Knock::on_wood

unclear thoughts on software development

Articles tagged with design

Saturday, December 15, 2007

New Design

I wanted to play with Liquid, Mephisto’s templating engine. So in the process, I thought I’d create a custom theme for this sporadically updated blog.

I’ve added a few plugins and some code highlighting as well. Fun fun.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Don't click it

This is too cool. I’m not sure how practical it is, but it is a very well done experiment. Go ahead. Don’t click it now.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Cork'd

Sometimes, well almost all the time, I really wish I had better design skills. Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin put together a great (and nicely designed) site for wine aficionados called Cork’d. Looks like lot of fun.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Moving to a CSS Layout

For the past 3 years or so, there has been a shift in the web design field away from table based layouts toward the nirvana of standards-based, xhtml compliant, CSS driven layout. It is often a frustrating topic for those that have used tables for layout (pretty much every designer/developer I know). So most, despite noble intentions, end up doing a hybrid design (tables & CSS) or simply abandon CSS layout all together using CSS solely for formatting.

Well, times are changing and this task is getting slightly easier. With the new browsers (e.g. Firefox 1.x—get it and use it!), there are far less cross browser issues though some still exist. Here are some resources that I hope you find helpful:

Also, a side note on Firefox. It has a couple phenomenal extensions to help in this area:

  • The Web Developer Toolbar is invaluable. Just install it.
  • Aardvark lets you alter a web page on the fly, view partial source, delete elements for printing, and many more goodies.
  • IE Tab lets you open up IE within a tab in Firefox and see how the page will render without ever opening IE.

Hopefully you can start using CSS layout s in your app. The power is amazing. One thing that forced me to do this on a recent project was the print-friendly requirement. I wanted to hide both the header and menu areas when printing. With tables, I was stuck, but transitioning to a CSS based layout, it now works like a charm.

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