not fit the “fire and forget” nature of Mark’s series. Jonathan’s post discusses longdesc and the difficulties involved in adequately describing an image.
Smarty at OSCON
Smarty at OSCON: Andrei Zmievski and Sterling Hughes will be presenting a tutorial titled “Template Architectures with Smarty” at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego, July 22-26, 2002
. Further details are available here. Smarty is a powerful template engine for PHP which combines a highly versatile templating language with excellent performance gained through template compilation.
Blogroll etiquette
Jordon Cooper on Blogroll Etiquette. I haven’t made it on to many blog rolls yet but it’s always nice to spot a new site in my referrals. The problem with having a blogroll powered by blo.gs is that you can only blogroll blogs that ping either blo.gs or weblogs.com. I have actually gone as far as emailing several bloggers who’s blog I admire but am unable to link to due to their absence from these useful central repositories—the responses I’ve had have been positive so I’m hoping to add them again shortly.
Blog birthday
This blog is one month old today :) According to my category statistics page I’ve posted 185 entries covering 23 different topics. Quite frankly, that statistic scares me...
Busy day
Quiet blogging day today, but I’ve been busy behind the scenes. Firstly I’ve been playing around with TaviWiki (an excellent PHP Wiki engine), using it as a proof of concept for a Wiki-driven small website content management system. I’ve looked at several PHP Wiki’s in the past and TaviWiki is the best by far, with rock solid features and a well organised code base. My only criticism is that the script relies on globals a bit too much, making it quite hard to figure out what is going on at times. I’ve also been working on IncDirectory, the open source sequel to my aging links directory script ssLinks. Add to that a new CSS experiment and preliminary work on rewriting this blog to use mySQL and today has been my most productive in quite some time.