Blogging and all that malarkey

Want to learn from the best about jQuery and Designing for Mobile with CSS3? Places are still available on For A Beautiful Web workshops: Designing for Mobile with CSS3 with Dan Rubin and jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp.

If you are one of those people who love to complain about old browsers, it’s important to remember just how far browsers have come.

I would like to share some very exciting news about Hardboiled Web Design.

Today, RIM unveiled its latest mobile browser. It runs WebKit making every mobile platform except one run that rendering engine. With that in mind, I’d like you to try this experiment.

I’m almost at the end of preparing materials for “Hardboiled Web Design” and soon I’ be writing. To demonstrate various CSS3 properties, I’ve put together an archives page in the demonstration site, “It’s Hardboiled”. That’s where you come in (again).

In other conference news, this time of the online kind, I will be broadcasting from my orbiting space-station for The CSS3 Online Conference,  organised by Carsonified on March 22nd.

The conference that got it all started for me as a speaker comes back to London on June 10th and 11th for a sixth year, this time with a new face —  Web Directions @media.

Do you occasionally have to explain to a client why the site you made for them using CSS looks different for people who use very old browsing software? You should thank your lucky stars.

A month ago I tweeted about my own frustrations with learning jQuery. If you’re a designer or developer and you feel the same way, I’m over the moon to announce a new For A Beautiful Web workshop: jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp.

After traveling from the USA for An Event Apart to Australia and Japan for Web Directions in 2009, I had expected 2010 to be quieter. I was wrong. 2010 is going to be busier and more hardboiled than ever.

A week ago I was grumbling (again) on Twitter about JavaScript selector engines and enablers for Internet Explorer.

Just out, issue 132 of Computer Arts Projects, including a section on a Decade Of Web Design featuring interviews with Brendan Dawes, Elliot Jay Stocks and me. If you can’t get out today to pick up a copy, here is my interview.

I asked: Web designers are cool, but private detectives are cooler. No argument, but why can’t you be both? The answer? You can.

When the W3C announced that it was retreating from XHTML2 after years in the trenches, propagandists trumpeted that advocacy of XHTML had been foolish. With HTML5 again mired in corporate politics, egotism, squabbles and petty disagreements, it is easy to see why people are questioning if using or advocating HTML5 now is foolish too? At least until all parties reach some kind of armistice.

For A Beautiful Web is starting 2010 with a bang, by bringing Dan Rubin, one of world’s best designers and mobile specialists, to the UK for a full day workshop teaching the key steps to help you transform your site for mobile users.

I’m in the middle of preparing materials for a new book, “Hardboiled Web Design”. To demonstrate CSS3 selectors, transforms and transitions I’m putting together a page in the demonstration site, “It’s Hardboiled”. That’s where you come in.

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.

Always an example of the best the web design industry has to offer, this year 24 ways, the advent calendar for web geeks, has its focus firmly set on moving your web design forward.

(On 24th December 2009, the site that this letter refers to was replaced.)

A simple game time waster (and an old school blog meme). Go to the address bar in your browser and type a letter. Start with “a”, end with “z”. Here is what I found.

Writing this week about eating accessibility humble pie and using CSS attribute substring selectors, a comment by clever Craig Cook sent my imagination reeling.

We all make mistakes. Right? Particularly when it comes to accessibility. Often in the rush to ready a site for launch, we forget to check the details that can make a world of difference. That’s what I did when I launched the latest For A Beautiful Web.

Changingman, a liquid three column CSS layout with a fixed positioned and width centre column, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. (This entry was originally posted on 23rd November 2005 and has been updated in 2009.)

Some things are best expressed without words.