The more I use IE7, the more I hate it. Yes, it’s more standards-compliant and feature-rich than IE6; but if the best you can say about your browser is that it’s better than IE6, you’re not starting from a strong position. IE7 is better than IE6 as receiving ten smacks in the head is better than receiving twelve.
The reason I’m annoyed at IE7 today is that I’ve just found out they still haven’t implemented media types on the @import rule. If you’re not sure what this is, it’s a shorthand way to apply stylesheets only to specific media. Say, for example, we want to apply an external stylesheet called print.css which will apply only to printed documents; easy enough, you just do this:
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John’s Essential Guide to CSS is a ‘pocket guide’ to the language. There are many out there, but I decided to link to this one because of it’s very first link: Fix Your Site with the Right DOCTYPE.
I cannot stress enough the importance of working to a valid DOCTYPE; it’s good for the web, and it’s good for web developers. I remember the Eureka! moment of discovering how DOCTYPEs work, when all of a sudden cross-browser coding became that much easier. It’s an absolute basic of web development, so if you’re not familiar with how it works then I suggest you read the article forthwith.
How many great sites and interesting articles are we missing out on because we don’t read their language?
I was thinking about this as I read the blog of Rafael Oliveira, a web designer from São Paolo. I’m fortunate enough to be able to read Portuguese, but most people aren’t; that means that, unless his posts are ever translated, you’ll never get to read them. I can just about muddle through with written Spanish, but I’m sure that I’m missing some of the nuance in blogs like Brainet. And even when translated, this article holds very little meaning at all for me:
There is a rule in regard to the production which, assuming, that how it was the beginner, when the person who is identified the professional Web designer does is shy in Web design and even “the manner” can say. “You did not know”, “you are not taught”, with it does not pass. Because, because [anata] is to be the professional.
I’m fairly sure that the technical hurdles and solutions are universal, but I can’t help but wonder what theories we’re missing because they never get translated.
I made my first forays into web development back in 1998, with my own Geocities homepage (now sadly defunct). It was after I developed my first ‘proper’ website (an unoffical guide to the FIFA Club World Championship 2000; please don’t laugh, this was eight years ago…) that I decided I wanted to be a professional developer.
I’m mostly self-taught, but there’s no way I would have been able to make a career out of it — and keep interested in it — without the aid of the books below.
Please note: I’m not saying that these are necessarily the best books available, just that they have been — and continue to be — inspirational to me. OK, in no particular order…
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SVG looks set to be the future of web graphics — the distant future, perhaps, as it’s not yet supported by IE without a plugin. Opera’s Chief Web Opener, David Storey, announced on his blog recently that future builds of Opera will support SVG on the CSS background-image declaration. This is very good news, and the potential for scalable layouts is exciting.
The best tool for creating SVG files that I know of is the free, open source, Inkscape, which has just released version 0.45. Inkscape is similar to Illustrator or Freehand; it’s not as polished as these commercial releases but is still very powerful and capable of producing stunning effects. And — crucially — its native format is SVG.
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The next milestone build of my favourite browser, Firefox, has been released today. Codenamed Gran Paradiso, the biggest changes have been made to the graphics layer, which is now Cairo. I’ve played around with it a little today, and it seems significantly faster at painting a page than its predecessor.
I took a look at the Mozilla Developer Centre page to see a fuller list of new features, and noticed that it now supports the CSS :default pseudo-class. This was a surprise to me, as I’d never heard of it! The information in the W3C recommendation document is very vague:
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