« November 2003 Entries »

Font Size Redux

Phew. We’re turning over the font size issue so vigorously it’s gone green.

An on-screen style switcher was due on this site sometime down the pipeline, but I rushed it in response to the discussion. See right-hand sidebar — if things are funky, reload.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (33) | posted to Typography

Font Size: No Happy Medium

If there’s one thing nobody can agree on, it’s how to treat your text size. Pixels aren’t scalable within the most common browser on the market, and if you do everything you can to support relative units, you will still get people complaining that you are using text that’s too small, or too big, or too low in contrast, or too high in contrast. A designer can do his or her best to find a happy medium, but someone will always speak up:

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (47) | posted to Accessibility

CSS Crib Sheet Archive

The Crib Sheet has moved to a permanent home. I threw it into this site’s template for now, but I may choose to do something differently, eventually. Perhaps a PDF or two. The good news is that my print style sheet should allow for a relatively clean printed version for now.

I’m referring the Sheet to this post, and leaving it open for comments indefinitely. Feel free to add more suggestions below. Remember the focus: practical, real-world tips that aren’t picked up in the spec, or by the validator. Things that are easy to trip over, and may not make sense without external knowledge.

Comments Closed (34) | posted to CSS

Meatspace

‘Tis the season for industry events, fa-la-la…

I’m a few months early for South by Southwest, but before we get to that: WestCiv builds the popular StyleMaster CSS Editor and publishes the House of Style. WestCiv is hosting a series of workshops on CSS layout in Sydney, Australia in a few weeks. The first has sold out, and the second only has a few seats left. Anyone looking to sharpen their CSS skills who will be in the area on December 12th may want to book a seat, like, now. It would seem that the Zen Garden will be a focus; don’t let that fool you, I’m not taking a cut for plugging the workshop. WestCiv is a company that really gets it; that’s worth supporting.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (4) | posted to mezzoblue

CSS Crib Sheet?

Alright you Nielsenites you, that didn’t go quite like I expected. It’s probably my fault for calling it ‘Best Practices’ in the first place — what we’re looking to create is more a crib sheet of practical advice, something for reference when a designer gets stuck while using CSS specifically.

“A lot of these ‘best practices’ are just arbitary favouritism for a particular way of working.” - jgraham

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (46) | posted to CSS

CSS Best Practices

I’ve been thinking about how to put this together for a while, so I think I’ll open it up to everyone for contributions, then build an actual resource out of it somehow.

Here’s the idea: a CSS Best Practice is a one sentence action statement, a “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” (paraphrased, of course) that highlights a specific issue, be it browser compatibility, code integrity, or whatever else can actually be considered factual (instead of opinion). It’s followed by a paragraph that goes more in depth about why or why not someone would want to follow the action, with links to further reading. This is the stuff that, if you know it ahead of time, makes your design process much less of a headache.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (62) | posted to CSS

Methodology

From an e-mail exchange last night:

I think there’s an important relationship here: if content is the focus (as it should be), usability means structuring that content appropriately.

Structuring that content appropriately means designing it properly, but you can’t design until the content is in front of you.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (21) | posted to CSS

Remember

Comments Closed (15) | posted to Reflective

Priorities

Necessity forced the abandonment of software solutions in favour of hardware; a router got bought. A router with sticky-uppy thingies, to be more precise. Yes, we have discovered 802.11 (wireless) and oh is it good. Sitting on the couch with an Airport-enabled iBook (which is increasingly becoming the weapon of choice chez Shea) and a good pair of headphones tuning in to a radio station from a timezone a whole day removed while writing one’s latest tome on Cascading-something-or-other is a most agreeable way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (38) | posted to Reflective

Retrospective

A year already? A year. Already.

I keep stopping myself from writing over-detailed summaries about how I created other similar sites before this one going back to 1997, and how this one has really been around since 2001, but the weblog and the ‘official’ birth of mezzoblue happened a year ago. Too tedious for anyone but me though.

So to try (and fail) to avoid a self-indulgent narcissism-fest, here’s a simple month-by-month summary of the year you’ve been with me, and we’ll leave it at that.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (15) | posted to mezzoblue

IE x 3!

Ethan, excellent find! The big news for today is that it is possible to get multiple versions of Internet Explorer running on a single Windows box.

Joe Maddalone has written up the process in detail, and while there could be a couple of tweaks to make it easier to understand, I was able to follow it and verify that, yes indeed, IE5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 can all run on the same computer. Here’s my screenshot of IE5.01 in action on an XP box normally running IE6.0.

Great thinking Jon, this is exactly what we need! Now the question is, as Matt Haughey puts it, what possible explanation would keep them from releasing the simple info and making developers the world over happier to use MS products? I’m hoping to get an answer. Stay tuned.

update: Luke Redpath has put together a great set of colour-coded icons for the various IE installs.

Comments Closed (42) | posted to Browsers

Plugging the RSS Usability Hole

It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating: direct links to syndication feeds, be they buttons or text, present a problem for end users:

I am not a technically proficient user. I don’t know what XML, RSS, or even HTML stand for. I think the internet is the web, and the web is the internet. I still haven’t figured out that I can dial up without having to click on the blue ‘E’ first.

When I see an orange button, I wonder what it does. I push it. A bunch of garbage text fills my screen, so I assume the button is broken. I don’t push the useless button again, and resent it being there.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (65) | posted to Technology

Fog Creek Software

It’s site launch day again!

Today’s redesign is Fog Creek Software, purveyors of the popular CityDesk web publishing system and FogBugz bug database software. You’ve probably heard of Fog Creek’s founder, Joel Spolsky, via his popular weblog, Joel on Software.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Clients