Siolon

A trendy topic amongst CSS’ers is the CSS reset. The idea is that you intercept the default browser stylesheet (that is used first in the cascade), reset, and then apply generic styles including margin/padding. I read many articles by many gurus, but I eventually came out with what I have below. For differing implementations check out this great “killer collection” of resets, and note that this won’t work in IE6 due to the universal selector but I’m ok with that. EDIT: My syntax highlighting plugin added “baseline” in there twice, and it shouldn’t be there. If you view it (read more...)

Laying out forms with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a complex topic. In light of many developers doing their first overall CSS layouts they often bail when it comes to laying out forms with CSS and avoiding both tables and line breaks. The code example shows the following: Well-formed, semantic markup CSS for layout and presentation Ensure that the form is both usable (easy to read/use) and presentable No tables or line breaks To avoid the line breaks we simply use the CSS “clear” property. This property says: “clear all floated elements to the x side of me”. So for clear: (read more...)

When freelancing I use the Harvest application to manage all of my time tracking. It has made invoicing painless, and while I got it thinking I was over-charging my clients, it turns out then I was not charging them enough! Anyway, after being listed as a WordPress consultant by Automattic I naturally had more WordPress contracts. I then wanted to solve a business need by allowing my clients to view their impending charges inside the familiar WordPress administration interface. This was impossible until recently when Harvest published their full API. I now have the ability, through REST, (read more...)

I recently gave a presentation by this title at the Dayton [Ohio] Web Standards Group Meetup. Here are the slides that I presented as well as my references for the presentation. We also have a new Google Group for all designers interested in standards-based development regardless of location. Further Reading Comparisons XHTML 2 vs HTML 5 Preview of HTML 5 (X)HTML 5 Versus XHTML 2 HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web Specifications XHTML 2 HTML 5: W3C and WHATWG (read more...)

I hate JavaScript. I mean I really hate JavaScript. Dealing with different implementations of the DOM between browsers is a menace I couldn’t duplicate if I tried. I’ve tried JS libraries from Mootools, script.aculo.us, and so on until recently. I knew jQuery existed, but I didn’t realize how powerful the language was until recently. When I realized I could select and manipulate DOM elements with CSS selectors then I was off to the races! I love how it’s tailored for designers who already understand that syntax. There is no more getElementById(”search”) or other garbage, because (read more...)