Gadgetopia

CSS, Accesibility and Standards Links: Great set of CSS links. (Thanks Dave.)

CSS Vault » The Web's CSS Site: A great-looking CSS site. Lots of articles and sample designs. Via Tomas Breen.

CSS Vault » The Web's CSS Site: Links to all that is CSS, and some great design ideas too. Via Reach Customers Online.

Ten CSS tricks you may not know: Fantastic round-up of CSS tricks. Good stuff.

Tables vs CSS: Decloak makes a number of extensions for (I think) DreamWeaver and ASP.Net. Apparently some of their Web authoring tools don't support CSS positioning. So, instead of adding CSS positioning support, or just ignoring the issue, they launched an offensive against using CSS positioning. This page is a ...

Advanced Typography techniques using CSS: This guy did some nice things with typography in CSS. If you're willing to push CSS, there's some interesting stuff you can do.

Keep CSS Simple: Are CSS hacks getting out of hand? I don't really use any, that I know of. I don't have any CSS on this site that panders to one browser over another. "The complexity monster has reappeared, right in the center of modern Web development. Nowadays it doesn’t ...

Shadow Boxing: Well-done, simple technique for shadowed boxes with CSS.

Selectutorial: CSS selectors: Here's a fantastic CSS tutorial which includes a 22-step guide to go from this to this through nothing but CSS. They're even nice enough to show you the BrowserCam results. Very well done.

Architecting CSS: This is a pretty shallow, but solid, article on how to organize CSS. It covers how to organizes the three big components of CSS. Stylesheets (the CSS files and STYLE blocks) Rules and Selectors (within stylesheets) Attributes (within selectors) There's some good advice there, but I'm really looking ...

CSS Colors: Take Control Using PHP: Good article on how to use PHP (or any scripting language, really) to generate your CSS. While many web sites use powerful programming environments to create HTML, these same tools are usually ignored when it comes to creating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This article ...

Listutorial: Step by step CSS list tutorial: These people have forgotten more about CSS lists than I will likely ever know. "Listutorial takes you through the basics of building CSS lists with 'background images for bullets' and 'simple rollovers' with a few variations along the way."

Front Page - css-discuss: If you're just learning CSS, you can't do much better than this as a resource. The css-discuss Wiki is a companion to the CssDiscussList mailing list. Among other things the wiki serves as a collective long term memory for the list participants.

I read this book on the plane to and from Chicago. Eric Meyer is apparently a CSS God, although I hadn't heard about him before this book came out. (Update: See the comments turns out I had heard of him...) In the end, the book wasn't for me. If ...

Basic CSS Box Model Demo: A fantastic interactive, Flash version of the CSS box model. Very well done, and very handy for someone who doesn't understand it. Based on this version.

Wide-body CSS | silverorange labs: Notes on the "min-width" CSS attribute that IE doesn't support. It would come in handy, along with its companion max-width that [sigh] IE doesn't support either. "The advent of table-free pure CSS layouts has been great for those browsing with non-PC environments (handhelds, ...

Tables Vs. CSS - A Fight to the Death: So which is better building page layouts using TABLE tags or using DIVs and CSS? This guy set out to find out. He built the same site both ways, and documented the experience and results. On Table-based design... I've seen ...

Hot Dates with CSS: Some neat CSS for making your blog date headers look like little calendar pages. There's nothing Earth-shattering here, just some good markup for a nice effect. I like it.

This page was transformed into this page through nothing but a new CSS file; no HTML was changed.

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design: We've covered CSS Zen Garden before, but if you haven't been there lately, you're missing some of the best work I've seen in a while. Take a look at new designs like Corporate Zenworks, Port of Call, and No Frontiers. That's the ...

CSS Pencils v3.1: Play with this for a while, then view the source. Some people have way too much time on their hands.

Fast Rollovers Without Preload: Here's a devious little trick for CSS-based image rollovers. Use one image that's bigger than the area in which you want to display it. The image has three different "areas" and you use CSS to "move" the image up and down (or side to side) to ...

About Dynamic Properties: Ever heard of IE's CSS "expression" property? It allows you to set a CSS property not to a constant, but to the result of a JavaScript expression. Like this: p{width:expression(400 + "px");} What this lets you do, according to this really good article, is make IE emulate ...

Make sure machines dig your designs: XHTMLized: These guys do outsourced HTML/CSS, nothing else. You send them a PSD, they send you back HTML/CSS. Look super in all major browsers [ ] Optimized for search engines [ ] Accessibly ready for everyone [ ] They have a little slider on their site that ...

Listamatic: A nice look at using CSS to style lists. "Can you take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list using samples from Eric Meyer, ProjectSeven, SimpleBits and others."

Book of Styles | No table? No problem!: A nice site on CSS layout with lots of free templates. The first one I looked at was actually pretty good.

In a perfect world, you'd never put anything in your HTML that defines the presentation of your page. You'd only use HTML for content, and allow the stylesheet to define the presentation. One of my few gripes with CSS is the inability to create a box with rounded corners. In ...

Here's a nice article on writing more efficient CSS using shorthand properties, and reducing the number of duplicated style rules. One of the touted benefits of CSS is that it reduces total page weight, and thus download time, both at first page load, and even more on subsequent loads due ...

CSS2 Test Suite Failures Results: This is a great page on CSS support in the latest browsers. It has several dozen tests, explains how the browsers did, and lets you link to the live test so you can look at it in the browser you're using. It really shows you ...

There's an Australian company called Western Civilisation that I've come to know because they have (1) good CSS documentation, and (2) fantastic search engine placement. Whenever I search for something related to CSS on Google, they're one of the first results. They sell courses on HTML, CSS, and Web colors ...

We've written about CSS Zen Garden before, but development of style sheets for that site has really taken off. There are some truly breathtaking designs on display over there. Try these links any one of them will blow your mind. Zunflower fleur de l’avante-garde Backyard White Lily Creepy Crawly ...

Fantastic article (as usual) over on A List Apart this morning. The next version of CSS (CSS3) includes a lot of handy features, one of which is a 'column-count' property, telling a web element to render its contained text into multiple columns (think magazine or newspaper). That would be a ...

Photo Cards: Here's a good, simple, obvious solution to an annoying problem. Whenever a picture needed a caption, I surrounded the entire thing in a DIV and floated it left or right. However, I had to set the width of the DIV so it would float correctly, and to do ...

blueprintcss - Google Code: Why am I so shocked at the notion of a CSS framework? We have server-side frameworks, javascript frameworks, etc. But when I saw the phrase CSS framework, I thought of course, what a great idea Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on ...

CSS Naked Day: I wish I had mentioned this earlier, but it's a good idea nonetheless. Where did my Design go? The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a ...

Prince: Overview: There's a big gap in getting Web content into print. I've had to cross the gap a couple times, and I've both generated PDFs server-side and used CSS to style HTML into printable format. Both methods suck. Prince is a system that lets you take XML, style it ...

To make tabs, you ordinarily wind up creating a table, chucking a row in for the tabs, a row in for the tab page, etc. Using tables for layout? The CSS Gods will frown upon you and Jakob Nielsen's ghost will haunt you to your grave (after he passes on, ...

Print It Your Way: This is an article about how to creating your own printable versions of Web pages when there's no printer-friendly version provided. Essentially your over-ride the designer's stylesheet with your own. ...what happens when there is no printable version, or the printable version includes ads or other ...

MBoffin.com did something really cool while redesigning his blog. They made a 'design timeline' while working on his latest site design. Every time the designer saved the site, he took a screencap, and turned it into an animated GIF. He's imbibed the 'presentation separate from content' Kool-aid, so you can ...

One of the great things about properly-done CSS is the ability for your site to degrade gracefully. Here's a link to view the Gadgetopia home page without ANY stylesheet at all. Gadgetopia Sans Style Doesn't look half-bad. It may be even more readable that way.

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design: This is probably the most useless alternate stylesheet yet over at CSS Zen Garden, but it's an example of how far out you can get with CSS. Bet you never expected someone to do this...

Containing Floats: Slick method of clearing margins using invisible horizontal rules. "...in order to keep with Web design tradition and author expectation, CSS is written to allow floated elements to stick out of the bottom of their containing elements. While this is necessary for normal text flow, it's a major ...

VisiBone Style Sheet Examples: An interesting little page that uses constantly changing JavaScript styles to show you various style rules will do the styles change constantly as you sit and watch. Nicely done. A free public service by VisiBone. Here are some cascading style sheet examples. See the start ...

IE7 CSS Updates: Mezzoblue has an update of the changes in IE7. Sadly, improved CSS support is pretty lacking. Other than that? After running through Position Is Everything's "Explorer Exposed" omnibus, it seems to me that the list of outstanding IE bugs remains long. Line-height bug? Not fixed. Border chaos? ...

CSSTidy: It's HTMLTidy for CSS. CSSTidy is an opensource CSS parser and optimiser. It is available as executeable file (available for Windows and Linux) which can be controlled per command line and as PHP script (both with almost the same functionality). If the examples are accurate, it certainly cleans things ...

Layout-o-matic: On the heels of Firdamatic and List-o-Matic comes Layout-o-Matic. Good for roughing in layouts. "Select a layout type, width, and other options to the left, and then click Download or View and pick up your multi-column CSS layout starter kit (turning it into something unique and beautiful not included). ...

Most developers would say that content binding is the domain of XSL. However, I've found there is a CSS property for binding arbitrary content to an element, and it's been around since 1998. Sadly, IE has no support for it, Netscape / Mozilla just partial, and apparently Opera is the ...

QuirksMode - for all your browser quirks: I wasn't there ten seconds before I learned something new: the * selector (warning: deep link into a frameset). Who knew? "QuirksMode.org is the personal and professional site of Peter-Paul Koch, freelance web developer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It contains more than 150 ...

the business value of web standards: This is a good article about how to write good, solid HTML, and the author hits on something I discovered as well when re-assessing how to teach HTML for The Joshua Project. "For years, the standards community has been extolling the virtues of keeping ...

CSS Rounded Corners Roundup : Rounded corners suck. There s so many ways to do them, and they differ based on how many images they use, whether or not they re liquid, whether or not they use JavaScript, etc. This guy has collected links to a bunch of major techniques and made a ...

Here's a CSS technique that I didn't know about, and perhaps you didn't either. To center an element on the page like the image above just set the margins to "auto." This only works on block elements, so you'll need to modify the "display" value for images. ...

A (CSS) Horse of a Different Color: A quick look at the upcoming opacity features in CSS3. "The draft CSS3 color module takes this a step further, adding an alpha channel to the RGB value, effectively allowing you to change the opacity of an object. This additional alpha value takes ...

Style Master Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Editor: Western Civilisation has released Style Master 3. We've talked about this software before. About a year ago, we said. "...I don't see a need for it, really. It's a GUI for building CSS sheets with controls for just about every possible directive and ...

Web Developer Extension: I don't remember where I heard about this one, but it's a peach of an extension. We've talked about the Web Developer extension for Mozilla and FireFox before, but the latest version comes with the sweetest sidebar you could ever imagine... You can open the stylesheet for ...

I've discovered yet another use for the Web Developer Toolbar; I can perform The Site Design Litmus Test, heretofore known as "Joe's Razor" (named for no one in particular): Open up a site you've done in Firefox, and take a look at it. Now, open up the 'Edit CSS' sidebar ...

Position Is Everything: Good CSS layout resource with solid examples you can reverse engineer to your heart's content. "...I built this site to explain some obtuse CSS bugs in modern browsers, provide demo examples of interesting CSS behaviors, and show how to 'make it work' without using tables for layout ...

Stylegala … the finest CSS and web standards resource: A good looking site for CSS junkies. A lot of sharp-looking designs linked from here.

We're deep into HTML and CSS now with The Joshua Project, and I'm determined to teach these guys the right way to do things from the start, which means lots of CSS. I'm not going to let them get into the bad habits of HTML hacks. No FONT tags, no ...

Create a Pull Quote with Javascript (and CSS): Interesting method of dynamically creating pullquotes. When used for drawing a readers eye to an important passage, it can be argued that they are a presentational effect, so it would be nice to have a method to create a pull quote without ...

I'm going to kick off a new weekly series this week I'm calling "The Basics"; Here's the idea: Every time I need to write some JavaScript for feature X on a new site I'm building, I always just go back to the last site I remember writing feature X for, ...

Developers gripe about IE standards inaction: Now that Microsoft has abandoned Internet Explorer, it looks like that browser's bugs are here to stay. "Web developers want to light a fire under Microsoft to get better standards support in the company's Internet Explorer browser, but they can't seem to spark a ...

At some point, I think every web jockey has scoped out the CSS Zen Garden for a little inspiration (I dig this one). It's a great example of the power that comes from the separation of style from content, and the proper use of semantic markup. Judging by this link ...

Cheat Sheets: A nice set of cheat sheets for mod_rewrite, PHP, and CSS. Nicely done. (Warning: The CSS sheet was apparently written in a fantasy world where all browsers obey every last word of the spec. Real-world mileage will vary.)

Here's something I would like explained: why can't I use "none" as a value for the "background-repeat" CSS property? To get a background to stop repeating, the correct value is "no-repeat." Why? It's "none" on everything else in CSS -- why the change for this one thing?

One of the interesting side effects of separating style from content is the fact that it takes very little to redesign the style even if it's not your site. In his programming journal, Mihai Parparita has a neat article about reskinning GMail with his own custom stylesheet. However, there ...

CSS Design: Custom Underlines: If regular underlines aren't enough for you, try some of these. Custom underlines allow for new creative opportunities that might be appropriate for some websites. They can also be used to provide additional visual cues to the differences between the types of links contained in a ...

Speaking of CSS, check out this crazy gallery by Stu Nicholls. There's nary a stitch of javascript on this page. Even the CSS isn't that complicated, and the HTML is fairly basic. This is so cool, it literally gave me chills. That's how big of a dork I am, people.

List-o-matic - generate CSS-styled navigation based on list items : Very cool service. Enter the items in your list, pick a snazzy style, and it will give you all the HTML and CSS necessary to build it. Great for people like me who learn best through reverse engineering gimme ...

ObscureTags.com -- a museum of strange and rarely used HTML tags: I love this site. Old tags never die. They just go to Hell and regroup. This page contains absolutely no CSS because CSS is dumb. We've talked about some of these in the context of the ADDRESS tag last ...

Flash Vs. CSS/HTML: Which Will You Choose?: I hate Flash. What I hate even more is when someone presents a well-reasoned argument for why it beats HTML. "Remember my original statement, 'HTML and CSS will never be able to do what Flash does'? While this is true, it’s quite possible ...

Integrating CSS with Content Management Systems: Here's a great article from the heroin factory that is Digital Web Magazine on building PMS "Presentation Management Systems." Building CSS editing features into our content management systems allows us to make style changes as easily as we make content changes. In the ...

The more you use CSS, the harder this is, because you find that CSS really scales down the number of HTML tags you use. I forgot very few really easy ones about half of the tags I missed I had never heard of before. 49 (In case the image ...

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Details Begin to Leak: It stuns me that of all the things Microsoft is thinking about putting into IE7, improved CSS support is not one of them. Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. ...

Slashdot HTML 4.01 and CSS: Good for them. I can't believe they went this long. After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. Here's the incredible stat from the story: [Thanks ...

dean.edwards.name/IE7/: This guy made an "IE7" patch for Internet Explorer that uses JavaScript to force IE to honor CSS features like min-width, :first-child, [attr=value], etc. Here's the good news: it works. It comes with a series of test pages that prove it's doing what it should be doing imagine, ...

The Zen of CSS Design : Visual Enlightenment for the Web: csszengarden, the book.

Say you have someone who is interested in Web development, but who has never really progressed beyond Dreamweaver. Where would you start with them? My gut is telling me that you start by teaching them HTML and CSS from the ground up. Do you agree? If so, what resources would ...

A little while ago, I made a short post on Miguel de Icaza s comments on Avalon, Longhorn s new UI API (which obsoletes WinForms, which obsoletes the unmanaged API s). Miguel, one of the driving forces behind mono and Gnome, pointed out what he considered to be problems with Avalon. Well, Chris ...

Extension Room :: URIid: I found this via Joe's post on skinning GMail. Very cool extension. Let's you fix little formatting problems with sites you visit frequently. Well thought-out. The URIid extension makes it possible to create CSS rules based on the site you are visiting. This is useful when ...

TopStyle Pro HTML Editor, CSS Editor, XHTML Editor for Windows: Nick Bradbury was the creator of the legendary HomeSite probably the first text editor made specifically for editing HTML. Now he has a new text editor called TopStyle. I downloaded it and tried it out, and it's extremely good. ...

Firebug 1.0: It's Hot, Baby, Hot!: I agree with Josh -- if you have the Web Developer extension, its perfect partner is Firebug. The ability to inspect the CSS of individual elements is a huge help. If you have anything at all to do with making web pages, you've gotta ...

Giving some thought today to "printer friendly" versions of Web pages. This isn't a tutorial or anything, just a consideration of the options. There are essentially three ways to do them. (1) Using a Separate Page If you're running your site from a database or other central data store, this ...

Web Development Bookmarklets: Thanks for Simon Willison for pointing us at this amazing page of bookmarklets that let you play with the CSS and JavaScript of any page. These bookmarklets let you see how a web page is coded without digging through the source, debug problems in web pages quickly, ...

The All-Music Guide has long had a pretty irritating web site. The design rendered poorly in non-IE browsers, almost all of the links were javascript-driven for no apparent reason, etc. So, when they recently redesigned, you'd expect them to fix these problems, right? No such luck. The new design not ...

One of the problems with using CSS to layout a page instead of tables is dealing with 'float' issues. For instance, the left and center columns here on Gadgetopia are floated to the left of the right-hand column. If we wanted to put a border around the whole thing, the ...

I've spent some time today playing with Squarespace, since their ads kept appearing my AdSense. While I try not to get too excited about new things (lest my head explode), I'm going to venture a pretty bold statement -- Squarespace is the best content management system I have ever seen ...

I'm working on an app right now with a multi-step form process, and a brilliant designer put step indicators in the design so you'd know what step you are on. So the unstyled HTML looks like this:

  1  2  3

Now, before I knew I could use multiple classes on a ...

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I got to thinking today about the major protocol and language that drive the Web HTTP and HTML and I reflected on the fact that this pair is essentially frozen in time. There hasn't been a major update to either of ...

Link Markers: CSS Generated Content: A good example of something you can do using Mozilla and Opera, but not IE. Makes me want to use XML/XSL instead of HTML.

...it's all about layers. A List Apart has put out two great new articles on the use of JavaScript in web design. In 'JavaScript Triggers', Peter-Paul Koch (of Quirksmode fame) makes an interesting point: There are 3 big layers to an HTML page: structure, appearance, and behavior. CSS is great ...

Eric Meyer, in addition to working the turntables and personally speeding up the entire Internet (at least if you get your news from Apple), has come up with a really slick set of CSS rules and Javascript that can take a garden-variety web page and turn it into a dead ...

Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics: Google parsed a billion Web pages and pulled some stats out of the HTML. We can now add to this data. In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, ...

I found a peach of a tool today it was exactly what I was looking for at exactly the right time. We have a central database at my company, and the guys have been bugging me to work up some enhanced printing for it. They want to be able ...

NYPL: Style Guide: Need to come up with HTML and CSS coding standards for your company? You could do a lot worse than this resource a set of well-written, easy-to-understand guides from the New York Public Library.

Here's something not that shocking: the same amount of time spent on different Web development activities can yield vastly different productive results. Put another way: you can spend two hours on Activity A or the same amount of time on Activity B. Does this mean they will both contribute equally ...

Say you put together a nice, static site for a client. There's a lot of CSS, a fair amount of scripting (in whatever language we'll assume PHP here), a handful of images, and a lot of HTML. The client is going to manage the site with a WYSIWYG editor. ...

PrettyPrinter.de, an online pretty printer for PHP, Java, C , C, Perl, JavaScript, CSS: Here's a nice little service that will clean up your semicolon-and-bracket-type code. It's well-done, but I'd like to see it sniff functions and alphabetize them. Via Simon in a comment to this post.

Learning Movable Type: I didn't dig too deep into these, but they look good. Via Lockergnome. Learning Movable Type is a growing set of tutorials aimed at helping beginners to the Movable Type content management system. These tutorials are geared for those with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, ...

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters: After all these years, Slashdot is redesigning (the link is a preview). Sort of. This was the winning design to convert Slashdot from it's old-school HTML to a current CSS-driven design. Not much has changed, though it's cleaner and we finally say goodbye ...

Steve Souders is Yahoo s front end engineer. He s the guy who wrote the article we discussed a few months back which brought us back to all those old tricks that make your Web site load faster. Consider this: say your page takes 700 milliseconds to load from request to final ...

Two great articles over at A List Apart this morning: Some folks insist on printing web pages before reading them. ALA has a neat technique for including high-res alternate images in your documents using CSS. David Miller introduces us to fvlogger, a Log4J clone for javascript, which looks like it ...

Multiple IE's in Windows: Here's a tutorial on how to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine. "I, like so many other's, have struggled with ways to test designs, css, etc. in multiple versions of Internet Explorer. Usually the only solutions were to have multiple OS's installed on ...

Another one for the web developer toolkit: MOZiE will simultaneously display the same page using both IE and Mozilla. A great way to shed some of your CSS woes. MOZiE is an extremely light-weight, free Windows application that allows web designers the ability to compare page rendering in Mozilla and ...

Who/Where are the Women?: A good point I'd never considered before. Spawned by recent conversations with friends, I've been thinking about people who are known for designing and working with web standards. Specifically those who have a strong interest in CSS or are already using style sheets to compliment or ...

Mint: Requirements: Here's the requirements page for Mint. It's kinda nice to see IE not supported. In order to view Mint you should be using a modern browser with support for transparent PNGs, modern DOM scripting (including XMLHTTPRequest) with competency in CSS 2. Safari or Firefox, both free, are highly ...

dompdf - The PHP 5 HTML to PDF Converter: Someone mentioned this over in the post on Prince. It looks quite good -- they have a demo page where you can enter HTML in a box, then generate a PDF real-time. I tried it -- it respects all CSS and ...

Code Style: Sans serif font sampler and comparison: Here's a great article that answers a perennial question: what fonts can I use in my CSS? Font selection for the Web should be based on a generic font family to ensure an appropriate type style is rendered in any circumstances. Specific ...

Helping your client maintain markup quality: Interesting concept of a way to help your clients keep their markup clean: style it ugly when it s wrong. [ ] one idea is to make any errors or suspicious markup obvious to the person working on the document. One way of doing that is ...

Tidying up your HTML with PHP: This appears to be a PowerPoint converted to HTML, so the presentation is a little horrid, but the content is amazing. We've talked about HTML Tidy integration with PHP5 before, but this details here are fantastic. Yes, you know Tidy can make your HTML ...

stopdesign | log archive | The New Path: Apaptive Path recently redesigned their Web site, and the design company stopdesign has a page detailing the transformation. It's a great piece of design work, and they managed to get CSS to do one thing in particular that has thus ...

About Conditional Comments: A handy but pretty obscure feature of Internet Explorer. A special comment format lets only IE see certain HTML / CSS code. So make that Web page look good in Mozilla and Opera, then hide the code necessary for IE in these comments. Conditional comments have certain ...

The benefits of a fixed width design: A good argument about fixed-width design. I always advocated fluid design, but there are too many problems with it. As screen resolutions get bigger, it gets harder and harder to read Web sites that go from wall-to-wall. Making your readers feel comfortable is ...

Web Developer Extension on chrispederick.com: I hereby declare this to be the greatest Firebird plugin ever. Ever wanted to reverse engineer a form submission using POST? Tough to do because the form data is based in the body of the request instead of the URL or the headers. This toolbar ...

A (CSS) Horse of a Different Color: The W3C is busy working on the CSS3 specification. This article has information on an interesting twist to colors: specifying them in HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) instead of the traditional RGB (Red, Green, Blue). I tooled around the What's New page at the ...

Recreating the NY Times Cancer Graph: I hope I m not the only person who finds this interesting. The New York Times cancer graph is a beautiful piece of work. I wanted to see if we could reproduce it with everyday tools. The screencast is really interesting. I get the same ...

HTML Tip: Sorting With The OPTGROUP Element: I found a tag today that I had never heard of before. OPTGROUP allows you to have an option in a dropdown that isn't selectable, is seperately formattable via CSS, and that other options are indented under. Until recently, the OPTGROUP element belonged ...

Lindows.com - Michael's Minutes: Apparently somone found a FrontPage meta tag on one of the pages on the Lindows site, and they contacted the company about it. This announcement was made shortly after. "...we're kicking off Nvu (pronounced N-view). This product will bring to Linux a solid WYSIWYG HTML editor ...

I'm curious to the relationship between screen resolution and actual viewable browser area (see this post). I need your help. I wrote a quick page that will print out the two for you (it should work, anyway -- I wrote it in 30 seconds and tested it for about that ...

Rob showed me this list of things Mozilla does that IE doesn't. Some of the features I've come to love... #1. Tabbed Browsing #4. Link Toolbar: I've written about this before. #34. Can fill in complete forms automatically: Do you know how much faster this lets you test? It's a ...

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient: This essay is years old, but it high-lights some points about WYSIWYG editing that are still very true today. The author is distracted from the proper business of composing text, in favor of making typographical choices in relation to which she may have no expertise ...

WikiAlong is a new extension for Firefox that s so cool, I may need to go lay down for a while. Basically, it puts a Wiki page in the browser sidebar, and displays a Wiki entry for every page you visit with the browser. Wikalong is a FirefoxExtension that embeds a ...

Here's something handy that my buddy Rob mentioned to me months ago, but that I just got around to trying: I added a new stylesheet LINK tag to the index pages, but with the "media='print'" argument. Thus, this stylesheet will be used only when the browser is rendering the page ...

Let's say you could tap into the nuclear weapon fire control systems of every country in the world. And let's say you could expose a PHP API for those systems. You then could build a page that when called, would launch all the nuclear missles in the entire world and ...

Sorry, Stu Nichols, but you now have to share the title of Diabolical Mastermind with Cameron Adams over at Man In Blue for this crazy bit of CSS/JS magic. Cameron is dynamically changing the page layout based on the user's screen resolution and browser size, just by changing the stylesheet ...

Christian Decker wrote up a nice tutorial on doing a full framework with AJAX. This is the "all-in" approach to AJAX: the site is loaded entirely through javascript and javascript handles nearly all of the client-server communication. This looks like an attractive way to write a web app. You essentially ...

CNN.com: CNN released their re-design today. Lots of rounded corners, and very Web 2.0-ish. They designed for a minimum width of about 1,000 pixels. Very CSS-compliant. I shut off stylesheets and it turned into clean, readable HTML. They re finally building Web sites like the rest of us. In the end, ...

Here's another argument for CSS-based, table-less design that I haven't heard before: by not using tables for layout, then you know that a table is, in fact, a table intended for the display of tabular data. Yesterday, a client of mine wanted to insert a table into the description of ...

Chris Pederick is the guy who makes the awesome Firefox Web Developer Toolbar, so he gets free beer from me if he ever needs to drop by Sioux Falls for any reason. We've talked up Chris' toolbar since way back, and it takes CSS development from a headache to a ...

mozile: index: I installed this, and at first glance, it looks as cool as it sounds. "Mozile or Mozilla Inline Editor is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows a user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from the comfort of his own browser. ...

Uh oh I may have started a new addiction... I'm a subscriber to O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf service, which I've discussed before. Tonight, I was doing some heavy reading into Microsoft Sharepoint, and I was getting annoyed at the interface. Reading books online is never fun, but I usually just ...

Aardvark Firefox Extension: It's a good week for me and aardvarks. First I watch the movie, and now I find the Firefox extension. Ever wanted to print a page, but it was all crapped up? There's stuff everywhere, and the text goes halfway off the page when it's printed, and ...

If you don't read the New York Times, you may not know that Firefox has a two-page ad in today's edition promoting itself. This got me thinking: with all the momentum behind Firefox, what is to become of Opera? If I was working for Opera, how would I feel about ...

A while back, I wrote about Mozilla and the LINK tag. The LINK tag is one of the great unexplored corners of HTML. No browser ever implemented it for years (except for an obscure Mac browser called iCab), and consequently, the LINK tag is used mainly to connect CSS stylesheets ...

I've been involved with Web development work at my church for several years now. In that capacity, I've been confronted with (1) the huge need churches have for Internet development, and (2) the general inability of churches to pay for it. Good Web development is expensive, and churches have much ...

On Managing Content and Content Management Systems (CMS): This guy makes a great point here: "I have yet to see one [CMS] that is anywhere worth the amount of money and time needed to get it into place and often times, for many reasons, a CMS can actually make a ...

It seems that there's always some consternation in the web design community regarding the styling of form elements. Usability studies and user observation has taught them that they shouldn't be applying styles to form controls; if you change the look of the control, it's less recognizable for novice users who ...

About Fog Creek Software: I wanted to send Joel Spolsky an email today, and I was prowling around the Fog Creek site looking his email address when I stumbled onto this "About Fog Creek" page. It's well-worth reading (which makes it a glaring exception to the average "worthless by definition" ...

Making A Better Open Source CMS, by Jeffrey Veen: This is a great article -- a rant, really -- about how much the author thinks the open-source CMS offerings just plain suck. He laments about a lot of things I agree with. The real goldmine, however, are the comments. There ...

Are you paying someone to make web pages? By now I'm sure that everyone is sick of hearing web people wail and moan about how much they hate IE. But the sad truth is that aside from giving your security guy nightmares, and serving as the source of a lot ...

Differences in the "standard" coding style from language to language frustrate me. I get irritated that I have to change styles to fit in with the accepted norms for different languages. Traditionally, some use variable names with_underscores, some MixedCase some mixedCase with the first word uncapitalized, some use tabs, some ...

I read Joel Spolsky's book over the weekend: "User Interface Design for Programmers." This is an excellent guide to usability for client apps and for Web development. The strength of the book is that it doesn't start by presenting many hard-and-fast rules, but instead concetrates on general concepts that ...

I changed the URL scheme of this Web site over the weekend. I had been meaning to do it for a while, but some problems with Movable Type 3.2 kind of forced the issue. (I have got to stop rushing into every beta that presents itself...) To make everything backwards ...

One thing that continues to amaze me is how poorly people use Microsoft Word, considering its dominance in business word processing. The "barrier to entry" for a Word user is extremely low -- just open it and start typing -- so very few people bother to learn how to really ...

Does a good looking Web site get used more than a plain one? If so, why? Consider two Web sites: Site A is written in plain HTML / CSS / JavaScript, etc. It s a traditional Web app, well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing, but no attempt has been made to engineer a slick ...

Can we finally admit that the FrontPage experiment has failed? You know -- the promise that FrontPage will allow novice Web authors to create and maintain (especially maintain) good, solid Web sites? Can we finally admit that this just isn't going to happen? How many people know someone that is ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...

I ve talked a lot over the years about content modeling. Open and Closed Content Management is probably the most self-referenced post on this site. Recently I called content modeling one of the Four Disciplines of Content Management. But, lingering behind all the questions about how to model something is a ...

I got to thinking the other day: exactly when do you have a content management system? We ve all built apps that manage content, but when do you graduate from a relational database with an admin section (RDBWAAS) to the lofty and deserved title of content management system? (Incidentally, I ...