Thoughts, notes, and ramblings on the technology Mark Cervarich deals with on a daily basis.
By moving 3 sliders (red,green, blue), a palatte is created that could/shoule be pleasing to the eye: ColorMatch Remix. Also includes the ability to export your colors to a Photoshop color table.
PC Magazine penned an article, Embedding Fonts in Web Pages, that explains how you can embed specialty fonts into your web pages. If this worked all the time, it would be great! No longer would you have to turn certain parts of web pages into graphics, just so your page turns out exactly how you want it.
The only problem that I see with this method, is that it still doesn’t support all browsers. We start getting into a scenario where we will have to specify that “this website works best with browser XYZ.” Yikes! With the movement back to standards and stylesheets, I was kinda hoping that we’d moved beyond that.
I will keep an eye on this, but right now I don’t believe that this is the answer. It might be a great solution for an intranet, where you know all of the browsers will be IE version 6.0. But in the non-idealized world we actually live in, I don’t see this happening.
While its easy to talk about what XHTML is/isn’t, sometimes all the talk in the word can’t compete against a good concrete example.
The Style Guide for the Branch Libraries of the New York Public Library explains the markup and design requirements for all Branch Libraries web projects, along with various standards and best practices.
The information is timely and useful…and I really enjoy their use of CSS to make the pages layout quite nicely.
I have finally come around to the fact that it’s no longer the 90’s. And as we rapidly approach 2004, I will no longer be coding new websites that are made to support version 4 browsers.
Here’s a fact from White Papers // Client-Side Best Practices:
“Building a site to support version 4 browsers can double the time needed for client-side development.”
Experienced designers choose colors intuitively…the rest of us need help. Finding the correct combination of colors can be frustrating and take a lot of time.
This tool, the color scheme creator, will suggest to you sets of colors that work well together…once you’ve given it an initial color that you choose by clicking on a color wheel.
Hopefully this will help out you fellow non-designers, I know it will help me.
…or, why the heck are the links in my html not doing what I told them to do in my CSS sheet. It’s because you need to have them in a certain order:
For more info, please visit Eric Meyer’s Page on link specificity
XHTML is the next generation of HTML: XHTML is not very different from HTML 4.01, so bringing your code up to 4.01 standards is a very good start.
The Most Important Differences:
This XHTML Tutorial will help you on your way.
It is very important to validate your code using the available online resources.
You can also validate your CSS code while you are at it.
You will need to start each xhtml document with a document type declaration (DTD). There are three you can choose from:
If you have lots of existing HTML code, you’d probably want to use the Transitional DTD.
Finally, let’s let our tax dollars work for us for a change! Here is a page from the EPA with tips to make sure your html code complies to XHTML standards.
If you ever take the time to look in your web server access logs, you might be surprised to see that you are getting tons of 404 errors for a file called robots.txt. While you could spend the time to make an elaborate file, why not spend 30 seconds to make a very simple one that will reduce the number of 404 errors, and make search engine spiders that much happier to visit your site.
A generic robots.txt file that welcomes all robots and denies none would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
More examples can be found at clockwatchers.com.
After years of coding, I’m realizing that CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have finally hit critical mass. As this site proves, you can separate design from content. What are some sites that help me to rememember this?
I’ll add to this list as I come across/remember more resources.
