Webdesigninformer.com

Cameron Moll Go to the source

ColosseoType.com, An All-HTML5 Endeavor : The site for the Colosseo poster is my first production-ready website with HTML5 under the hood. I’ve coded sites semantically with HTML5 class names before (see Jon Tan’s article ), but this is the first with legitimate HTML5 elements such as and in the markup. IE doesn’t yet recognize HTML5, so I’ve added Remy Sharp’s HTML5 shiv script , which forces IE to acknowledge the new elements. Granted, the Colosseo site is a one-pager, but hey, it’s a start. Update: It looks like Firefox 2.x doesn’t play well with HTML5, either. Here’s another article from Remy Sharp on getting Firefox 2 to recognize HTML5… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Acrobatic Thieves Hit Best Buy, Get Away with $26,000 in Apple Laptops : This reads like something out of a movie script: They didn’t appear on store security cameras. They cut a hole in the roof and came in at a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners. And they left with some $26,000 in laptop computers, departing the same way they came in — down a 3-inch gas pipe that runs from the roof to the ground outside the store…. “High level of sophistication,” said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman. “They never set off any motion sensors… Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Every now and then I look at using background-position-x and background-position-y but can never seem to find a definitive and up-to-date resource. To save myself the trouble in the future, I’m documenting it here. Positioning via separate X and Y values is a feature that Internet Explorer introduced but never made it into a W3C specification. Any recommendations to add it to the spec have been denied . Why have separate X and Y values? … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

After just a couple weeks of testing, I gave up on the Canon HG10 w/35mm for shooting HD video. Not only was the quality not stellar, but it’s a hack that’s cumbersome and really difficult to work with. Following an enormous amount of deliberation and questioning if so many dollar signs were really worth it, I bit the bullet and sprung for a Canon EOS 7D and some quality lenses. No mistaking, this thing shoots incredible photos and equally impressive 1080p HD video. I still have plenty to learn about the camera and photography in general, but so far I’m really pleased with it… Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

The winners of Microsoft’s MIX 10K Smart Coding Challenge (for which I was honored to serve as one of the judges ) have been announced, and the Grand Prize has been awarded to… Jimmy D ’s Frog Log . Which is an HTML5/CSS/JS entry. That doesn’t run in Internet Explorer. Yep. Frog Log was my top pick, and obviously did very well with the other judges too, for a good reason: it’s a fun game. It doesn’t play quite the same in Firefox previous to v3.5, as the drag-n-drop doesn’t work. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

It’s been said before that web inspectors—Firebug, Dragonfly, the inspectors in Safari and Chrome, and so forth—are not always entirely accurate. A less charitable characterization is that they lie to us, but that’s not exactly right. The real truth is that web inspectors repeat to us the lies they are told, which are the same lies we can be told to our faces if we ask directly. Here’s how I know this to be so: body {font-size: medium;} Just that. Apply it to a test page . Inspect the body element in any web inspector you care to fire up. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

It’s been said before that web inspectors—Firebug, Dragonfly, the inspectors in Safari and Chrome, and so forth—are not always entirely accurate. A less charitable characterization is that they lie to us, but that’s not exactly right. The real truth is that web inspectors repeat to us the lies they are told, which are the same lies we can be told to our faces if we ask directly. Here’s how I know this to be so: body {font-size: medium;} Just that. Apply it to a test page … Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Brandon Barré’s photographs of amazing living spaces : Simply inspiring. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

Monospace text sizing is, from time to time, completely unintuitive and can be quite maddening if you don’t look at it in exactly the right way. Fortunately, there is a pretty simple workaround, and it’s one you might want to consider using even if you weren’t aware that a problem existed. But first, allow me to lay some foundations. Assuming no other author styles beyond the ones shown, consider the following: span {font-family: monospace;} <p>This is a ‘p’ with a <span>’span’</span> inside.</p> All right, what should be the computed font-size of the span element? Remember, there are no other author styles being applied. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

In the course of digging into the guts of a much more complicated problem, I stumbled into an interesting philosophical question posed by web inspection tools. Consider the following CSS and HTML: p {font-size: 10px;} b {font-size: 1.04em;} <p>This is text <b>with some boldfacing</b>.</p> Simple enough. Now, what is the computed font-size for the b element? There are two valid answers. Most likely one of them is intuitively obvious to you, but take a moment to contemplate the rationale for the answer you didn’t pick. Now, consider the ramifications of both choices on a situation where there are b elements nested ten layers deep. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

In the course of digging into the guts of a much more complicated problem, I stumbled into an interesting philosophical question posed by web inspection tools. Consider the following CSS and HTML: p {font-size: 10px;} b {font-size: 1.04em;} <p>This is text <b>with some boldfacing</b>.</p> Simple enough. Now, what is the computed font-size for the b element? There are two valid answers. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

I’m a bad conference organizer. Why? Because we opened the An Event Apart 2010 schedule for sales back in, um, flippin’ November , and I never mentioned it here. Cripes, I never even posted when we announced the lineup of cities. I could go through the great big long sob-story list of reasons why 2009 was really tough and blah blah blah, but when you get right down to it, I fell down on my job. Okay… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Zeldman: Flash, iPad, Standards : Jeffrey Zeldman: Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first. … Read the rest here

SimpleBits Go to the source

This year will be a busy one in terms of speaking events. I’m currently crafting a brand new talk titled, “The CSS3 Experience”. It’ll focus on enriching the experience layer with advanced CSS and CSS3. Everyone can easily add enhancements to to their designs when focusing on the interactions and events that happen on the page. And by targeting the user experience with these new and evolving standards, you can start using these flexible techniques now, on any site, with less worry. Well damn, that sounded rather pitchy, didn’t it… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

One of the problems of working in the knowledge economy is the constant need to keep abreast of current trends and thinking. This would be fine if you worked in a mature industry or one with a limited number of books, papers and conferences appearing each year. However in the knowledge economy of the web, more information is being published every day than could be consumed in a year. What’s more, that pace is increasing. The problem is exacerbated by a number of things… Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

One of the problems of working in the knowledge economy is the constant need to keep abreast of current trends and thinking. This would be fine if you worked in a mature industry or one with a limited number of books, papers and conferences appearing each year. However in the knowledge economy of the web, more information is being published every day than could be consumed in a year. What’s more, that pace is increasing. The problem is exacerbated by a number of things. … Read the rest here

Eric Meyer Go to the source

I was recently honored to be asked to be a judge for the MIX 10k Smart Coding Challenge , running in conjunction with Microsoft’s MIX conference . The idea is to create a really great web application that totals no more than 10KB in its unzipped state. Why did I agree to participate? As much as I’d like to say “ fat sacks of cash “, that wasn’t it at all. (Mostly due to the distinct lack of cash, sacked or otherwise. Sad face.) The contest’s entry requirements actually say it for me. … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

“Someone asked me the other day what percentage of my day was spent doing what. Yesterday it was approximately one third general admin type stuff, one third client liaison type stuff and one third designing type stuff. If we ignore the fact that there isn’t really such a thing as a typical day – that is a pretty much a typical day.” Ben Terrett ( Interesting Mini CEO Half Thoughts ) When I started working freelance, I worked out my rates and estimated earnings based on a ‘typical’ eight hour day. What I didn’t really comprehend at the time was the fallacy of an eight hour day of solid work. There are so many factors that eat into that supposed ‘billable time’. Admin … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

“Someone asked me the other day what percentage of my day was spent doing what. Yesterday it was approximately one third general admin type stuff, one third client liaison type stuff and one third designing type stuff. If we ignore the fact that there isn’t really such a thing as a typical day – that is a pretty much a typical day.” Ben Terrett ( Interesting Mini CEO Half Thoughts ) When I started working freelance, I worked out my rates and estimated earnings based on a ‘typical’ eight hour day. What I didn’t really comprehend at the time was the fallacy of an eight hour day of solid work. … Read the rest here

Mezzoblue Go to the source

I’ve spent a bit of time playing around with HTML5’s canvas element lately. It’s a fun new toy and has a lot of potential to be useful. But the biggest headache I’m finding so far is the lack of authoring tools. SVG has been around for ages, whereas Canvas is still relatively new. (Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukićević has a good overview presentation of the differences between the two, and when and where to use each.) SVG support is built into plenty of graphic editing tools; Canvas support is so far sadly lacking, although Matt May pointed me to this YouTube video that shows off the upcoming Canvas support Adobe’s CS5 suite will have, whenever it becomes available… Read the rest here