Blogging and all that malarkey

Judging from the response from the people who attended, our first Visual Web Design Masterclass in London this month was a huge success. As a large part of the day was spent learning about typography, both relating to type and to layouts devised from typographic principles, I chose to illustrate the lessons by typesetting The Waste Land, a poem by TS. Eliot. If you weren't able to attend, now is your chance to take a look at the results of my experiments.

One of the questions that I get asked quite frequently is until CSS3 moves forward, is there anything new we can say, or write, about CSS?. That's a good question. Not as good perhaps as Why does Gordon Brown do that funny thing with his mouth? or Would Eddie Izzard make a good Doctor Who?, but quite a good question none-the-less.

With only a week to go until our first Visual Web Design Master Class in London, I’ve been taking time away from client work to focus on writing all new content that I hope people attending will really love.

Enrique Ramírez wrote to me yesterday with a few questions about Microformats and markup. I’ve been asked these questions before, a few times. So rather than send Enrique my answers on a postcard, I’m replying in public, with Enrique’s permission of course.

It seems like a lifetime ago that I first sat down with a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit and thought about the conventions that we use for naming HTML/XHTML id and class attribute values.

I promise. In the run up to the opening of the Watchmen movie next year, I will resist the urge to write about or link to every piece of Watchmen trivia.

Who said that you can’t teach an old rocker new tricks? At An Event Apart Chicago, it was Dan Cederholm‘s latest talk example, Color Transparency With RGBa that made me sit up and take notes.

In what I hope will not be a series about the stupid things that clients complain about.

I was lucky to be sent a preview copy of Rachel Andrew‘s soon-to-be-published book Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!, published by those nice chaps at SitePoint. I’ll be writing a full review later this week, but as the book is largely (almost exclusively) devoted to CSS display : table; properties, I couldn’t wait to try out some of the techniques she advocates.

Web designs need not look exactly the same in all browsers. I know that’s a topic I have written about and spoken on a fair amount before, but somehow I’m always amazed by the reactions that I get when the subject comes up.

Demonstrating our designs to clients as XHTML/CSS pages rather than as static Photoshop or Fireworks has streamlined our workflow and helped us to set and manage a client’s expectations better than ever before.

Want an easier way to re-style and optimize your pages to work better in Safari Touch (or Mobile Safari if you prefer) on the iPhone or iPod Touch? I did and now with a custom version of Allan Jardine‘s Conditional-CSS I have it. And you do too.