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Rounded Corners - inspired by Sliding Doors

This is neat, and it augers well for things to come. Ryan Thrash has created some semantically correct CSS boxes with all four corners rounded, basing his work on the famed Sliding Doors method. Take a look for yourself and check out the code which Ryan has generously made available. This little exercise is part of an open source ecommerce system, due to be released November 24, which it seems will largely make use of XHTML/CSS.

CSS Best Practices becomes CSS Crib Sheet

Things happen quickly at Mezzoblue. A few people jumped up and down about the nature of many of the suggestions for so called CSS Best Practices, pointing out that many of them are arbitrary preferences with no good reason for working in one way or another. But Dave Shea has been quick to explain what he thinks needs to happen, ie, there are certain techniques that can be justified, and we should make them known to others, along with why we think they are a good idea. This morning there are a whole lot of additional points, so do go and check it out.

And further to the following point regarding using anchors in your HTML

Be careful when styling links if you're using anchors: If you use a classic anchor in your code you'll notice it picks up :hover and :active pseudo-classes. To avoid this, you'll need to either use id for anchors instead, or style with a slightly more arcane syntax: :link:hover, :link:active.

do take a look at some additional comments on Anne Van Kesteren's blog.

Cast a vote for web standards

This is both amusing and serious. There's been quite a bit of talk over the last couple of days about the low standards set by the sites of the current candidates in the US presidential elections campaign. OptimizationWeek.com have done both a speed and accessibility analysis of all the sites. They also look at some of the common problems they found and discuss some possible solutions. And just now I've seen that White Space has also done a review of each of the sites from both a design and usability perspective.

Make a contribution: CSS Best Practices

Over at mezzoblue Dave Shea has had the great idea (and, more importantly, actually implemented it) of creating a resource called CSS Best Practice, to which anyone will be able to contribute their ideas on specific issues such as browser compatibility, code integrity, or whatever else, as long as its factual and not just your opinion. Dave has set the ball rolling himself with a few thoughts on the use of preview browsers and a simple CSS coding rule. This could turn into an excellent collection of guidelines that it might otherwise take you a lifetime to develop on your own.

WaSP Interviews: Dan Cederholm

Over at the WaSP they've introduced a new ongoing series of interviews which will look at groundbreaking new redesigns happening at the moment. Available now, in the first interview they speak to Dan Cederholm, who did all of the design and front end development for the FastCompany/Inc.com changeovers to web standards. Dan sees web standards as "the fad diet that actually works", and I know I for one will be a very happy person if he's right. Find out what it's really like to retro-fit over 20,000 pages of out-dated content, and at the end see an average reduction in page file sizes of 50%!

So much trouble in the world...

Now it's even got a name

I found out today that pages which scroll horizontally are called "side-scrollers". See Wayne Burkett's blog for a listing of some of the neat ones that are around at the moment. I like fastclemmy. What do you think of them?

Get down to the Hub

The Hub is a new blog and resource site to explore interaction design. Will hopefully develop into a great resource looking at user interface design not just in IT, but in the many many areas where it is important. In fact, are there any disciplines or practices where it is not?

A little off topic

But some good if depressing points. See The Pricing Problem at Andy Budd's blog for some interesting comments about quoting and pricing as a web designer.

Contribute, Winners and Arrivals

Do your bit

In a new article over at AListApart Joe Clark discusses the shortcomings of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and, more importantly, shows how you can get involved in improving them. This week too at ALA, the man himself, Jeffrey Zeldman, has posted an article on dealing with usability problems in the process of a site redesign, drawing on his recent experiences at ALA of course.

ReUSEIT Winners Announced

After much deliberation the winners of the competition to design a new site for Jakob Nielsen's UseIT have been announced (but remember that the competition wasn't actually run by Jakob himself, so don't expect any changes anytime soon). The winning entry was Kraftsman by Michael Pick, but be sure to check out the results page as there certainly were some great designs in the runners up and top ten groups.

A new arrival

And my brand new iMac arrived yesterday. It's now sitting proudly in the very middle of the desk flanked on the left by my cheap and cheerful Windows XP box (whose design language now looks even shabbier and more flimsy, if that is at all possible) and "Poor Old iMac". I am trying very hard to resist the urge to anthropomorphise the old blue iMac, because I know they hate that. But it's not going to be easy to just walk away from something that has served me so well since June 1999. Most of all though I have to steel myself for the task of getting to know OS X more closely, getting all my software installed, and, best of all, getting connected again, when my broadband ISP, last time I checked, told me "we don't actually support OS X", and in answer to my favourite question ("What do you mean?"): "You can try and get it to work, but we're not trained to help you do it". I think I'm going to leave that job until Monday...

There's just one road to freedom

Web standards come to e-commerce

Via the WASP, standards based developers will await with interest the launch of Karova. Karova will be delivering e-commerce in a box with a difference. The claim is that their solutions will be accessible, fully compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act, and make use of XML and CSS. Launching any day now - good luck!

Who will watch the watchers?

White space has been brave enough to do a design and usability audit on Jakob Nielsen's UseIT, and there are certainly some interesting and worthwhile points made. Day 1 is here, and Day 2 is here.

What you should know about XHTML 1.1

Even if you think you know everything about XHTML 1.0...this is a great resource to find out about the important changes introduced in XHTML 1.1. Each point includes an extensive list of further reading.

Inspiration

Saw this the other night. Amandla! (the Xhosa word for power) is a documentary about the role of music in the struggle for freedom in South Africa, which makes it sound rather dry when nothing could be less true. great music, wonderful interviews and recorded conversations, and inspiring use of the documentary medium to be all that it can be. As well, be sure to check out the web site, which rather than being the usual cheesy Hollywood-esque placeholder is a true addition to the movie with lots of extra information.

PNG, float and war

PNG news

The PNG Specification (Second Edition) has just been released as a W3C recommendation. PNG is a bitmap graphics format with many features that make it far superior to the much more widely used GIF, including alpha channel transparency. For everything you need to know about PNGs, check out the PNG HomeSite, and for an idea of what you can do with alpha channel transparency, see the design pret-a-porter at the csszengarden - one of my current favourites.

Float news

This is great. I'll have to admit it made me realise how little I actually new about the whole float thing - see Float: The Theory from the good people at Position is Everything if you think you really need to grok how it all works. Believe me, it's worth it.

Lest we forget

My clumsy day-late words don't really have much of a place here - remembrance in the zen garden and some words from an old soldier.

Still worrying about older browsers?

If you really really have to....

still worry about Netscape 4, and you're trying to create CSS based page layout, make sure you have a look at these ideas here - not for the fainthearted as some hacks are involved, but when you've got to do what you've got to do...

A better solution

is hiding the CSS from older browsers that aren't going to cope, and only giving them the style they can digest. This page here gathers together the techniques you can use to do this for various browsers.