Aza’s Thoughts: ContextFree.js & Algorithm Ink: Making Art with Javascript. “I’m looking forward to an explosion of infographics and other data visualizations that weren’t possible before without a heavy server-side setup, or without a compile step that breaks the ability to view-source-and-learn cycle of the web.” Me too. ¶
Entp: Where did those custom selectors in Lighthouse go? “[...] we’ve run into a few brick walls with the usability of the assigned user selector [...] As accounts and projects grow, those lists are getting long, and now you can use that keyboard to sort through the list or jump straight to a user.” ¶
Ralf Herrmann’s Typography Weblog: Kerning and OpenType features in Firefox 3. The kerning is great, the support for ligatures is broken. ¶
Subtraction: Spacing Is Everything. “[...] by normalizing the space between like elements, aligning elements along similar spatial planes, moderately increasing the space between stacked items and paying attention to how elements are framed by negative space, we can get what is, in my opinion, a significantly more attractive Gmail interface.” ¶
HTML 5 differences from HTML 4. “Acronym is not included because it has created lots of confusion. Authors are to use abbr for abbreviations.” :) ¶
SOFA: Design, Interfaces & Software. Lovely website redesign from the makers of Checkout, Versions, and Disco. ¶
Hicksdesign: Graphics Editor or Text Editor?. “It’s easier and quicker to move stuff around in a graphics editor.” ¶
37signals: Web designers should do their own HTML/CSS. They really should. ¶
37signals: Why we skip Photoshop. “HTML/CSS is real in a way Photoshop will never be.” Never used Photoshop for web design, and I never will. ¶
The vanishing design. Lovely. ¶
Daring Fireball Linked List: A Cruel and Shallow Money Trench, a Long Plastic Hallway Where Thieves and Pimps Run Free, and Good Men Die Like Dogs. “The music labels think we should pay more for a song downloaded from a server that isn’t theirs, over a network that isn’t theirs, because, well, just because.” ¶
John Resig: Processing.js. Cool. ¶
Veerle’s blog: Does Flash irks me? “This makes me think about the WYSIWYG applications and the promises that you can create a site without even touching a single line of code. This approach is broken in my humble opinion because if you want to call yourself a true web designer you got to have an understanding about what is beneath the graphical layer. A machine, how good it made be, will never have the capability to think like a human. It already starts with separating content from presentation. When I start the web development process I always start with thinking about structure first and the implications it may have.” ¶
Daring Fireball Linked List: I Box in Yellow Gox Box Socks. “In print, you’ve got two boxes at a minimum: the page, and the text itself; on the web, you’ve got the browser window and the text. That’s enough boxiness for anyone. The key is to remember that a column of text, by itself, forms its own box.” Couldn’t agree more.
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Ongoing: Look Sideways. That’s what I’m doing. ¶
Textism: Embedded video is broken. “I find myself at Youtube or Vimeo or Brightcove or wherever, begin watching something interesting, and immediately start looking for a way to put that in a corner of my screen so I can continue working or doing, um, research and cast my eyes back to it whenever it requires I do so. This evidently can’t be done using any of the popular embedded video gear, so I end up resizing the browser window, which inevitably results in some sort of layout chaos, and opening up a fresh window to resume what I was doing before.” Happens several times a day to me too. I’m hoping to convince a client to give you the option to launch video in an external player if you prefer that above watching the video embedded. Stay tuned. ¶
High Performance Web Sites: Cuzillion I’m going to be needing this soon. ¶
Veerle’s blog: Starting with CSS and bug fixing tips. Nice overview. ¶
Opera Developer Community: Stop using Ajax! “[...] the emergence of Ajax techniques has inspired a whole new wave of applications, but in many (if not most) cases, these applications don’t actually need Ajax to work [...] we can cherry-pick the best ideas – we can build Web 2.0 applications without using Ajax.” True. ¶
Seed Conference. Lovely piece of web typography. ¶
Surfin’ Safari: Scenes from an Acid Test. “Web standards can often seem boring compared to super fast performance, whizzy new features, and even the basic Web compatibility work of making sites work properly. Interoperability is critical to the Web as an open platform, but it can be difficult to explain to regular users why it’s so important. The Acid tests make web standards fun, for browser developers, for Web designers, and for regular users. Whatever the intrinsic value of the tests may be, I think we should all thank Ian Hickson and all the test contributors.” ¶
Dive into mark: Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Joel Spolsky’s “Martin Headsets”. Can someone please get Ze Frank to read this out loud on camera? ¶
Apple: About the Safari 3.1 Update. “Adds support for CSS 3 web fonts. Adds support for CSS transforms and transitions. Adds support for HTML 5 <video> and <audio> elements. Adds support for offline storage for Web applications in SQL databases.” Browser innovation is back. ¶
The B-List: Legacy. Best explanation for the reasons behind the IE 8 version targeting proposal I’ve seen so far. ¶
SitePoint: CSS Reference. Great. ¶
Hixie’s Natural Log: Mistakes, Sadness, Regret. “[...] I recommend not including the meta tag, or, if you are forced to include it, making sure it says “IE=7”, even once IE8 ships. This seems to me to be the best way to show your support for an open, interoperable Web on the long term.” I think I agree. ¶
IEBlog: Compatibility and IE8. Bad idea. Adding more rendering modes makes it harder to maintaining the engine and harder to build and test web pages. A List Apart and Zeldman seem to like the idea, Dean edwards, Anne van Kesteren, Robert O’Callahan, Ian Hixie, and the Safari developers don’t. ¶
Stephen Fry: Social networking through the ages. “My point is this: what an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago?” ¶
24 ways: Mobile 2.0. I’ve been saying this for years and I’m saying it again: Forget about ‘mobile’, it’s all just going to be Web. ¶
Google Chart API Developer’s Guide. Very convenient. ¶
24 ways: Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6. Good overview of what you can and can’t do. ¶
Email Standards Project. “The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.” ¶
A List Apart: Understanding Web Design. “Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.” ¶
DamnHandy: URI vs. URL: What’s the Difference?. Good summary, nice to keep around if you need to explain the difference. ¶
Surfin’ Safari: Downloadable Fonts. The latest WebKit built supports downloadable fonts. Let’s hope this makes it into Leopard. ¶
Westciv: XRAY. Handy for adapting stylesheets to Internet Explorer 6. ¶
Smashing Magazine: Best of August 2007. Convenient. ¶
Airbag: Rolled. No more tabs at Amazon. ¶
Subtraction: Form of… a Book about Forms!. The Book looks interesting and the PayPal credit card type recognition is very smart. I strongly disagree about the Mint form though; it’s too busy. ¶
Kaourantin.net: What just happened to video on the web? I guess Adobe got scared after Microsoft released Silverlight. ¶
Joyeur: When you’re really pushing traffic, Amazon S3 is more expensive then a Content Delivery Network. Interesting and somewhat unexpected. ¶
Toolman Tim: The new Backpack: a shinier engine but a dull paint job. I agree. Trading developer time for this many server roundtrips is not a good idea. ¶
Roughly Drafted: The iPhone Threat to Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Real, BREW, Symbian. Again, don’t use Flash for important stuff. I’m suddenly wondering if the Gucci website works well on iPhone. ¶
Stuff on Fire: iPhone SDK. “The last thought I had was about the lack of Flash on the handset. I’ve done a lot of work with Flash on the desktop lately on Windows and I have to say that despite Adobe’s efforts to modernize their infrastructure, Flash is still a very primitive technology with strong roots in education CD-ROMs on Mac OS 9 — they’ve made tremendous strides in terms of rapid application development and deployment, but I don’t think performance or reliability has ever really been on Adobe’s radar with this product.” ¶
The Cafes: North and South. Guess which is Rest and which is WS-*. ¶
37signals: What if I actually like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?. We like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript too. ¶
Red Sweater Blog: WebKit’s New Element Inspector. You wouldn’t guess, but the new Inspector is fully implemented in HTML and CSS. ¶
mod_never_expire. That is nice. ¶
BitWorking: RESTify DayTrader. For those thinking that REST can’t be applied to complex situations. ¶
Lawbean » EFF Privacy Advocate Photographed by Google’s Street View. Oh, sweet irony. ¶
Apple: Safari 3 Public Beta. Now runs on Windows too. I wonder how much of Cocoa is already running on Windows in Apple’s labs. ¶
Shaver: The high cost of some free tools. “When the tool spits out some bundle of shining Deployment-Ready Code Artifact, do you get something that can be mashed up, styled, scripted, indexed by search engines, read aloud by screen readers, read by humans, customized with greasemonkey, reformatted for mobile devices, machine-translated, excerpted, transcluded, edited live with tools like Firebug? Or do you get a chunk of dead code with some scripted frills about the edges, frozen in time and space, until you need to update it later and have to figure out how to get the same tool setup you had before, and hope that the platform is still getting security and feature updates?” ¶
A List Apart: Educate Your Stakeholders!. “Although such people may be very well meaning, they are often blissfully unaware of the factors that should and do influence decision making on the web.” ¶
Sam Ruby: Different Drummer. Well… ¶
Dive into mark: Silly season. Don’t get fucked by Adobe or Microsoft. ¶
Ongoing: REST, as in Take It Easy. Names and message and a little bit of protocol. ¶
A List Apart: The Web Design Survey, 2007. Take it. ¶
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: Where are the Women? Where are the Links?. “Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don’t know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experiences for the web.” Sigh. ¶
HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web. Great overview of what HTML5 is about. ¶
Twitter, Rails, Seaside, Respect. “In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it’s really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.” ¶
My Ajax Nightmare. “There is a disturbing trend that I am seeing among older industry types that are just now entering the world of web development. They think that AJAX is not only the way you have to go but a platform rather than a feature. There is so much confusion at the moment as managers are evaluating different AJAX toolkits to bet the next few years of development on. My advice is to not tie yourself to any one toolkit and to abstract javascript away as much as possible.” ¶
Proposal to Adopt HTML5. Yes. Please. ¶
A List Apart: Articles: Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid. Finally a baseline grid article that just uses pixel sizes. I really see no need to define the header font size as 1.66666667em instead of 20px when you’re using a base font size of 12px anyway. ¶
Heresy and turtles (all the way down) with Avi Bryant. The choice between fully stateful (Seaside) and mostly stateless (Rails) depends very much on the kind of web application you’re building. ¶
No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July. A very good example of a concept site that doesn’t suck. ¶
White- (or green, or blue, or yellow) label Dabble. You upload your logo and Dabble automatically creates a color scheme for you based on the colors in your logo. Very nifty. ¶
You’re not on a fucking plane (and if you are, it doesn’t matter). I think I fucking agree. ¶
Jester: JavaScriptian REST. It’s like ActiveResource, but written in JavaScript. Awesome. (Via Riding Rails.) ¶
Paul James. Some excellent articles on REST like 3 Tiered REST Architecture and Living Without Sessions. ¶
Deal With It. Using the number of elements you have to deal with as a measure for perceived user interface complexity is a really, really good idea. ¶
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. So, why is the title an image? ¶
SQL Injection Cheat Sheet. Helps to make your site safer. And don’t forget the XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet. ¶
What do you want to know? Read the comments. ¶
HTTP/1.1 (DELETE, GET, HEAD, PUT, POST). I’m going to print a poster of this first thing tomorrow morning. ¶
Web 2.0 Tutorials Round-Up. Over 65 tutorials, references and related resources for creating Web 2.0 graphics. Gradients, gradients, gradients. ¶
Don’t Judge a Book by it’s Cover. Great idea for adding credits and copyright information to images that only gets shown when the image is downloaded or passed around on the web. ¶
swfIR: swf Image Replacement. Nice. ¶
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