Siolon

For all of you in the Ohio area, I’ll be speaking at the Day of .NET on April 19th.  My topic will be “User Interface Design for Programmers.”  I will explain the basics of usability, information architecture, user experience, etc.  It will be focused on explaining the concepts to people who aren’t and don’t think like designers.  I’ll make the materials publicly available after the talk. As an aside, MS is doing good stuff listening to standards developers.  They are no longer “evil” in the sight of standards developers.  From their concession on IE8, improved CSS support in IE7/8, and they (read more...)

I recently updated my Post Information Plugin to version 1.2. The changes include: Converted to jQuery from script.aculo.us (uses jQuery bundled with WordPress) Added extensive styling including the famous Fam Fam Silk Icons Reorganized code Added support for tags Added graceful degradation for users without JS Please visit the plugin home page to get all the information. (read more...)

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...)

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...)