A common request from clients is to open all external links on their website in a new browser window. (Leave aside for now whether this is a good idea or not, and just assume that you need to do it.) It’s easy enough to add target="_blank" to a link, but there are two problems. First, [...]
Archives for “standards”
How to use jQuery to target CSS at older browsers
On a recent project where I had to support Firefox 3.6, 3.0 and 2.0, I had to find a way to target a specific version of the browser due to differences in the rendering engine. It turns out the easiest way to do this is by using jQuery to detect the browser and add a [...]
Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer
Long story short, Google released a plugin for IE 6, 7 and 8 that will run Google Chrome (which uses webkit) inside a frame in the IE browser. Now IE6 can be standards-compliant, and all versions of IE get blazing fast javascript and HTML 5 support. Sounds great, but there are some problems, as lifehacker [...]
How to Avoid Paragraph Gaps when Using Superscript and Subscript
Frequently, when I see a webpage with superscript or subscript text, I see associated gaps in the paragraph. This is caused because the default way browsers render super and subscript text is to add enough vertical space in the paragraph to show them. The result is ugly, but as you can see in the following [...]
Key Takeaways from An Event Apart
I’ve attended An Event Apart four years running now. It is, hands-down, the finest web conference around, and if you work on the web at all, whether you’re a designer, developer, copywriter, or client-services, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Reviewing my notes from previous conferences, I noticed that there were some running themes. Each [...]
XHTML 2 is Dead
Wow, I didn’t see this coming. Zeldman reports that the W3C is not going to renew the XHTML 2 working group‘s charter this year. That effectively kills XHTML 2 in favor of devoting the resources to the HTML 5 working group. This makes sense in that HTML 5 is already gaining traction, and we’ve seen [...]
An Event Apart Seattle 2009
The night before An Event Apart, I was at a party with some college friends. When they found out I was in town for a conference, they wanted to know what it was about. I said it was a web conference, and they said “Aren’t those usually held on the web?” Eventually, I explained it [...]
Who’s Afraid of HTML Email?
Anyone who tells you creating HTML email is easy has either never done it, or is lying. Inexperienced designers tend to think, “Oh, no problem, it’s all tables and font tags!” Grizzled veterans, however, know all too well the difficulties of getting anything but the most simple design to render well in a variety of [...]
Pop Art Redesign
The redesign of the Pop Art site is live! I’m really proud of the work I did on this, and I’ll write a longer post soon with details about the process and some of the coolest features. In the meantime, I wanted to make a quick post and encourage everyone to check it out.
Detroit Diesel Redesign
About a month ago, we launched the new Detroit Diesel redesign. We were working on this site when I was first hired at Pop Art, and while I’m proud of the code we wrote the first time, our standards have evolved a bit over time. The opportunity to revisit the site and kick it up [...]
An Event Apart San Francisco 2008
I’ve managed to attend An Event Apart every year so far, and this year was particularly exciting because the nearest location was in San Francisco. I went to Seattle the last two times, which was fine, but I know Seattle pretty well, so the opportunity to play tourist in a new city was very appealing [...]
Dojo is Coming Together Nicely
I haven’t had a chance to have another coding marathon for Dojo yet, but I’ve been able to spend an hour or so here and there, and I’m really pleased with the way it’s coming together. First and foremost, I’m proud of the code. I haven’t even gotten to the CSS yet, it’s just markup [...]
I’m Working on Something Special
Most coders and programmers are familiar with the concept of “flow” or “getting in the zone.” In a nutshell, it’s a mental state you get in when you’re working on something where it almost becomes effortless. This state can be difficult to achieve, and usually takes the right combination of energy level, motivation, and little [...]
Third Annual CSS Naked Day
Happy CSS Naked Day! Dustin Diaz started this in 2006 as a way to promote web standards. “In the spirit of promoting Web Standards along with good semantic markup and proper hierarchy structures, [today] will be a day of nakedness for all webmasters to remove their style sheets from their website for one day. …The [...]
Version Targeting and IE8 Followup
Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post). “In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting [...]
Version Targeting and IE8
Previously on Web Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by using a valid DOCTYPE. A lot of people, including Jeremy Keith, think this is a [...]
The Email Standards Project
In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind. This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards [...]
Duplicate Work is a Bug
“You’ll sometimes hear people joke that good programmers are ‘lazy’, and what this means is simply that good programmers tend to see duplicated work as a bug, and try to fix it.” – James Bennett, discussing CSS frameworks
41 Useful CSS Links
I was clearing out my bookmarks recently, and noticed that I had a pretty large collection of web development and CSS-related bookmarks that I never refer to any more, but might be useful to people who are just getting started with CSS. So with that in mind, here’s a collection of links, and I hope [...]
Web Design for Sara Ryan
In January, I got an email from Sara Ryan, asking if I would be interested in designing a website for her: Hi Scott — I found your site while searching for Portland web developers who use WordPress, and I really like the look and feel, as well as your focus on CSS and web standards. [...]
Selling Web Standards is Hard
I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that the extra money we charged them to upgrade their site to web standards will make [...]
Citations, Emphasis and Italics
Wanna get a headache? Go type “html book titles italic em” into Google and read for about 15 minutes. What you’re looking at is an intense debate over the best way to mark up a book title using HTML. I’ll save you some time and tell you that after several hours, my conclusion is that [...]
An Event Apart Seattle 2007
Last year, I attended An Event Apart 2006 in Seattle. It was a great event, although I remember it being really rushed, because they seven sessions packed into one day. So when I heard that they were coming back to Seattle, and had changed the format to two days, I signed up right away. I’m [...]
How Web Standards Made a Better Site for LP
What started as a simple project with LP to redesign their top-level landing pages quickly grew to encompass their entire site. This brought with it some surprising logistical difficulties, which the Pop Art team overcame through clever use of web standards. The end result is a new look applied across the entire site, with the [...]
CSS Naked Day ’07
It’s that time of year again when standards-conscious web designers shed their stylesheets and let their sites run around, exposing their raw markup to the world to promote web standards. The idea is that a standards-based site will be marked up semantically enough that even without the stylesheets, it’s still usable, if not pretty. I [...]