A Source Of Inspiration

Andy Clarke, aka “And all that Malarkey”, from StuffAndNonsense, has just published one of the books every web designer should ask for Christmas: “Transcending CSS: the fine art of web design“.

The book is focused more on the creative process rather than the technology itself, as many of the publications in the field seem to do. The extensive knowledge of the author (who is an invited expert of W3C), known for it’s useful articles on web design will surely be a good starting point to creatives starting to explore the fields of web design.

When i have my copy available (since it’s only on pre-order), i’ll post the full review here. Meanwhile, you can check the companion website.

Update: just found out Malarkey’s Flickr photostream, so you can do a sneak preview of some of the pages.

For the Flashers out there, MediaBox has recorded sessions of day 1 and 2 of Adobe MAX 2006.

Among other subjects, you can watch:

• Flash Player 9 penetration
• Adobe Apollo forecasts
• New software releases from Adobe
• Integration between Adobe and Macromedia products
• Porting Flash Player to PS3
• The Max Awards
• Flash Mobile and Flash Lite opportunities

(Via Biskero)

Based on Jeremy Ruston’s TiddlyWiki, ccTiddly is a web personal notebook.
It’s a server-side adaptation, based on PHP and MySQL, with version 1 released last September.

I’ve tried to use the TiddlyWiki standalone version for notetaking in a USB drive, or the GTDTiddlyWiki version for the incursions in GTD, but these weren’t quite useful since i’m always exchanging notes between work and home. Also, as i’m most of the time online, it’s not that practical to plug the USB and save the HTML file, that could easily reach several MB.

From the several server-side adaptations, only one seemed promising, so i gave ccTiddly a go. The setup was quite smooth, mostly database parameters and admin rights, and after the upload, it was online.The only thing that failed were the importTiddlers plugin, so i had to start with a blank wiki and expected that future releases might fix this problem.

I spent some time customizing stylesheets, creating some default tiddlers, and learning how to adapt my writing/note-taking style to this app. An finally,here it is:

[Screenshot only. Web app on private URL]

It has all the 2.0 webiness, with ajax transitions and easy editing and the essential feature of being able to access your personal wiki anytime you’re connected.

My review: Great ! If you’re a writer, blogger or training consultant it’s an excellent tool for knowledge management and notetaking, with more freedom than a traditional wiki.

Download link: http://cctiddly.sourceforge.net/

[tag]Microsoft[/tag] sent me an email (see transcript at the end of this post) letting me know that Web sites, extensions, and applications shoud be compatible with Internet Explorer 7.
Well, that’s all beautiful, but instead of the climate of FUD, maybe MS should consider implementing real CSS2 support and compliance with W3C standards.

I wonder what clients think about paying support so their sites work with the new IE7 ?

For us, poor mortal web developers, a few headaches are coming:

• New user-agent string, so you should consider updating those browser detection scripts;
• [tag]CSS[/tag] hacks for older IE versions are unpredictable. MS instead “recommends” their proprietary model of conditional comments;
• Garbage code that MS applications (appolo, ASP.net, Word) spit out.
• You still have to support for quite a while those older IE versions. Less fun, more work.
• Lazy ” webmasters” will keep their old bad habits. Valid [tag]XHTML[/tag] is still a mirage.

But not all are bad news. In fact, some improvements are on the way:

• Full PNG support. At last !
• Some famous bugs no longer present (Peekaboo, Guillotine, 3 Pixel Text Jog, etc)
• width:auto, percentages are expected to behave normally.
• pseudo classes (:hover) in any element are now supported.
• support for ABBR tag

[Read more …]

I realised that designers love frames. They use it everywere. In hotsites, e-commerce, portfolios or annual reports websites. My guess is that they love the idea of a design fitting in that narrow square space, just like they get in their print jobs.

But they have to let go. Think big. Go vertical. Discover the page there is below the fold.
And, as a rule of thumb, avoid frames.

Here’s my own list of reasons:

• Low performance on search engines
• Browser and Accessibility Problems
• Copyright issues
• Wrong Bookmarking
• Complex navigation
• Poor hyperlinking
• Page reloading issues
• Printing problems
• Screen sizes

[Read more …]

The wise one must run away from the old nightmare of table-based layouts and dozens of email clients into the road less traveled. One must accept the different paths of content and structure to completely understand the beauty of the Cascading Style Sheets.

I wish all could be that simple.

Unfortunately, the use of valid markup (XHTML) and CSS in email is quite a vision in these days. Most of the email clients have a subset of HTML, usually a poor implementation of the W3C guidelines or even some proprietary markup (MSHTML or web based clients).
[Read more …]