Archives for standards
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 year, [...]
Freightliner Trucks Homepage Redux
In the last quarter of 2008, I was tasked with redesigning the home page of one of our clients, Freightliner Trucks. The original design of FLT is from a few years back, and we have been slowly updating areas of the site to current standards and practices since then. A wider layout, better navigation, stronger [...]
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 lots [...]
Welcome to the New Pop Art Blog!
The new Pop Art blog is live! On the front end, it’s sporting a brand-new, and oh-so-spiffy, design, and on the back-end it’s been converted to the titan of the blogging world, Wordpress. Please look around, and enjoy the new scenery. And make sure you take a peek at the new profile pages by clicking [...]
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 like [...]
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 [...]
LP Usual Defects
About six month ago, we launched the first version of Stop the Usual Defects, a microsite for LP to promote the launch of their new engineered wood product, LSL. The concept was to showcase the strengths of LSL by portraying defects in traditional lumber in the style of The Usual Defects. We just reworked the [...]
Bionic Lobster
We recently launched a microsite for Leatherman’s new Bionic Lobster ad campaign. The idea is that a lobster lost his claw during a struggle with a Sea Captain, but stole his Leatherman at the same time. He tied it onto the stump, and became a kind of lobster superhero, freeing his fellow crustaceans from restaurant [...]
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 [...]
IE Double-Float CSS Bug
Has anyone seen this problem before and have any idea how to solve it? In firefox, the text wraps around both floats correctly. In IE6/7, the text only wraps around the second float.
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 ‘Standards’ [...]
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 in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Bulletproof Web Design: One Paragraph Review
Having already written a book introducing readers to the web standards movement, Dan Cedarholm returns to cover more advanced material. While his first focused on markup and basic scenarios like grocery lists, this book focuses on CSS and accessibility. In particular, he explores how to let a web page flex around things like large font [...]
CSS Mastery: One Paragraph Review
In the introduction to this book, Andy Budd writes “There are an increasing number of CSS resources around, yet you only have to look at a CSS mailing list to see the same questions popping up time and again.” In that sentence, he’s neatly summarized this book. The material contained here is certainly available elsewhere, [...]
Web Standards Solutions: One Paragraph Review
Dan Cedarholm has written a very nice book introducing the reader to the concept of web standards. Unlike Zeldman’s book, which is nearly all theory, this book is heavily focused on markup techniques, with some basic introduction to CSS. Each chapter presents a variety of scenarios, such as how to mark up a grocery list. [...]
