Tiff Fehr March 3, 2008 at 4:01 PM Add to Delicious or Add to My Yahoo! Today Microsoft announced that IE8 will render standards mode by default. This is a fairly big reversal from the initial stance that web professionals would need to include a special instruction, X-UA-compatible, to render a website in standards mode, rather than the default rendering currently in … Read more
Matthew Pennell January 22, 2008 at 9:03 AM Add to Delicious or Add to My Yahoo! Readers of the venerable A List Apart will already have read about IE8’s new version targeting (and Eric Meyer’s accompanying opinion piece) — and the announcement has elicited quite a few heated reactions, collated here for your convenience: Microsoft’s own announcement drew both positive … Read more
As browsers get better and better, creating layouts with CSS becomes easier and easier. A reliable workhorse in CSS layout options is the float property. Floats are not the only choice when it comes to creating layouts, but they are popular because they survive the unpredictability of designing for various screen sizes, resolutions, and browsers as well—or … Read more
Welcome back to our two-part series on Application Programming Interfaces: APIs. If you’re not familiar with what APIs are—or maybe you are but you’re still not sure what all the fuss is about—then I’d recommend starting with part one of this series: APIs and Mashups For The Rest Of Us. This time around, we’ll dispense with … Read more
PNG, GIF, and JPEG The PNG image has been widely overlooked by the web design community—and mostly for good reason. Until recently, it hasn’t been possible to take full advantage of the format and have it work reliably in all browsers. But, with proper PNG support in Internet Explorer 7, and some handy JavaScript and … Read more
This example page shows all the four types of positioning that are available in CSS 2.1: static (main content) relative (drop cap in block quotation) absolute (the sidebar to the right) fixed (header, footer, left-hand menu) All of the CSS is contained within the page, so all you have to do to see how it’s done is to select … Read more
Any cascading style sheets (CSS) newbie will have heard about it, right? CSS positioning—absolute this and relative that. Perhaps you have some vague idea about what it is, but are afraid to try it yourself. An element with position:absolute is removed from the document flow, which means the rest of the document acts as if the element … Read more
The next time you work on an intranet project, whether for private- or public-sector organizations, ask your client or manager about branding. Usually, the answer will be another question, “Why do we need to worry about branding?” After all, this is an internal site, for employees only, or—in the case of extranets—for contractors and partners, … Read more
As a writer, I often make screenshots to accompany my tutorials, blog posts, and articles. But, sometimes, static screenshots aren’t up to the job of clearly illustrating a point. You’re likely to find that the neighbor starts the lawnmower in the middle of your voice recording session. Or, on playback, you discover your bad sniffing … Read more
Nick Finck February 25, 2007 at 12:24 PM Add to Delicious or Add to My Yahoo! The age-old debate about gender diversity at web conference has kicked back into full swing again which spun a wider debate about gender diversity and even ethnicity in the industry as a whole. Here are some recent posts on the topic: Gender … Read more
Nick Finck February 17, 2007 at 12:00 PM Add to Delicious or Add to My Yahoo! As someone who helps co-organize WebVisions every year and with my experience in speaking at conferences (not that I am an expert at it) I am often asked for advice on presenting at conferences. There are thousands of sites out there that provide … Read more
If you think it’s time to really start gettng to grips with Microformats, then a few new things have just gone online. Roger Costello has a series of pretty in depth tutorials for most major microformats, while at Web Directions North (disclosure, I was one of the organizers and presenters) there were three 1 hour presentations … Read more
The age-old debate about gender diversity at web conference has kicked back into full swing again which spun a wider debate about gender diversity and even ethnicity in the industry as a whole. Here are some recent posts on the topic: Gender Diversity at Web Conferences, The diversity division, On Conferences and Diversity, Diverse It Gets, Why are smart people … Read more
As someone who helps co-organize WebVisions every year and with my experience in speaking at conferences (not that I am an expert at it) I am often asked for advice on presenting at conferences. There are thousands of sites out there that provide information for doing presentations, some really great ones… but there are a handful of … Read more
Win a full pass to Web Directions North, in Vancouver, Canada, February 6-10, 2007. Web Directions North features top-notch speakers including Dave Shea, Doug Bowman, Veerle Pieters, Andy Clarke, Cameron Moll, Kelly Goto, Jeremy Keith, Dan Cederholm, Derek Featherstone, John Allsopp, and many more. Making the gathering even cooler, the conference is followed by two days of optional … Read more
When I first began programming with JavaScript, I created my variables and then encapsulated any functionality I needed to reuse into a function. As my tasks got more complicated and as I started learning object-oriented programming in other languages, I began to see the benefits of applying that to JavaScript. In JavaScript, a function is … Read more
Long promised and way overdue, mobile technology is finally moving beyond telephone calls to become a fundamental of our technology-infused lives. In fact, mobile could very well transform how we gather and use information. But beyond the hype rumors and billions of investment dollars in the mobile industry lies a simple concept: mobile devices, which … Read more
Programming Localization You might usually have the luxury of working on a site or application in just a single language, but there will come a time when you’ll have a project that must be done in two or more languages. This is where localization comes in. Localization, often referred to as “l10n” (the 10 represents … Read more
I am sure you have seen the Gmail invites going around (If not, check out whitespace, dezwozhere, jluster, minjungkim, widgetopia, wholelottanothing, and about 100 other sites). Well, just because it’s the trendy thing to do these days: I have seven, yes seven (7) Gmail invites to give away. So instead of doing some kind of contest, I would like to do … Read more
Brian Fling (full disclosure: one of my business partners) at Blue Flavor has authored an excellent post on Pricing a Project. If you are a freelance web professional or even if you work in a small company where you are asked to price out the project, this is a post you can’t afford to not read. Also, if … Read more
When I started this column, part of my motivation was to write about tools to empower Web designers—techniques they could take away and apply immediately. I’ve written an article on how information architecture can be a natural progression from Web design and two articles containing short lessons to help new information architects be more effective on the job. My … Read more
While several people are just beginning to understand what “Web 2.0” is, others who have been working within the realm of it are now beginning to say it’s dead. Does Thomas Vander Wal have a great post entitled Web 2.0 Dead? explaining this in more detail in response to Richard MacManus’s post Web 2.0 is dead. R.I.P.. … Read more
Former Columnist Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland, USA Employer: Freelance Title/Role: Web Developer and Consultant Personal Web site/Portfolio: snook.ca Memorable Quotes: “Anything is possible. It’s just a matter of how much time or how much money.” Digital Web Articles Powering the Web with HTTP Published on June 28, 2005 Variable Scope for New Programmers Published on October 17, 2005 … Read more
In developing Web applications, as in life, it is important to understand the basics. With that thought, let’s cover one of the most basic components of the Web: the hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP. HTTP Why did you just get disconnected? Simply put: HTTP is stateless. Using HTTP, a request is made by the browser … Read more
Nick Finck June 24, 2005 at 8:09 AM Add to Delicious or Add to My Yahoo! So today at Gnomedex Microsoft will be announcing extended support for RSS. Read that carefully, we’re not talking about better support for RSS, we’re talking about an extension to RSS. They want to be able to do e-commerce via RSS. Yes, … Read more