External links

From Paul Irish, one of the brains behind Modernizr.

How the Wired Magazine user interface will look on the iPad or other devices.

— Expect Hardboiled Web Design to be like no other CSS book you’ve ever seen.

I’ve seen Andy a couple of times in the past and kind of felt he was a bit ‘marmite’ and it was clear from both the verbal feedback during the talk and the Twitter stream that some were keen to disagree with his views but like he said – that’s OK.

At Clearleft, our designers do not mark up their own designs. We require that they can all code well, but they never touch a line of production HTML. By the same notion, our front end developers – the ones who do code up the designs – never push a pixel of design, but we do expect them to have a basic understanding of design principles.

Fun as it is to take a trip to London/Brighton for a web conference it does start to get expensive so the fact that some local boys put on something for us Northerners was really cool.

— Couldn’t agree more. Speak The Web was a triumph.

If you care about how the content on your site is presented I think you get the best results with a designer that knows how to code.

To deem it neces sary to write HTML to be a good web designer is really quite dis respect ful to experts in those sub sets of web design who never go near any HTML, yet have equal value to bring to a design project.

Start asking your clients, “Would you like me to make sure your new site works on Blackberry, iPhone and iPad or spend time hacking for IE6?” I bet I know which one they’ll choose.

From January 2003 but still an illuminating read from Simon St. Laurent.

There’s nothing terribly revolutionary about MTV’s new logo – described aptly by the network as a ‘refresh’ rather than a redesign.

A thoughtful article from Jonathan Christopher on when he feels it appropriate for him to use progressive CSS.

Font-stacks created after considering the font-share percentage on both Mac and Windows platforms and then checked in browser for x-height and other issues (like: readability).

Some people would have you believe that you aren’t reading this because it’s not ‘above the fold’.

— Sending this to my client from hell.

This is why CSS was invented. Read the tutorial.

This weekend saw the minting of not one but two new elements. The summary element (not the summary attribute on the table element) goes inside the details element:

There’s so much to think about when building a web site that it is easy to leave things out, or forget about important considerations. One of the most important of these is accessibility, an area of web design that can seem very daunting.

— Part two is equally as fantastic.

Peachpit have released a short section from my Designing Web Accessibility DVD on YouTube.

Remy Sharp talking to Boagworld.

— Don’t miss out on your place on jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp workshop in London on May 14th 2010. Tickets on-sale now.

Want to see how FF Meta renders in IE 6 on Windows XP? How about Skolar in Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu? We’ve got it covered. Just navigate to any font on Typekit and click on the “Browser Samples” tab.

— More from the Typekit blog. The almost added by me as there is currently no Typekit support for Opera.

In my totally unbiased and professional opinion, this new blog design from Simon Collison is worth two years of waiting. Brilliant stuff.

That’s some big brass typefaces you have there Greg.

Modularization is but one option for the HTML5 specification, of course, but while it won’t please all parties equally, it would at least put an end to this battle and restore some sense to the specification.

— Faruk Ateş on one option for stabilising HTML5.

Seeing as I already had all of the content that was to be displayed I jumped straight into writing HTML and laying out the content in the browser – this is an approach I often take where appropriate and this job was really all about the content, Photoshop could wait for now.

— Sam Brown with a lovely writeup on the new dashboard he designed for Carbonmade.

To me, praising “CSS only solutions” is not enough – if you really love CSS and see it as a better solution than JavaScript then you should also show how people can use its features to create smart, short and flexible code.

— Excellent tutorial from Christian Heilmann. Too many people forget that good HTML is more important than any fancy CSS or Javascript.

CSS1 is a simple style sheet mechanism that allows authors and readers to attach style (e.g. fonts, colors and spacing) to HTML documents. The CSS1 language is human readable and writable, and expresses style in common desktop publishing terminology.

— As we start the third decade of CSS, it is good to remind ourselves just how far we have some.

One of the most common things I hear is, “I’d like to do something remarkable like that, but my xyz won’t let me.” Where xyz = my boss, my publisher, my partner, my licensor, my franchisor, etc. Well, you can fail by going along with that and not doing it, or you can do it, cause a ruckus and work things out later.

— Web designers and developers can learn a lot from this.

Technicians who invented it, run it. Technicians with taste, leverage it. Artists take over from the technicians. MBAs take over from the artists. Bureaucrats drive the medium to banality.

Primer undercoats your CSS by pulling out all of your classes and id’s and placing them into a starter stylesheet. Paste your HTML in to get started.

— This could be a useful tool.

Now updated to include Safari 4, Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10.5.

Andy Clarke is an ass with a horrible sense of fashion who just happens to have a rare eye for great design

— What did I say? (Features tweetCC and other fantastic work)

Often when I talk or write about using progressive CSS, people ask me, “How do you convince clients to let you work that way? What’s your secret?” Secret? I tell them what they need to know, on a need-to-know basis.

— My article for 24ways 2009 is live. Comments range from “He’s mad” to “He’s really lost it this time.” (archived here)

Cute, but this would have been so much better if it had used a liquid layout and flowing text.

Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. To view your own Web site with this same visualization overlaid on it, simply type its URL into the “Enter URL here” textbox at the top of the window and click Go.

After Marv, this could be the perfect role for Mickey Rourke. Shoot to thrill!

Focussing on using those CSS techniques (and a little JavaScript) to create some practical elements and layouts.

— Article: 9/10. Comments: Don’t get me started.

A series of small, intimate, low cost web design and development events in the style of a gig. Coming to Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Leeds in early 2010.

— I will be helping out and of course the events are supported by For A Beautiful Web.

Nathan Borror on Sass, the CSS preprocessor. CSS is not a programming language, it’s a style language and the preprocessor community should keep that in mind..

Best comment comes from Jeff Croft: CSS gurus are just that: CSS gurus. They already know how to write their way out of any paper bag you can find using CSS. They’re experts. They don’t NEED a preprocessor.

How can you stick to a plan when so many things threaten to derail it? How can you focus on a few important things when so many things require your attention?

— I’m starting on this. Tomorrow.

Instead of traveling through time and finding myself in the future, I traveled about fifty metres along the footpath at 200mph before finding myself in a bush. When asked by the nurse filling out the hospital accident report “Cause of accident?” I stated “time travel attempt” but she wrote down “stupidity”.

— Simply hilarious.

Have you read the comments that belong to a Smashing Magazine post? I know we can’t demand that every website in the world has the types of discussions that we wish for, but you would at least want the leading site in the community to enrich your life just a little bit I would think.

— Paul Scrivens (one of the smartest men on the web) on how Smashing Magazine is the OK Magazine, Jeremy Kyle Show of the web.

Includes border-radius in Internet Explorer. I would love Microsoft to offer a full roadmap of their planned CSS development for IE9.

A collection of screenshots displaying examples of microcopy in web application design. Microcopy is tiny copy (often shorter than a sentence) that helps clarify, explain, reduce commitment, or otherwise assuage someone when performing (or considering) a task. Curated by Annett-Baker and Joshua Porter.

A first look at John Allsopp’s Westciv CSS Transforms creator and demonstration (remember, you read it here first folks). I hate that how clever this guy is, but I love him anyway.

A look at the visual personality of London, based on visits to the city’s major art museums, attendance at the 2009 London Design Festival, and interviews with artists and designers who call the great city home.

— A well written and illustrated piece by Dan Redding. Well done to him and to Smashing Magazine. More like this please.

Nick Cowie’s Progressive enhancement with CSS3 presentation slides (including a little from my CannyBill redesign) on Slideshare.

The CSS Zen Garden has largely gone to seed. But that didn’t stop Nick Cowie from using it to show off CSS transforms and transitions.