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Adactio Go to the source

I know I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer but there’s one recurring topic that makes me feel downright stupid. I’ve heard a lot of my fellow designer/developers talking about how page zoom (rather than text zoom) spells the death of liquid layouts. Now, forgive me for being dense, but I just don’t get it. I totally understand how page zoom could spell the death of elastic layouts; using ems for layout won’t be necessary if browsers natively resize pixel-based layouts. But both pixel- and em-based layouts have a set width and that width doesn’t change depending on the width of the browser window. A liquid layout will resize depending on the browser width , right? … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

When CSS animations were first introduced in Webkit back in 2007, I expressed my concerns that CSS may not be the best place for it . Sound cool? I don’t think so. Not only does it make CSS more complicated, it makes JavaScript more complicated, too. Having actually taken some time to implement CSS animations in an example , a light bulb clicked. The way I looked at how animations were declared and in what situations you would declare them suddenly changed. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Lionel Schriver’s piece in the Standpoint called Dashed Bad Form is a witty affair, comparing and contrasting the semicolon and the em dash . Alas, the self-describing nature of the article is completely lost in the online version—though presumably not in the print edition—having suffered the all-too-common fate of emdashculation; every instance of an em dash in the article has been converted into a plain ol’ hyphen. Oh, the irony! …proper irony too—not that confused Alanis Morissette kind . It’s probably a CMS issue. But, hey, it’s as good an opportunity as any to point to the classic article on A List Apart , The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters) . … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and while I thought I had a solid opinion on the matter, I find myself waffling on the issue. Who cares about older browsers? If you haven’t done so, I highly recommend cracking out a copy of Firefox 1. Start bouncing around to a few sites and check out what’s broken. Sure, most stuff is fine but you’d probably be surprised at what’s broken… Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

Ah, blogging: the new long-form Tweet. This morning I said : retraining myself not to /> close img, input, and meta tags. It’s an uphill battle. Which received an instant string of responses asking, in a nutshell, “why?” So I clarified : because I’m done with XHTML is why. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

In creating the combo-bar charts for the survey report , I stumbled into an Explorer bug that I didn’t remember ever seeing before, and Google didn’t turn up anything that seemed to be related. This could easily mean that I’m the only person who ever did something this insane and thus found the bug. It could just as easily mean that my Google-fu has failed. Either way, I’ll write it up here so it can enter the collective memory. … Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

Back in January I was part of a double bill with Jon Tan , entitled Skillswap goes typographic . It went down really well so I thought I’d better tie it all together here. My talk was on “Facing up to Fonts” the blurb for which went as follows: Browser support for the typographical aspects of CSS is gradually increasing. Things are on the up. Richard will be trouncing the myth of web-safe fonts, demonstrating how to go beyond bold, detailing the technicalities of font embedding and exploring the commercial and ethical minefield therein. The introduction of font embedding in particular is a long-awaited step in the right direction… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

This post isn’t about what you think. This isn’t about some handy little CSS technique you can implement right now. Not yet, anyway. This is about an idea that I’ve been working on. An idea that — I hope — will one day help you and me build better web sites. I’ve come up with my own layout specification . … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) The portion of the feedback devoted to shapes had two overarching themes, as I saw it. That makes this entry a bit short, but when I tried to combine it with my feedback on “ Graphical Effects “, it quickly got too long. So, a little amuse cerveau , as it were. Animations, transformations, and so on — the WebKit team have of course been having a field day in this area, and what they’ve done will likely make is way to other browsers. Or not. I don’t know. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

Eight years ago (almost to the day), Jeffrey Zeldman wrote, To Hell With Bad Browsers , signaling the dawning of “The CSS Age”. Explaining how the use of @import for referencing stylesheets is ignored by Netscape 4, was an important step in shedding away the problems related to supporting an ancient browser. Eight. Years. Completely ignoring a browser in terms of CSS is a wonderfully freeing thing… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

In the preface to my book DOM Scripting , the first of my acknowledgments is a thank you to View Source. Thanks to that one little piece of browser functionality, I was able to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In these days of RESTful APIs, there are even more sources to be viewed. Whilst deconstructing a message from the oracle of Fielding , Paul gives some straightforward advice on being true to the ideals of REST , including this: Above all, don’t kill the bookmarking experience and testing with bog-standard, service-ignorant browsers. Replace the word “testing” with “viewing source” and that single sentence encapsulates the baseline support I expect from a web browser. In recent years, the bookmarking aspect has been suffering not through any fault of the browsers but because of overzealous use of Ajax and through the actions of developers using POST when they should be using GET… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

How many times have you played out the following scenario? Makes local changes to your style sheet(s). Upload the changes to the staging server. Switch to your browser and hit “reload”. Nothing happens. Force-reload. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

After a wild couple days, it’s live. Well, live-ish. Blick Blocky Retro, the ninth iteration of this veritable site, has made its debut. Why? I’ve been working on this redesign for close to a year now. … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Recently I’ve seen a considerable amount of press on blogs and such regarding HTML 5, “the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web” (W3C). I have virtually no experience (yet) with HTML 5, so as I jump on the bandwagon and begin familiarizing myself with it, I thought I’d share some of the resources I’m reading along the way. So far from what I’m learning, the consensus among several of these articles seems to be this: The world isn’t ready for HTML 5 at large just yet, but we can begin preparing for it by using common, semantic selector names ( header , nav , section , etc.) — or even new attribute names — derived from HTML 5 within our HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.x documents. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a start. In each of these you’ll find other resources to help you dig deeper. … Read the rest here

Clagnut Go to the source

The CSS 1 font-weight property is used to display text with a Bold or Regular weight. This is achieved using font-weight:bold and font-weight:normal . So much so CSS 101. But there’s more to the lives of many typefaces than just bold and regular. There’s Ultralight, Extralight, Light, Thin, Medium, Book, Semibold, Demibold, Extra-bold, Heavy, Black, Extra-black, Ultra-black, and more besides. Since its inception in 1996, CSS has provided a way of displaying these other weights through use a numerical scale with the font-weight property. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

The new Gregorian year has brought a striking new Big Z design to An Event Apart , along with the detailed schedule for our first show and the opening of registration for all four shows of the year. Jeffrey has written a bit about the thinking that went into the design already, and I expect more to come. If you want all the juicy details, he’ll be talking about it at AEA, as a glance at the top of the Seattle schedule will tell you. And right after that? An hour of me talking about coding the design he created… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

A while back, I woke up one morning thinking, John Resig’s got some great CSS3 support in jQuery but it’s all forced into JS statements. I should ask him if he could set things up like Dean Edwards ‘ IE7 script so that the JS scans the author’s CSS, finds the advanced selectors, does any necessary backend juggling, and makes CSS3 selector support Transparently Just Work. And then he could put that back into jQuery. And then, after breakfast, I fired up my feed reader and saw Simon Willison ’s link to John Resig’s nascent Sizzle project. I swear to Ged this is how it happened. Personally, I can’t wait for Sizzle to be finished, because I’m absolutely going to use it and recommend its use far and wide. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

Here’s a late-week call for assistance in the JavaScript realm, specifically in making IE do what I need and can make happen in other browsers. I’d call this a LazyWeb request except I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it all [censored] afternoon, and it doesn’t [censored] work no matter how many [censored] semi-related examples I find online that work just [censored] fine, but still don’t [censored] help me [censored] fix this [censored] problem. [doubly censored] ! I have a table. (Yes, for data.) In the table are rows, of course, and each row has a number of cells. I want to walk through the rows and dynamically add an ‘onclick’ event to every row. The actual event is slightly different for each row, but in every case, it’s supposed to call a function and pass some parameters (which are the things that change). … Read the rest here