Archives - Design

Four tips for getting yourself out of a design jam.

Your pencils are sharpened and the page is blank. You've spent the last half hour watching cars, pouring a cup of coffee, and cleaning your keyboard without a thing to show for it. You've got designer's block, my friend.

I have been working with web standards based design for many years now and I see many rookie mistakes. When newbies get started with CSS/XHTML based web design, most of their work is focused on just getting the page to look like the Photoshop comp. While this translation is important to keep the client happy, considerable thought process should be involved in creating the semantic markup and marrying that with CSS. CSS is not a collection of hacks to get the browsers to bend to your will. Style sheeting is more of an art form. The difference between choosing inline elements and background selectors is a delicate procedure. How will I manipulate the structure? What is the client brand and how does this work into the markup. Simply thinking through your process before starting each project will save you headaches as the site grows.

I like the little icons next to hyperlinks that signify if that link will take me offsite, open a popup, or link to a file (as opposed to another html page). Here's how to do it in a way that's supported in IE7, Firefox, and Safari.

Customising Apache Functionality at the Directory Level

One of the most common needs Webmasters have is to cause the Web server to handle all the documents in a particular directory, or tree of directories, in the same way -- such as requiring a password before granting access to any file in the directory, or allowing (or disallowing) directory listings. However, this need often extends to more than just the Webmaster; consider students on a departmental Web server at a university, or individual customers of an ISP, or clients of a Web-hosting company. This article describes how the Webmaster can extend permission to tailor Apache's behaviour to users, allowing them to have some control over how it handles their own sub-areas of its total Web-space.

I could have sworn that someone has already a great post or forum thread on this topic, but I can't seem to find it (no matter how advanced my operators). I'm sure Mr. Malicoat has it in his bookmarks, but since blog posts are one of my personal systems for public bookmarking, here goes.

Maybe everyone already knew about these, but I just stumbled on them a few weeks ago and found some more yesterday. You can have animated favicons in Firefox! The icons for each site on the Firefox tabs are animated and when you bookmark them, the bookmark icon is animated too. A quick peek at the HTML of a page with animated favicons shows they simply have a 16X16 animated gif and point the page to that as their favicon with this:

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

One of my pet peeves is Flash, I hate Flash. Wait maybe I should rephrase that I don't hate Macromedia Flash; I hate what it does to clients and web designers the program it; it's essentially an eye-candy crutch.

This is a list of HTML elements I've found to be very poorly represented in most markup on the web today. Many of these elements offer more semantic value than actual functionality, but with the rising popularity of CSS driven design where HTML elements are used for what they were actually intended for, I felt shining a little light on them was appropriate.

I started thinking about the extreme difference in HTML knowledge among people working in the web industry. It spans all the way from people who know next to nothing about it to those who know it well enough to write the actual HTML specifications.

We all have been there. It is 4:55 and you want to get out of work...But you want to make sure your system is shutdown for the night. You dutifully close all of your applications and start shutting down

5 minutes later it *finally* powers off

As modem connections have become quicker, the Web has become increasingly graphical. Beautiful images are rightly loved. Some webmasters, however, take their images so much for granted that they don't consider how their pages may look and behave for others – for visitors on an old dial-up connection, for instance, or for visitors who cannot actually see their computer screen. Graphics that are not correctly implemented can damage a site as much as they can enhance it. To enjoy images correctly, they need to be made accessible by providing text alternatives. Alternatives are still provided on too few sites, but they are simple to implement and any conscientious webmaster should be aware of them. At least one prominent lawsuit (brought by a blind user against the official site of the 2000 Olympics) has highlighted the fact that this is an area in which carelessness shows.

You know those crappy programmers who don't know they are crappy? You know, they think they're pretty good, they spout off the same catch phrase rhetoric they've heard some guru say and they know lots of rules about the "correct" way to do things? Yet their own work seems seriously lacking given all the expertise they supposedly have? You don't know any programmers like that? Come one, you know, the guys who are big on dogma but short on understanding. No, doesn't sound familiar?

A list of recommendations.

Right now I'd like to lock myself in a small padded room, froth at the mouth, and make menacing faces through barred windows at innocent passer-by. But my shrink says I should channel my anger into something productive.

So let's talk about Google.

Following are the most commonly used graphics file formats for putting graphics on the World Wide Web and how each differs from the others.

JPEG/JPG

Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the original name of the committee that wrote the standard. JPG is one of the image file formats supported on the Web. JPG is a lossy compression technique that is designed to compress color and grayscale continuous-tone images. The information that is discarded in the compression is information that the human eye cannot detect. JPG images support 16 million colors and are best suited for photographs and complex graphics. The user typically has to compromise on either the quality of the image or the size of the file. JPG does not work well on line drawings, lettering or simple graphics because there is not a lot of the image that can be thrown out in the lossy process, so the image loses clarity and sharpness.