« February 2004 Entries »

Great CSS Design

I just haven’t had time to cruise for new and inspiring work recently, which is a shame because there is some absolutely fantastic standards-compliant work showing up these days.

These have been pretty well covered elsewhere, but regardless, here’s a good-sized list of some of the work I’ve been enjoying lately. Hats off to each of you!

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Links

Notebook Ergonomics, Usability

Using a notebook as my primary system is proving great for keeping everything I need with me at home or at the office. (Yes, the infamous iBook, though I don’t expect that to hold true much longer.)

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Technology

Side-stepping IE

I’ve explored the MOSe (Mozilla/Safari/Opera enhancement) concept twice in the past: MOSe and MOSe Menus.

Let’s turn that telescope around. Let’s take a look at some of Internet Explorer for Windows’ biggest CSS deficiencies, and how you can use MOSe techniques or just plain old hacks to get around these problems.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (55) | posted to Browsers

Services Not Provided

A friendly note to all potential clients. I do not work with businesses promoting, selling, or developing services to help others sell the following fine products, as a matter of educated guesswork.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Clients

Understanding Design

It appears that Microsoft promoter extraordinnaire Robert Scoble has sparked a debate about the value of design.

Robert’s claim that readability comes before ‘prettiness’ may be valid in some cases, but let’s not waste our breaths. Throwing arguments in favour of design at one with an engineer mindset is as effective as stapling Jello to the wall; it just won’t stick.

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

...and Australia!

Well it seems like I’ve been asleep at the wheel. All sorts of print publications have been covering the Zen Garden, and I’m only now starting to hear about them.

Keep them coming as you spot ‘em, this is great! None of these publications sent me notice they’re running spots on the Garden, and since the magazine market can get rather regional, chances are I won’t find them myself. A few more books are coming up that will also have some screenshots, though I’ve told the authors to contact the individual designers for permission too; you should know about those if you’re going to be in them.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Zen Garden

We're Big in Japan

So the email I got two weeks ago, remember, the one where the girl says she wrote a book and wouldn’t I like a copy oh the catch being that it’s in Japanese? Oh, right, I didn’t tell you about that one. This woman wrote to say… well, just that. You wouldn’t have said no either.

The book showed up last night, direct from Tokyo. Happy coincidence that I’d come home with an assortment of maki and nigiri for dinner, but I digress.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (22) | posted to Zen Garden

Ups and Downs

Being in business for yourself is a quirky thing. Events happening in your field which are mostly positive lead to excitement for future possibilities. More negative occurances lead to reflection, and consideration of what can be done to avoid the same happenings in your own work.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to The Industry

In the Referrals

Working in an environment that relies on web-based communication is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have world-wide connectivity allowing employees outside the country to connect with the rest still in-country. On the other, you have world-wide connectivity allowing the rest of the world access if you’re not careful.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Publishing

Importance of Brand

As has been reported everywhere this morning, Mozilla has renamed Firebird. The new Firefox trademark is the result of a naming conflict with another open source project, and the process has been written up by those involved: Ben Goodger, Steven Garrity, and Jon Hicks.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (39) | posted to Design

Spot the Error

Cleaned up eh?

(hint: line 28)

comments off | posted to Ephemeral

CSS Validation

As reported elsewhere this morning, if you use the Tantek hack in combination with the screen media type, your CSS doesn’t validate. Long story short, it’s because the validator is mis-reporting. It should validate, but it doesn’t.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to CSS

Dailies Update

Way way way overdue, the Dailies sidebar on this site now has a full set of browsable archives, and for those who haven’t discovered it yet, a corresponding RSS Feed.

Both have always been around, if you knew where to look. Which until now meant hitting the comment counter, then hacking the URL to get back to the /dailies/ root. But thanks to, you know, all number of excuses, they were never more than unstyled HTML. People were finding them, particularly comment spammers, so it was time to give ‘em some attention.

Continue Reading… | comments off | posted to Links

Browser Support 2004

thecounter.com’s stats live again. Not to be used as a final word, but as good an indication as you’ll find of the global climate, their stats are aggregated from a widely distributed hit counter script, and presumably sample a broad cross-section of the population.

There were some trends I was following before they went MIA in May of last year. (Note: disregard stats for June to December 2003, they finished off with May and misreport the rest of the months.) Observed: IE5 users are dropping, as they switch to IE6. NN4 is history. (MSIE1.x is reportedly being used by almost as many as NN4, but this is an anomaly). IE dominates, and while the browser eco-system is getting interesting again, the numbers are still heavily skewed in favour of Microsoft’s dormant flagship.

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