New Labour website launches
Just a day after the Prime Minister announces he’s to step down in June, triggering a leadership contest, the Labour party launches their redesigned website.
Just a day after the Prime Minister announces he’s to step down in June, triggering a leadership contest, the Labour party launches their redesigned website.
I’m very impressed by the redesign of The Guardian; they’ve managed to pull off the complicated feat of having a lot of information and not losing that information in a morass of boxes and links.
The design, based on a six-column grid, actually reminds me quite a lot of The Onion, although I think it’s even less busy. This article talks about the design process for The Onion; I think it’s had a slight design refresh since this was written, but it’s still an interesting read.
I conducted a Q&A about the future of CSS with speaker/author/developer/etc Andy Budd, which you can read on CSS3.info now.
Remember the bad old days of “This site is best viewed with Browser X at Resolution Y”, before the concerted push towards web standards? Looks like they could be on their way back.
Now, I kind of understand their problem; they don’t want to have a whole load of websites appear broken when users upgrade to a new browser. But they’ve got their view of responsibility around the wrong way: site authors should have to opt out of standards in order to support IE, not opt in.
Update: This is an old post and the information contained in it may be out of date. I don’t use MooTools much any more, so please don’t expect that any of this information is still relevant.
MooTools is a neat little JavaScript framework which grew out of the Moo.fx library. It’s a quick and easy way to add dynamism to your site, from AJAX to animation (that doesn’t seem much alphabetically, I know).
Despite having extensive documentation, however, I felt it was lacking a ‘quickstart’ tutorial — so I decided to write one. This one, in fact. Let me just apologise in advance for any confusion that may arise from this tutorial; I’m not used to writing them, and my JavaScript is a little rusty so I may get some terminology wrong. Don’t hesitate to correct me if you spot any errors.
For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.
One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.
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