And on that note, I’ll mention that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download. Go break the web!

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But waitaminnit… What’s this stuff about forward compatibility by adding some new X-UA-Compatible header to my pages or my server? Am I reading this right? Are you telling me that in order for IE8 to use its fully compliant rendering, we have to add something new to our pages? And that if we don’t, it will fall back to rendering pages just like IE7? Is that what this means?

That’s just dumb.

Screw their stupid “don’t break the web” motto. Break it! Break the web in the name of progress! How will we ever move forward if you keep dragging us back? And while you’re at it, quit trying to misdirect us with that “don’t break the web” nonsense. Putting out a browser with excellent CSS support is not “breaking the web”, it’s fixing it! There’s no real shame in putting out a better product, and admitting that the previous versions had flaws. This is a concept called “continuous incremental improvement”.

There has already been a lot of reaction from the web development community. There are several big names behind the idea. There are several big names against it. I’m not a big name, but I fall in the latter camp. This is not “forward compatibility”, it’s not “forward” anything. This is keeping progress of the Internet Explorer browser and adoption of better standards at a crawl instead of letting them make an evolutionary jump.

Oh, and unless I’m missing something here, there was already a mechanism in place that the IE team has already encouraged web developers to use, which could do the same job: conditional comments. What’s that? Oh yeah, there are problems with that, too.

If you need more reading material on this subject, check out Mark Pilgrim’s links. At the time of this writing, he has pointers to 29 articles, and I’m sure there will be more.

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All in all, there were some very nice designs in the competition. I could tell that the designers all put a lot of work into their designs. Even the designs that didn’t manage to collect any of the judges small pool of points deserve kudos, and I encourage everyone to look at all of the entries, not just the official winners.

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Sandbox has a really good structure, with lots of semantic classes (and microformats) added at key points. This allows the clever theme designer to turn their site into a chameleon. You can theme based on the type of page being viewed (blog posts, single post, pages, archives, categories, search page, etc.). And you can theme certain posts based on their categories, their authors, or even by the season, or time of day when the post was published.

I’m hoping that we’ll see some really stunning designs that use these capabilities in interesting ways. There’s a strong chance that Sandbox will be included as a standard theme in a future WordPress release, which would expose your work to an extremely large audience. How’s that for some extra incentive? Do you think you have good CSS chops? Design your entry and get it submitted. Just make sure you get your entry in before the July 29 deadline. And note that the deadline is 12:00am UTC, which is July 28, 8:00pm EDT, or 5:00pm PDT.

FWIW, this site is running Sandbox (albeit, an older, and slightly customized version). But I certainly wouldn’t try to hold this site up as a paragon of good design. Make something better, okay?

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I’ve done a little bit of searching, but I haven’t found what I’m looking for. I’ve found plenty of font surveys of which fonts are commonly found on Windows vs Mac vs Linux. I’ve found lots of discussions about things that affect readability, like font size, line length and line height. But it’s all very general, I’m looking for something more practical.

What I’m looking for is a resource that has pre-made sets of font-family definitions. But not just font lists in isolation — a set of font choices for various page elements. These fonts for headers, those fonts for body text, these other fonts for sidebar items, etc. A sort of “font palette” for the web, not unlike many of the color palette utilities that are available. I’m looking for typography design patterns for the web.

Does anything close to that exist? Even if it’s not full sets of font palettes as I envision, if I just had a good set of pre-made, cross-platform font-family definitions, it would be a start. Sure, I could just find well-made web sites that I like and see what fonts they use, but I wouldn’t know if they planned out their font use, or if they picked them as haphazardly as I normally do. I want to find a resource that has documented some lists of font-family selections, with good, cross-platform fallback choices.

I think this is a darned good idea for a web site. If I had the time to work on it, I’d make it myself. It would have a mockup web page skeleton, with some headers, body text, lists, strong and emphasized text, blockquotes, etc., and a selection of font palettes that could be applied, to see how they look. You’d be able to download these palettes as CSS stylesheet rules.

You’d also be able to see how things look if the visitor doesn’t have this or that font installed. The font-family definitions would try to be very complete, with good choices made for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux browsers. Users would be able to add new palettes to the site, and everyone would vote on them. And it would be all Ajaxy and stuff, with glossy buttons, reflected graphics, round corners, and a “beta” label.

There, I’ve laid out the basic project plan. Now, somebody go build it!

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As one increases the layout precision of a section on a webpage, all other sections of the page have their layouts perturbed by a proportional amount.

And its corollary:

The more precisely one specifies positioning and layout for a page in one browser, the less accurately every other browser will render it.

Make sure you follow the link and also read his example of a typical exchange between a customer and a web designer. It’s funny because it’s true.

If only we could get customers to read articles like 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards. Especially “Lesson No. 2: It’s not going to look exactly the same everywhere unless you’re willing to face some grief… and possibly not even then.”

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I’m sure she’ll be posting on a variety of topics, from web design and technology, to current events, to family matters. Everybody drop by and welcome Susan, my very own Digital Diva, to the blogosphere!

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Check out the examples for an idea of what you can achieve. In particular, look at the Nested Rounded Corners example. Then look at the table version at the bottom of the page. Note the difference in the source order. The table version forces you to reorder the information in ways that wouldn’t make sense if you were trying to decipher the HTML source (I’m speaking of all the “block N top” and “block N bottom” elements). The OTL version keeps related bits of information together in a straightforward flow.

This is going to take some time to properly absorb…

via: webgraphics

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The recommended workaround is to use IE’s conditional comments feature to load a stylesheet with rules specifically for IE6 and older. For example you might put something like this in the <head> of your document:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="compliant.css" />
<!--[if IE lt 7]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”ie-rules.css” />
<![endif]–>

This would load the compliant.css file for all browsers. Then, the conditional comment would load the ie-rules.css file only for Internet Explorer with a version less than 7. All other browsers (including IE7) would ignore this comment. [Note, however, that this hack doesn't apply to the specific Slashdot example used in the IEBlog article. Read the comments to see why.]

Note that this only applies if you are using IE-specific hacks in standards-compliance mode. This includes hacks which target rules to only work in IE (like my favorite, the star html hack), or rules that only work in compliant browsers (like the child selector hack). And it may not be necessary in all cases anyhow, depending on how you are using those rules (the main problem is probably going to be that the star html hack won’t work in IE7 even in quirks mode). Theoretically, if you are using quirks mode, then you can probably just continue using your old hacks. However, I think most of us would probably prefer to keep to the standards whenever possible.

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After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. While there are a handful of bugs and some lesser used functionality isn’t quite done yet, the transition has gone very smoothly. [...] And for the brave, download the stylesheet and start experimenting with new themes and designs for Slashdot: some sort of official contest to re-design Slashdot is coming soon, so you can get a head start now.

I’m guessing that it won’t be long before we start seeing user stylesheets and GreaseMonkey hacks for customized Slashdot viewing.

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