We’ve rolled out some changes over here at SimpleBits that have been chipped away at for months. Visually, it’s not a drastic difference, but lots of adjustments and polishing were done in other areas. Chunks of copy were chopped, multiple pages combined into one, things simplified. More care and attention was given to the internal layout of pages that aren’t weblog pages. Finally. … Read the rest here
(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) Not surprisingly, there was a lot of community feedback asking for better layout mechanisms . Actually, people were asking for any decent layout mechanism at all, which CSS has historically lacked. Floats mostly work, but they’re a hack and can be annoyingly fragile even when you ignore old-browser bugs. Positioning works in limited cases, but does not handle web-oriented layout at all well. Why do we use floats for layout, anyway? clear . … Read the rest here
(This is part of the Feedback on ‘WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008′ series.) In this round, layout . Not all of it, but the bits that struck me as either really useful or really, really way too long overdue. Float containment – yes, we need a property that does just that. As long as we’re tied to floats for layout—and I plan to rant about that soon—there should be a clear, unambiguous, intentionally defined property that tells elements to wrap themselves around floated descendant elements. overflow works in most cases but can fall down in unusual circumstances (I’ve seen scrollbars appear where none were actually needed) and anyway, it wasn’t intended to provide the wrapping effect in the first place… Read the rest here
Hey all, and especially those of you in the EU: I’m going to be doing an all-new one-day workshop in London in early March via the offices of Carson Workshops, for whom I’ve done workshops in the past. Previously I’ve done two-day gigs with a beginner-to-intermediate skill range, but this time we’re trying something different. I’m going to get down and dirty with some tough topics, and really push hard at the limits of what CSS and semantic markup can do. You can get the details at the CW site , and note the special price for the first quarter of the seats. That’s right, this will be a small, intimate workshop, with plenty of chances for questions about and challenges to what I’m saying. … Read the rest here
Clear your schedules, Boston-area web geeks! An extra-special joint event with fellow North Shore pals, Build Guild and the Markup & Style Society (new site coming soon) are co-hosting a meetup here in Salem on February 2nd . Special guest Eric “Rock Horns” Meyer will be in town — and when Mr. Meyer is in town, you gather up the troops and celebrate with frosty beverages and good times. You just do. As usual, my M&SS cohort Mr. Marcotte has written up a far better summary of the night’s events… Read the rest here
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
Registration opened a couple of days ago for the latest Clearleft event. UX London will be taking place from June 15th to 17th . This will be a very different event to dConstruct . For a start, the format is based around workshops (although there will also be a day of presentations). … Read the rest here
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
Rate My Area describes itself as: …the new and easy way to find, review, share and discuss all that’s good (and not so good!) in your area. The name is a little bit confusing. You don’t actually rate your area as such, you rate the businesses in your area. But Rate My Cafés, Pubs, Takeaways and Everything Else would be a very long-winded name. Anyway, the reason I mention the site is that Clearleft had a hand in it: information architecture, visual design, and front-end build. That last part was where I was involved; markup, CSS and JavaScript… Read the rest here