This morning I learnt abour sIFR, the Flash tool that lets you put text in any font possible without ruining your HTML or busting your browser! There are lots of advantages to this. First, this technique gives the browser several options for rendering your content. If you’ve got Flash installed then it shows the custom designed font. If it doesn’t, then you get alternate (standard font) text. This is more fault tolerant than turning your nicely fonted text into graphics and then having them load (slowly), not register in SEO stats as well, and default to (non-semantic) image alt’s if they don’t render.
I wanted to be an architect. I did the drafting classes and the math and all, but when it came time to draw reliefs, my little red head shut down.
After years of listening to people say “Anyone can draw, it’s like learning to type!”, and wincing; I’ve decided to commit some real time to overcoming this (mainly emotional, I’m sure) barrier.
Besides, a good web dev can’t be scared of a web designer, who can’t be scared of a little mock-up sketching for white board conference room thrills.
Favorites so far: DueysDrawings has stage by stage photos to keep you re-inspired while doing the work, and, (who knew YouTube was the greatest drawing instructor?) some Photoshop drawing tutorials, and, OMG, do you remember this guy from PBS, Mark Kistler? If you don’t love the secret space cities, or the kickass late seventies moustache worn right into the here and now, or the bwow-chick-a-wowt-wow PBS intro music…, well, then you may not be capable of loving anything at all!
OK, I’ll admit it: when I saw the title, I thought, “I bet I know all those. Whatever.” I was right for the first 20 of these 37 Steps to Perfect HTML Markup, but the last 17 were pleasant surprises. Now I’m sayin’ :”Open your HTML purse and throw these in. You can never have too many bobby pins in there.”
As a beginner, I had no idea why one would choose percent over em’s, or pixels over percents to specify text size. You are hereby witnessing my breakthrough to intermediate, with this article on text-sizing strategy!
Basically, you want to stay away from absolute sizing methods, so that those who are interested can use their browser to resize the text. Sounds smart, and if done from the beginning of the design, easy.
Check here for a visual introduction to the almost infinite variability in text rendering between common browsers. Note to Owen: Very pretty presentation– Add me some Firefox 3, next revision!
Here’s the love, from htmlcodetutorial. Also enjoyed yourhtmlsource for this one. I was studying the design of Trickwood, by 3dB Creative here in Seattle, and realized I hadn’t used iFrames before. iFrames plus-es: you can imbed not only another html page, but a Word or Acrobat doc; you can have iFrames interact with each other (creative opportunity?), and you control the iFrame styles in a separate stylesheet- so you can go all krezzy on that. Also, Quirksmode sez that the most important thing you can do to get cross browser compatibility is to give your iFrame both an ID and a NAME. And he’s pretty smart.
Thanks, Elliot Jay Stocks, for a great write up on picking and massaging background images. Great for developers gone designer, or any other visual layout newbies. The other 24 Ways to impress your friends are definitely going on my ‘to learn’ list as well.
SURL, or Software Usability Research Lab at Wichita State University publishes their easy-to-read and well-reseached studies here. Great source for tips and principles when you’re planning site styles. I liked the info on the influence of the typeface on the perception of a resume or a company website, and the top 10 shopping cart design mistakes.
This type of work is filling in a huge gap– it’s attempting to quantify things like ethos, which the article defines as the audience’s perception of the author’s credibility and trustworthiness. (Incredibly important qualities for resumes and company websites!) Ethos has always been seen as a “soft” quality, like “people skills”; and therefore less valuable. I’m pretty stoked that the internet is not only using ethos, now, but demanding it.
…and that XFN (X(HTML) Friend’s Network) isn’t just another cheeky web thing, but based on a one of the best descriptions of the web I’ve seen (from the father of the web himself, no less):
The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.
I’m pretty sure that the answer to every CSS problem is to add a wrapper around the whole “problem” and then control it from that outer layer. Works pretty darn well.
