Sam’s random musings

Coding Horror: Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?

One of the things we’re thinking about while building stackoverflow.com is how to let users style the questions and answers they’re entering on the site. Nothing’s decided at this point, but we definitely won’t be giving users one of those friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser layout controls.

I am also bothered by the gui widgets that people tend to like in pages, for one I want more control given to my designers over my ‘users’ pages. Generally people really abuse those controls and make the ugliest darn things. The worst looking emails tend to come from yahoo and other web mail products that have those darn things.

I also like the markup that markdown makes, easy to style into something that flows with the rest of the site. Not by me you know, but by my designers…

A Guide to Web Typography | i love typography, the typography blog

Typography for the Web has come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee flipped the switch in 1991. Back in the days of IE 1.0, good web typography was something of an oxymoron. Today things are different. Not only do we have browsers that support images (gasp!), but we have the opportunity to make our web pages come to life through great typography.

A good quick treatise on typography as it applies (in my mind) to reading on the screen, specifically on the screen.

Good reading for this design wrecker as I embark on a new design road…

In All Fairness … Internet Explorer Still Stinks

This is the story of how SitePoint tried to give Internet Explorer a fighting chance … and it lost anyway.

The title says it all….

(Via SitePoint’s DHTML & CSS Blog: Stylish Scripting.)

Server Switcher :: Firefox Add-ons

Server Switcher is a navigational help tool for web developers. It allows you to easily switch between sites on your development and live servers, so that you can immediately see the differences…

Great tool for developing sites

(Via Koke.)

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p>New UI library for Prototype in the works: “

Sébastien Gruhier, author of the VERY cool Prototype Window class has started a new initiative to build a complimentary UI library for Prototype. Accompanied by Samuel Lebeau, Juriy Zaytsev and Vincent Le Moign, the team aims to build easy to implement UI components that will enhance the user experience in web applications.

<blockquote><p>At the beginning of the project, it was only a full rewrite of Prototype Window but it became quickly a UI library based on <a href="http://prototypejs.org/">Prototype 1.6</a> and <a href="http://script.aculo.us/">script.aculo.us 1.8</a> to include all my previous components like <a href="http://prototype-carousel.xilinus.com/">Prototype Carousel</a> ….</p></blockquote>
<p>The current version is still in early stages but already provides some nice components:</p>
<ul>
<li>window
<ul>
<li>skinnable</li>
<li>shadowing system independent from window and skinnable</li>
<li>div based</li>
<li>resizable from all borders and corners</li>
<li>custom buttons</li>
<li>Dialogs (like it’s done in <span class="caps">PWC</span>) are not yet implemented but will be done soon</li>
</ul>

• carousel: only HTML content (no Ajax content)
• dock (experimental)
• shadow: a simple class to add shadow on any element with a absolute position.

<p>Full details of the project can be found on <a href="http://blog.xilinus.com/2007/11/4/prototype-ui-beta-version-pwc-reloaded">Sébastien’s blog</a>.

This looks like a great start for those of us who like to use stuff that just works

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Creating a Visual Language:

Amazon has a clear visual language for shopping-related buttons. (Figure 1) While the buttons vary in size, color, text, and iconography, they clearly share enough of the design elements that the variety enhances their purpose rather than complicating it.

• Color
• Iconography
• Context & Flexibility
• Copywriting

Worth reading if you do things like buttons and pretty things in your work. I tend not too, I’m the guy who builds the pigs I don’t put the lipstick on them

(Via Garrett Dimon.)

Multi-Safari: Testing with 10 versions of Safari at once:

Michel Fortin has created special versions of Safari that allow you to run them all on the same machine. This allows you to test your Ajax application in a variety of versions.

There are similar things for explorer and firefox so this is a great addition to the developers tool box…

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Navigating the HTML email jungle:

We’re ramping up our emailing efforts and decided to start sending out HTML newsletters to customers. (We’ve always sent out plain-text emails but figured some minimal styling would help liven things up a bit.) So we designed a nice, simple email using clean code. The first one is this brief Basecamp Newsletter.

It took a while to get to this version though. First, we ran our simply styled email through Mailchimp Inbox Inspector (demo), a useful tool you can use to view HTML newsletters in a variety of email apps.

It came up perfect everywhere except Outlook 2007, Windows Live Mail, and Lotus Notes. Strangely, it looked fine in Outlook 2006 but busted in Outlook 2007.

The reason? As Campaign Monitor put it, Microsoft decided to take email design back 5 years.

If you do find yourself inclineded to do html email generation it does behoove you too check out the mailchimp inspector and take the time to read some of these links…

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)