Once again, after reading somebody else’s article , I felt inspired to put together an alternative example. In this case: Text Rotation. Within the article I linked to, the example uses an image sprite and a sprinkle of CSS to get things positioned right. Well, maybe not so much a sprinkle. … Read the rest here
Currently when you place an image (or any ‘replaced content’) inside a block with rounded corners set by -webkit-border-radius , the image pokes through the rounded corners on Safari (version 4.01 at the time of writing). Image breaking through rounded corners in Safari 4.01 The expected and desired behaviour is that the image be cropped by the rounded corners. This can be achieved by applying overflow:hidden to the container, as per my little test case . Image cropped at the rounded corners in Safari 4.01 As you can see it’s still not perfect as the image overlaps the border. However work is at hand to rectify the situation, which was seemingly caused by a vagueness in the CSS 3 Backgrounds and Borders module. On the CSS WG public mailing list it was resolved that “overflow:visible does not allow replaced content to overflow”… Read the rest here
I wrote another book. It’s called Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design , and it’ll be published by New Riders next month. I had help this time. The unstoppable Ethan Marcotte contributed an absolute gem of a chapter on the fluid grid. And I think it’s worth the cover price for the pages he authored alone… Read the rest here
A few weeks ago I received the following remarks from Jeff Lin, an Authentic Jobs customer and founder of Bust Out Solutions : Just wanted to let you know that I posted a job probably two years ago for a designer, got several responses, and ultimately found one guy who I tried to hire. It didn’t work out at the time, but we kept in touch, and I finally hired him a few months ago. It’s worked out great, and we recently launched Best Buy Idea X . I’m happy with the design, and in part thanks to Authentic Jobs for helping me find great talent! Employers continue to find talented web and creative professionals through Authentic Jobs , which has been filling full-time and freelance positions throughout the globe since 2005. … Read the rest here
Recently I made the switch back to HTML 4 for DOCTYPE s and px for font-size (sound like 1999 again?), and I’ve tweeted about it occasionally. I’m documenting the switch more thoroughly here. HTML 4.01 Strict I’ve chosen to go with HTML 4.01 Strict as the DOCTYPE in my projects moving forward, favoring it above XHTML 1.0 Strict and HTML 5. I’ll briefly explain my reasoning. XHTML 1.0 Strict – This is what many of us in the industry, including myself, have been using for the past few years… Read the rest here
I built this desktop application a while back called Snitter . It’s a desktop Twitter client that runs on Adobe AIR. Alas, it fell by the wayside during my freelance tenure. Recently, I’ve had the inclination to start working on it again and bringing forth to reality ideas that I’ve had for over a year now. One of the things that always bothered me was the rather rushed icon. … Read the rest here
Almost a month ago, I wrote about supporting older browsers — how and whether we should even support them. We draw a line in the sand that says, "You popular browsers, stand over here. Everybody else, just be happy you got content." More specifically, a base style sheet would declare some default font styles but no float or other layout tricks. Just linear content. … Read the rest here
The font-stretch property was introduced in CSS 2.0 over ten years ago, but was culled in the transition to CSS 2.1. It now languishes in the CSS 3 Fonts module. The property instructed browsers to select a ‘normal, condensed, or extended face from a font family’. Its removal from CSS 2.1 was due to a complete lack of implementation by browsers. Unfortunately this leaves us with a gaping hole regarding font support. Many professional typefaces are designed with extended and condensed styles. … Read the rest here
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
At last—at long, long last!— the results of the A List Apart Survey 2008 are available , along with the anonymized raw data we collected. There are a great many reasons why it took so long to get this out the door. A big part is that it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort, which means it happens in our “free time” (and there the word “free” has a couple of meanings). I say it’s almost entirely a volunteer effort because the detailed analysis is actually done by a pair of professional statisticians, who are paid for their time and expertise. They did a great job once more, and did it in a reasonable time frame. … Read the rest here
Thanks to a tweet from Jason Santa Maria a few weeks ago (and his help since), I was pointed to Cufón , which “aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use.” I’ll refer to these tests again in a minute, but feel free to jump ahead to these Cufón test pages that I’ve put together. sIFR , as many of you are aware, is a means of replacing “short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems” using a combination of Flash and JavaScript. Shaun Inman , Mark Wubben , Mike Davidson , and several others put in many long hours developing and refining IFR and sIFR, and we all owe them our gratitude for moving forward in a big way the state of typography on the web. These efforts continue today, as evidenced by this Web Typography mini-site from a SXSW 2009 panel. For many of us, however, the Flash part of these technologies makes it difficult to set up and use… Read the rest here
Thanks to a tweet from Jason Santa Maria a few weeks ago (and his help since), I was pointed to Cufón , which “aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use.” I’ll refer to these tests again in a minute, but feel free to jump ahead to these Cufón test pages that I’ve put together. sIFR , as many of you are aware, is a means of replacing “short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems” using a combination of Flash and JavaScript. Shaun Inman , Mark Wubben , Mike Davidson , and several others put in many long hours developing and refining IFR and sIFR, and we all owe them our gratitude for moving forward in a big way the state of typography on the web. These efforts continue today, as evidenced by this Web Typography mini-site from a SXSW 2009 panel. For many of us, however, the Flash part of these technologies makes it difficult to set up and use. (I personally have not opened Flash on my computer in literally 4 years, and I hope to keep that run alive.) Cufón, on the other hand, can be set up and run on your site in about 5 minutes. … Read the rest here
A few weeks ago, Jeremy and I were invited to a mini-conference in Austria. At the conference were owners of some leading businesses whose primary operations were online. I found myself trying to explain to one of these bosses why his developers should be using microformats on his website. The boss in question was more business-inclined than technically-savvy so there was little point in me talking about ids and classes, or even HTML . I needed to explain what practical benefits microformats would bring to his customers and his business. This is the blog post I wish I could have pointed him towards… Read the rest here
The MyFonts January 2009 newsletter reports on their Top 10 Fonts of 2008. The list highlights the year’s most successful fonts in each genre, based on sales numbers. Sitting pretty in that list (based on sales numbers, remember) is a free font family: Museo and Museo Sans , which were the year’s top geometric display fonts. Designer Jos Buivenga offers three out of the five Museo weights for free, along with 2 out of the 10 Museo Sans fonts, but on the strength of the paid weights alone, the Museo family still made it to the top of the list. Jos specifically allows use of the free weights for @font-face linking, but it’s clear this was no deterrent to people forking out hard cash for the full family. … Read the rest here
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
With Ajax applications, there’s often a need to see what information is being transported back and forth. Am I sending what I’m supposed to? Am I getting back the right response? Most JavaScript developers have Firebug locked and loaded but its requirement to post data back to the server just to inspect the request isn’t always a very pracitical solution. The information you get back may not always be the complete picture. Alternative otions include firefox addons Live HTTP Headers and HttpFox . … Read the rest here
Back in June, I talked about Helvetireader , a new approach I was taking to skinning Google Reader. Instead of making it look like an OS X app, this time I was going for minimal, inspired partly by Times , a newspaper style RSS reader, and the postcards that came with the (Deluxe!) Helvetica Film DVD . As there’s always so many other things to do, it’s only now that I’m announcing it going live. First, here’s a small screenie: I’ve removed a lot of stuff from the interface that I never use, so it’s not going to suit everyone. If it does suit you – great, if it ‘doesn’t quite’, you can take the CSS and fiddle and personalise to your hearts content! I’m trying a different delivery system this time around. … Read the rest here
There’s been some really interesting stuff coming out of Mozilla Labs lately. The latest toy is a plugin called Geode . It’s based on the W3C editor’s draft geolocation API . In a nutshell, it allows you to provide your location to a website at the click of a button. You can try it for yourself on Pownce . Now, I have no idea where it’s getting the location data from—probably a mixture of WiFi and network information a la Plazes —but I don’t need to know or care. … Read the rest here