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Blogs » Archive for June, 2008
CSS Theme Week… And That’s All Folks!
We conclude our first ever CSS-themed week with a classic article that collates the most important CSS positioning properties.
Nigel Peck’s article CSS Positioning Properties At-A-Glance Guide was first published back in 2003, but five years later still stands strong as a compact summary of the basics of CSS positioning (although we updated a few points before republishing). In fact, the concept of this article formed the basis for the SitePoint CSS Reference, which was then expanded to include the HTML Reference, and we have a JavaScript Reference under development, so the article was quite seminal from our perspective.
In case you missed an article along the way, here’s the complete list of articles that we published this week:
- Monday: Nifty Navigation Tricks Using CSS (Rachel Andrews) — an article that is still popular for beginners looking to create visually interesting site navigation elements that are based on semantic markup
- Tuesday: Breaking Out of the Box With CSS Layouts (Jina Bolton) — a terrific example of what can be done to dispel the myth that all CSS layouts are boxy
- Wednesday: Warning: This Secret CSS Technique Will Surprise You! (Alex Walker) — just when you …
The Week in ColdFusion: 18-24 June: CFML, Fast and Furious
One of the big topics this week has been the announcement of the CFML Advisory Committee at CFUnited. This group, headed up by Sean Corfield, includes members of the Adobe ColdFusion community and the Railo community, but notably no one from the Open BlueDragon camp. Ben Forta has posted his thoughts on the committee, and a dialogue of sorts between Ben and Alan Williamson from Open BlueDragon resulted in the comments. Alan decided to introduce himself to the ColdFusion community as well as address some of the controversy, prompting a response from Rey Bango (again with involved discussions in the comments). The soap opera will no doubt continue and I’m hesitant to devote any more column space to it, but I think the committee itself is a step in the right direction to ensure the CFML language stays consistent amongst multiple implementations, and hopefully whatever the outcome of the drama, it will be for the benefit of the CFML community.
In fact, there’s already good signs that the community is serious about interoperability: Barney Boisvert reports that Railo has implemented the same underlying mechanisms for arrays and structs as Adobe ColdFusion and Open BlueDragon.
On the flip …
Get Out and Boogie on the Customer Service Dance Floor!
One part of my role at SitePoint is to manage our Customer Support team. I often refer to this team as being “on the dance floor” with our visitors and customers, while as managers we’re just “sitting on the balcony”.
CSS Animation: The Ultimate Web Design Easter Egg
Our third tutorial for CSS Theme Week went live today — a new article titled Warning: This Secret CSS Technique Could Surprise You!.
Read previous articles from CSS Theme Week:
Today’s article was written by our own Alex Walker, a man with an unhealthy obsession for spotting an anomaly and exploring it in great detail (I sit next to Alex, so I know how much time he put into this tutorial). This article is the result of that exploring.
A while back Alex published a blog post about the fun that could be had when you explored overlapping CSS background images. At that stage, the effect he had produced was interesting and useful, though admittedly in limited cases (we applied it to the ad on the front page of sitepoint.com to promote our Art & Science of JavaScript book). While not immediately practical in every situation, it demonstrated one way of embedding a hidden feature into your page — an “easter egg” for your users.
Those easter eggs aren’t going to make or break your design — in fact, chances are …
BBC Rejects hCalendar Microformat Because Of Accessibility Concerns
The BBC have announced that they’ll be removing hCalendar microformats from their online programme listings, because of the accessibility issues with the ABBR design pattern.
To summarise the problem: some microformats use the title attribute of an <abbr> element to store ISO format dates, as machine-readable expansions of dates written in natural language, for example:
Meeting to be held on
<abbr class=”dtstart” title=”1998-03-12T08:30:00-05:00″>
12 March 1998 from 8:30am EST
</abbr>
However this can have a serious impact on blind users who have their screenreader set to expand abbreviations, because what the screenreader says is essentially gibberish to the user. For example, Window Eyes at its maximum verbosity setting will say this:
Meeting to be held on one nine nine eight zero three one two T eight three zero zero zero zero zero five zero zero zero
This similarly impacts on users with a cognitive disability, who look at the data in a tooltip and are faced with equally incomprehensible information. A date is not an abbreviation, and an ISO formatted date is not an expansion; the ABBR design pattern is both conceptually and demonstrably broken, period.
Unfortunately, the microformats community have not been taking this issue seriously, despite considerable debate and alternatives being offered …
SproutCore: JavaScript Applications
Revealed by Apple at the recent WWDC as the basis of the MobileMe web applications, is the newest member of the JavaScript framework fraternity: SproutCore. I’m pretty sure that if I told you SproutCore was yet another JavaScript framework for creating rich browser application interfaces, you’d prefer to scrub your eyeballs with steel wool than keep reading. Don’t head off just yet though, because SproutCore is quite different from other frameworks and worth taking a look at.
SproutCore is an open source framework for creating desktop-style applications that run in the browser using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You first create your application within a local development environment and then use the SproutCore build tools to compile the application in to a set of static files you can place on your web server. The term ‘thick client’ has been coined by SproutCore’s lead developer, Charles Jolley, to describe SproutCore’s approach. SproutCore applications are totally independent of any server-side technology. The whole application runs in the browser; the only interaction with the server is to save or load data via Ajax.
When I say, ‘creating applications’ I mean sophisticated, Model-View-Controller based application design, inspired by …
Dust-Me Selectors: Now Compatible With Firefox 3!
Today we released Dust-Me Selectors Version 2.1, the handy Firefox extension that trawls through your style sheets and cleans up unused selectors.
The primary change with this version was to add support for Firefox 3. Making this change wasn’t a difficult task for me — all I had to was upgrade to Version 1.0 (beta 3) of base2, and add a couple of UI tweaks.
Firefox 3 support aside, you should notice no huge difference in the performance or feature set.
For more information, to read documentation and to install the new version, check out Dust-Me Selectors on sitepoint.com.
Incidentally, if you’re interested in getting the most out of Firefox 3, you might like to check out our free eBook, Firefox 3 Revealed, available for download now.
CSS Theme Week: More CSS Tutorials Than You Can Handle!
It’s CSS Theme week on SitePoint!
What does that mean for you, dear reader?
Well, it means that we’ve trawled through the archives and hand-picked our favourite (and your favourite) CSS tutorials, and will be republishing one article per day for the next five days on the front page of sitepoint.com. Be sure to bookmark (you might even want to subscribe to the RSS feed for our articles if you haven’t done so yet). CSS has evolved and techniques have changed, but rest assured that these articles hold the test of time.
But that’s not all!
We also have a jaw-droppingly awesome new CSS technique that we’ll be throwing in there in the middle of the week. We’ve published some cutting-edge stuff in the past, but this is definitely up there in terms of pushing the envelope. I promise you haven’t seen CSS do this before … it’s awesome stuff.
In the mean time, though, I’d like to introduce you to our first article for CSS Theme Week. Allow me to reacquaint you with Rachel Andrew’s seminal article from last year …
This article is an excerpt from Rachel’s popular book The CSS Anthology, …
The Web Site Flipping World Championships
Why should Olympic athletes have all the fun?
If you’re a regular in our marketplace then you’ll want to keep an eye on this competition — the World Championships of Web Site Flipping are happening (a first for the site flipping industry, I believe), proudly sponsored by SitePoint.
Check out all of the contenders that have been spotlighted on the site — nothing really in there to suggest the talents of these flipping warriors, but fun if only to put some real faces to names in the site flipping industry.
There are a stack of prizes on offer — up to $20,000 worth, and that includes a copy of SitePoint’s Web Site Revenue Maximizer kit.
Watch the SiteFlipAcademy blog for more details as they come.
I’m a bit late reporting this, as the date for registering to compete has passed.Chaunna from SiteFlipAcademy informs me that it’s not too late to register and be involved. “You have until July 12th to flip like crazy and the score cards (that you’ll receive in the contender kit) need to be submitted by the 16th.” So if you’re interested in getting involved, get flipping!
The Week in ColdFusion: 11–17 June: ColdFusion 9 sneak peak leaks
Scotch on the Rocks and WebDU were last week (see my WebDU Day 1 post here) and CFUnited is now underway. It looks like CFUnited will generate heaps of blog posts, so I’ll probably have a separate conference round up after it’s over – but for now, a few advance details for ColdFusion 9 (coming sometime in 2009) were slipped out in the keynote address. Among these:
- Hibernate ORM will be “baked in”
- AIR integration will allow online and offline applications
- ColdFusion will be free for educational institutions
- Language updates will include a LOCAL variables scope
- a CFML Advisory Committee headed up by Sean Corfield will guide the development of the language
I’ve said it before, and so have many others – it’s an exciting time to be a ColdFusion developer. I don’t think there’s been a period of growth and change like we’ve seen in the last six months in the entire 11 year history of the platform.
Back our regularly scheduled program!
Community
First some sad news – the ColdFusion Weekly podcast has called it a day. Co-host Peter J. Farrell explains that the team simply didn’t have time to devote to the show. The archives will remain available, so if you …
