- Wired magazine puts out an open call to the web programming community to build a social networking service based on open standards like XFN.
- Westciv has released a free bookmarklet called XRAY that allows you to inspect the style properties of elements of a web page in Safari and Firefox. While XRAY is very slick, most developers will find Firebug is a better day-to-day tool.
- A tight summary of recent discussion surrounding the classic “Gang of Four” design patterns book, and its relevance today.
- Yahoo!’s recent update to the YUI library contains some pretty massive improvements: a beta rich text editor component, a beta color selection widget, dynamic dependency loading, a beta unit testing framework, and a formal skinning system!
- The W3C delivers XHTML Basic 1.1 as a Candidate Recommendation, closing the divide between the two previous specifications for mobile web markup. But with mobile devices increasingly able to cope with full HTML, does this specification arrive too late?
- An interesting thread on Javalobby about object databases (as opposed to relational databases), and why they haven’t seen the success that many have predicted.
- “Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build you project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.”
- A short-and-sweet tool to assist in aligning page elements to a regular baseline grid. When invoked, this bookmarklet will overlay any page with a regular horizontal grid so that you can check your element alignment. Works in all major browsers. (thanks gnarly!)
- This site collects snippets of good design from all over the web. Need some inspiration for a particular aspect of your design? Just browse the relevant category. (thanks spiky_simon!)
- Opera has published an API for the Nintendo Wii version of its browser that allows JavaScript developers to monitor and respond to the four controllers supported by the console simultaneously.
- A neat little program written in Lua that will dynamically generate CSS property values to ease some of the maintenance associated with static CSS layouts.
- A fascinating collection of problems that web technology currently faces, followed by brief interviews with some of the leading minds currently working to tackle them.
- A clear and concise run-down of how negative margins work in CSS.
Got a link you’d like to recommend for the SitePoint News Wire? Great! Save the link on del.icio.us, and tag it for:sitepointlinks. Please include a description—it will increase the chances that we’ll select your link for the News Wire!
Written By:
