Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “CSS relative colour values are now widely supported. In this article, pioneering author and web designer Andy Clarke shares practical techniques for using them to theme and animate SVG graphics.”

Although we’ve had a smattering of snow here in the Rhineland—where I’m basing myself for a couple of months—at home, an “arctic blast” means snow is threatening. Last week, I added a snow mode to my websites, but my pioneer characters still looked toasty and warm, and unaffected by the wintery conditions. So, it was time for them to get chilly.

I redesigned my contact page animation as a gold mine scene. Here’s how I approached the artwork, structured the SVG, and added subtle ambient animation using CSS.

Winter’s definitely arrived, and there’s a chill wind blowing. We haven’t had snow in the village yet, but it’s falling on my website, courtesy of a new ‘snow mode.’

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “In this article, pioneering author and web designer Andy Clarke shows his techniques for creating Toon Text titles using modern CSS and SVG.”

I mentioned last week that as well as expanding my Toon Text styles gallery, I’d added a Toon Text generator to help me (and you) create text in the style of those classic cartoon title cards. Now, I’ve launched a major update to both.

Partway through writing an upcoming article for Smashing Magazine, I decided it would be helpful to have a tool to generate text styled like that in my beloved cartoon titles. So I made one.

You know what it’s like. You decide to make a fun little side project. No need to integrate it into your main codebase. It doesn’t have to have compatible CSS or HTML, so no worries. Then you make another one. Same deal. Then another. Oh. All of a sudden, you have several projects, and there are annoying differences between them.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “I spend an unhealthy amount of time on the typography in my designs, and if you’ve read any traditional typography books, you might remember “the measure.” If not, it’s simply the length of a line of text. But measure means more than that, and once you understand what it represents, it can change how you think about layout entirely.”

Last week, I explained my strategy for writing CSS selectors. Today, I’ll explain how I decide on and design layouts. It isn’t really about grids; it’s about a repeatable way to make layout decisions.

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “SVG is one of those web technologies that’s both elegant and, at times, infuriating. In this article, pioneering author and web designer Andy Clarke explains his technique for animating SVG elements that are hidden in the Shadow DOM.”

Writing good CSS is all about restraint. As an example, I used to over-specify too many things in my stylesheets. It was a bad habit picked up from BEM, OOCSS, and from developers who flattened everything with classes to dodge specificity. Now I think of my CSS selector strategy as a “progressive narrowing of scope.”

When I’ve had a few spare minutes, I’ve been adding to and optimising my Magnificent 7 character animations to improve rendering speed. Then I had the idea to build a silly fairground-style shooting game, and I set myself the challenge of keeping it as small as possible.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “Over the past few months, I’ve explored how we can get creative using well-supported CSS properties. Each article is intended to nudge web design away from uniformity, toward designs that are more distinctive and memorable. One bit of feedback deserves a follow up.”

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “Ambient animations are subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. In part two of his series, web design pioneer Andy Clarke shows how ambient animations can add personality to any website design.”

It’s incredibly important to respect people’s preferences and to ensure that any movement is turned off when they’ve set “reduced motion” in their OS settings. After adding my Magnificent 7 animations yesterday, I went back to check them with reduced motion enabled. Oh hell, my CSS grid has also stopped working, and it took me all morning to realise the issue wasn’t the grid, but how I’d structured my media queries.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “There are so many creative opportunities for using shape-outside that I’m surprised I see it used so rarely. So, how can you use it to add personality to a design? Here’s how I do it.”

I have to admit that I got a little over-excited when I read that the contrast-color() function is supported in Safari and was keen to try it out. But there’s a problem, the thing with contrast-color is…

Before my workshop last week, I made some changes to my Compound grid generator. After the workshop, I made a new grid generator tool, this time designed to create modular grids.

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “Creating motion can be tricky. Too much and it’s distracting. Too little and a design feels flat. Ambient animations are the middle ground — subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show.”

To get ready for my first practical layout workshop for designers this week, I upgraded my compound grid generator with a new and improved version.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “When you picture placing images in long-form content — like articles, case studies, or reports — the standard approach is inline rectangles, breaking up blocks of text. Functional? Sure. Inspiring? Hardly. So, how do you use images to add personality, rhythm, and even surprise someone along the way? Here’s how I do it.”

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of the things that I’ve learned while designing and developing Inspired Guides, starting today with using HTML entities as separators in breadcrumb navigation.

Apple doesn’t have what many of us would consider to be a fully responsive website, but that doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes use two of Ethan’s ingredients; flexible media and CSS3 media queries, to improve the placement of some elements on an otherwise fixed page.

Exactly ten years ago today, on October 20th 2003, A List Apart published Doug Bowman’s Sliding Doors of CSS.

I sometimes work with other designers helping them to translate their design atmosphere and wide screen layouts into responsive designs. Breaking down their designs into systems is big part of what I do. In practical terms that means working through what are sometimes dozens of static visuals to identify patterns of typography, use of colour and layouts, both smaller modules and whole page compositions. From these patterns I classify and identify elements and compose stylesheets based on them.

Following up on my M M M Madness post, here are two good links to more on CSS filters: Creating iOS 7 effects with CSS3: translucency and transparency John Allsopp recreates iOS7’s translucency and blur using CSS filters. I suspect we’ll see a lot more of this design aesthetic on the web in the months to come. Create impact with CSS filters video presentation from Alex Danilo Alex Danilo’s presentation on CSS filters from Web Directions Code in Australia is well worth your time too. My prediction? Designers are going to go CSS filter crazy over the next year.

While I was preparing the slides from my full day CSS3 For Responsive Web Design at Smashing Magazine, I got very excited by the new filters in CSS. (313 onwards in my slide deck.) These filters — not to be confused with those legacy, proprietary Microsoft filters — are now well on their way to becoming part of a standard.

My Responsive Web Design workshop at Smashing Magazine is getting closer and some tickets are still available. In the meantime, here are three useful new resources for responsive layout using CSS3:

The Stuff and Nonsense nutty boys header is pretty tall and I decided I wanted to reduce its height for small screens, such as phones, in landscape orientation. When I wrote the CSS to make this happen I made some nutty assumptions. In the spirit of sharing our mistakes:

Not since the turn of the century, when we largely shifted from using CSS positioning to floats, has CSS layout been so interesting. Here are three great reads from just today that are all worth your time: Strong Layout Systems by Eric Meyer Jeremy is at An Event Apart in Atlanta, and reports on Eric Meyer’s new talk, Strong Layout Systems in which Eric speaks about flexbox and grids, both new CSS modules that were created specifically to allow us to create layouts. Using Flexbox: Mixing Old and New for the Best Browser Support Chris Coyer Coyier (who deserves a medal for the work he does (and his name spelling correctly, sorry) ) weaves together old and new flexbox syntaxes for better browser support. Anything lower than or equal to Internet Explorer 9 is still tricky though, so you’ll still need to get handy at designing around that problem. CSS3 Layout presentation at In Control Orlando Back at a conference, this time in Orlando, Zoe Mickley Gillenwater also spoke about CSS layout techniques including Grid Layout and Flexible Box Layout. Her slides are available on Slideshare, then check out her post as it’s full of examples and resources. PS: If you can remember either The Noodle Incident or Position Is Everything, it’s past your bedtime.

Microsoft launches Windows 8 in just a few days, so now’s a good time to turn our attention to Internet Explorer 10. Here are two links to help you get prepared:

Tweetbot for Mac Alpha is notable for a whole bunch of reasons I won’t get into here. Instead, I found something notable about the CSS the Tapbots team used on the page for their alpha release.

File this one under gotchas. I’m desktop browser testing a series of layout templates for a current project today. Everything was going really well until I encountered some files where my web fonts stubbornly refused to display in Firefox, but rendered perfectly in every other browser. Luckily I found the reason for the problem and a solution to it.

I’ve been reading Jonathon Snook’s Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS book this week. (It’s well written, practical and perfectly formatted for Kindle. I learned a lot and I’d highly recommend it.) In SMACSS, Jon recommends breaking down stylesheets into rules for:

Faruk Ate? in Opera Confirms WebKit Prefix Usage:

A lot’s changed since I wrote the original ‘320 and Up’ — my ‘tiny screen first’ responsive web design boilerplate — one year ago.

It’s been almost three years since I launched, what most people thought of as the bat-shit crazy Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS stylesheet.

About two years ago, I tweeted “If your CSS is complicated enough to need a compiler or pre-processor, you’re fucking doing it wrong!” I meant it too. After-all, CSS isn’t hard to learn and it’s easy to write and write quickly. So why would you need a processor like LESS or Sass?

This entry has been deprecated: Please use 320 and Up instead. Making layouts responsive using CSS3 Media Queries are a big part of the work that I’m doing for the Hardboiled Web Design site in the run up to the book’s launch.

Yesterday, Mike Davidson announced the sweeping redesign of msnbc.com article pages. The redesign is especially brave from a traditional news outlet business perspective as it emphasizes readability and enjoyment over page views. But I do have a minor gripe with its typography and set out to find a solution.

Yesterday Microsoft announced the third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9. I’ve been using this preview for a while, testing how their newest browser stands up to the examples I’ve designed for Hardboiled Web Design.

Today, RIM unveiled its latest mobile browser. It runs WebKit making every mobile platform except one run that rendering engine. With that in mind, I’d like you to try this experiment.

A week ago I was grumbling ( again ) on Twitter about JavaScript selector engines and enablers for Internet Explorer.

Always an example of the best the web design industry has to offer, this year 24 ways, the advent calendar for web geeks, has its focus firmly set on moving your web design forward.

Writing this week about eating accessibility humble pie and using CSS attribute substring selectors, a comment by clever Craig Cook sent my imagination reeling.

We all make mistakes. Right? Particularly when it comes to accessibility. Often in the rush to ready a site for launch, we forget to check the details that can make a world of difference. That’s what I did when I launched the latest For A Beautiful Web.

Changingman, a liquid three column CSS layout with a fixed positioned and width centre column, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. (This entry was originally posted on 23rd November 2005 and has been updated in 2009.)

I’m busy working on the slide deck and example site files for our Advanced CSS Styling workshops in Birmingham, Newcastle (and Tokyo). I’m really excited about this new workshop format and wanted to share one of the example site pages.

Smashing Magazine published an excellent primer for CSS3 properties by Inayaili de Leon today which referenced a little of my work. I was pleased, but as today as gone on and I’ve watched the comments roll, my heart started to sink.

Could this be the day that I eat my words about CSS frameworks? I’ve been mean to them in the past, written harsh things. I once likened them to instant cake mixes in response to Jeff Croft’s What’s not to love about CSS frameworks?

I wanted to learn more about CSS attribute selectors. —This article was originally published on And All That Malarkey on February 20th, 2005.

How do you answer the Internet Explorer 6 question?

I've got a Honda CRV. It's eleven years old. It's rusty around the bonnet, the electric windows are sticky and the exhaust is noisy. That's OK. It's been reliable, hardly serviced and as I only drive it a few miles about twice a week, it does everything that I need it to do. I'll probably drive it until I can't drive it anymore.

The Internet Explorer team today posted details that IE8’s Compatibility Mode (replicating IE7) will not render sites exactly as IE7 does.

A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Taylor interviewed me for the Boag World bodcast on the subject of Internet Explorer 8 and the state of CSS in browsers generally.

It seems like a lifetime ago that I first sat down with a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit and thought about the conventions that we use for naming HTML/XHTML id and class attribute values.

Who said that you can’t teach an old rocker new tricks? At An Event Apart Chicago, it was Dan Cederholm ‘s latest talk example, Color Transparency With RGBa that made me sit up and take notes.

I was lucky to be sent a preview copy of Rachel Andrew ‘s soon-to-be-published book Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!, published by those nice chaps at SitePoint. I’ll be writing a full review later this week, but as the book is largely (almost exclusively) devoted to CSS display: table; properties, I couldn’t wait to try out some of the techniques she advocates.

Back in April, I was booked by Carsonified to present a half-day workshop on Microformats as part of their Future Of Web Design London spectacular. So what have Microformats got to do with death rays?

Want an easier way to re-style and optimize your pages to work better in Safari Touch (or Mobile Safari if you prefer) on the iPhone or iPod Touch? I did and now with a custom version of Allan Jardine ‘s Conditional-CSS I have it. And you do too.

Having been booked by Carsonified to host a full-day workshop on advanced CSS back in May, in the weeks leading up to the show I had a flash of inspiration. Why not combine one of my favourite topics with one of my favourite musicians?

My entry of last week, where I called for the current W3C CSS Working Group to be immediately disbanded, has generated some serious debate, and a few raised voices. I’m glad that is happening. Now, after a little more consideration, I thought I would outline some concrete proposals for how the CSS Working Group could change for the better.

Following Opera’s action, today I am calling on Bert Bos, chairman of the CSS Working Group, and those higher up within the W3C including Sir Tim Berners Lee, to immediately disband the CSS Working Group in its current form. I am asking for immediate action to be taken on the formulation of a replacement CSS Working Group that will include new members who are not the representatives of browser vendors.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been bombarded (in e-mail, in person, and over IM) with questions about instant cake mixes. It’s completely understandable people would come to me with these questions.

If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen.

This morning when I opened my inbox, I found a flurry of messages discussing the Britpack and what it is, could and shouldn’t be and about whether or not the wider perception of it was elitist and somehow harmful.

Packed: Passport, toothbrush, Mac, pants, socks, toasted sandwich maker iPod. I think I’m ready: Web Directions North here I come. I’m heading out on Sunday.

I had thought that months of solid writing Transcending CSS would have left my ink a little dried out. But an offer to write a series of articles for Informit on Creating Inspired Design was one that was too good to pass up.

Over on Digital Web, Carolyn Wood asked Colly, Andy Clarke said recently that what always impressed him about sites designed by you is that you don’t limit yourself to the normal CSS layout conventions.

Despite owning several iPods including a 60Gb that contains my entire music collection, all six Star Wars movies and a multitude of other files, the new iPod Shuffle is such a thing of beauty that I just had to have one.

This morning I returned from a (literally) flying visit to New York where I had the very real pleasure of visiting my friends at AOL and speaking at their Design and Programming Offsite event.

It’s been a while since I wrote about CSS on And All That Malarkey, ( Ed says: It’s been a while since you wrote about anything here Malarkey!.) I’ve been busy documenting some of my working methods and thought that I would share Stuff and Nonsense’s current…

With Web Directions South and Fundamentos Web now both done and dusted, I have only one public event left before the end of this year. You might think that attending conferences regularly would mean that I have heard what is on offer from speakers.

Following much of the discussion over the future, activities and progress of the W3C over recent weeks, Mozilla’s David Baron, a member of the W3C’s CSS Working Group has published a long and detailed examination of what he believes are the conflicting…

the CSS Working Group is finally aware that it must include at least one classically trained artist and graphic designer on the team.

I invited thirty celebrity CSS chefs to collaborate in baking a single stylesheet. Now the bell has rung, the oven mitts are at the ready and our Too Many Cooks (Dvorak special) is ready to come out of the oven. But first, an open letter to Mr. Dvorak.

After his altogether brilliant article Why CSS Bugs Me, I’m officially designating this week to be John C. Dvorak week. To help Mr.

These last few days I’ve been looking back on @media2006; 800 people, two amazing days and one designer left feeling very humbled by the whole experience.

A dissertation evaluating the awareness of web accessibility amongst UK small businesses. Student Andy Higgs has written an excellent dissertation on ‘ Web Accessibility In UK Small Businesses ’.

With everything else that has been going on lately, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything much about CSS. It’s not that I’m any less interested in CSS; infact s e ven’s recent Beta has me more excited than ever about what we will be able to do on a…

Today I opened my email to find a passionate plea for help from a web designer looking to find good books or articles on web design.

Recent conversations over at 456 Berea Street on the subject of whether a new solution for clearing floats without structural markup is needed, required an answer. So at MIX06 I sat down with s e ven’s developers to find a recommended answer to the question.

With blue suede shoes on his feet and Viva Las Vegas ringing in his ears, Malarkey can’t help falling in love with Vegas as he reports from Microsoft’s MIX06 conference.

SXSWi, The Web Standards Project is changing, entering a new time in its history, opening the hive up to better include the communities and issues we’ve done our black and gold best to represent since 1998.

I am so pleased today to announce that a new beta build of IE7 (I call it the MIX 06 release) will be available from MIX 06, March 20th to 22nd. The new browser will be handed out at MIX and will then hopefully be available from MSDN.

Back in October 2005, the Internet Explorer team urged developers to begin removing CSS hacks in favour of conditional comments.

So, according to those slipping the new IE7 Beta Preview out of it’s sleeve and slapping it down on the music-center, Internet Explorer 7 breaks my site. I can’t say that this was much of a surprise.

My good friend (and evil genius) Brothercake has today released an update to Invasion of the Body Switchers. Updating the classic ALA Style Switcher to accommodate multiple users and devices, including some that are not even traditional browsers, all from a…

A new year and tv commercial breaks are full of advertisements for partworks magazines. The choice is so vast that I really don’t know which ones to choose.

Today I heard a rumour that there’s gonna be something big happening in London this summer. When I say big, I mean big and pulled off by some of the biggest names in the business.

Mickey Spillane, Frank Miller, Hakon Wium Lie: Three of my favourite thriller writers. No really, because alongside Spillane’s’My Gun Is Quick’ and Miller’s’The Hard Goodbye’, another thriller hit the book stores web just in time for Christmas; Lie’s CSS3…

I’ve alluded to it recently, and now after not much blood but one or two tears I’m ready to show and tell. The new design for Karova.com is out there. The new site is geared towards promoting Karova’s development framework).

At the beginning of last month I advocated a quiet revolution and wrote, Fighting a solitary campaign for standards within any organisation must lead inevitably to frustration if the responses are either negative or apathetic.

Many thanks for all the kind birthday wishes over the weekend, it’s not everyday that you reach […];). By way of a thank-you to all the kind people that I have met and others who occassionally stumble drunk across my site, here is a layout experiment which I…

Ian Lloyd has today published an email interview over at Accessify, Accessibility, the gloves come off. There are now so many web sites, blogs or publications devoted to helping people learn standards and accessible techniques that there are now no excuses…

As I head for London, I thought that you might like a sneaky peek at the presentation slides which I have prepared for next week’s Carson Workshop’s CSS For Designers events.

Over the last few weeks I have had several interesting conversations with web standards enthusiasts who work within institutions.

With Molly and I in session for Carson Workshops in only a few weeks and our presentation materials near completion, I have become interested in what audiences need or expect from presentation slides.

As standards enthusiasts, I think that we are often guilty of a little navel gazing when it comes to web design. In many open discussions on WSA or Style Gala, the conversation can often turn to the importance of semantics and validation and sometimes (not…

I’ve been aching to write about Measure Map, the first product from those cool hombres over at Adaptive Path. Now that Jeff Veen has written about Measure Map today, I can hopefully prevent my sides from splitting with gleeful excitement by writing about this…

NB: First published in 2005. Read the up-to-date version and see the latest demo. Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and geeks!

(This one sneaked out while I was teaching in Cupertino) As a studio we work on a number of e-commerce projects each year.

I’m not sure if this has come up before or if indeed it is of any interest (after all, why would anyone want to hide CSS styles from Safari?). But if you’re still here, this is a new (to me) method.

A major brand name redesigning and implementing their web site with web standards can still be big news. When that brand belongs to one of the most influential sites of modern web design, the news is bigger.

My copy of Professional CSS arrived on my desk this morning and I was very proud to read chapter eight in which Ethan discusses stylesheet switching and Invasion of the Body Switchers.

I’m back. Tanned, rested, fired-up and ready with news of a special design and CSS workshop event happening in November in old London town.

I’m very lucky. I get to work with some great clients and I’m currently working with a very cool consultancy company. Part of the brief was to do something which no one in his industry had done before and I wanted this to involve code as well as design.

Dateline London. Later this month, Waterloo in South London will be the place to be as the great and the good gather and @media 2005 rolls into town.

It’s now only two weeks until @media2005 in London, and the (now sold out) event looks set to be one of the biggest web occassions the UK has seen so far. It will be interesting to see how @media’s style differs in comparison to SXSW.

Working with other designers or developers on any project can often be tricky. But imagine what it would be like if there were 29 other people working on the same CSS file!

In Too Many Cooks I invited 30 designers and developers to contribute to a single CSS file. It has been interesting to see the CSS styles roll in and now we have a finished result.

I want to say a huge thank-you for all the kind comments about my new design. As you can imagine, a lot of time goes into making a total redesign, and often designing for yourself is harder than designing for client projects.

Applying id and (multiple) class attributes to the element is a fantastic way to turn the same XHTML configuration into multiple design layouts without the need for adding different attributes to div elements.

It’s here. I’ve been meaning to redesign this site for a little while now and since I have emerged from my black, depressive state, the urge was getting too strong to ignore. I just had to do it.

Whereas many have already publicly switched from MovableType to other brands of blogging software, some for technical and others for economic reasons, I am sticking to MT.

Well, I’ve been hinting at it for a little while now and now here it is, an all new And All That Malarkey. Not simply a lick of paint, but a complete new design, ground-up re-code and a CSS shake-up.

Some of you may remember that one of my first (and most visited) columns way back in May last year was about creating colour palettes from only two colours plus black and white.

Evil genius Brothercake has been busy in his secret laboratory and the result is a chicken with eight legs massive update to IOTBS - a full new version 2 release entitled’IOTBS: Look Who’s Switching Too’.

Image replacement is a topic which keeps reappearing on websites and in books. There are whole sections devoted to the pros and cons of each method in books such as Web Standards Solutions and The Zen of CSS Design.

Some of you may have read about’Durstan’ being left off the cover of the up-and-coming Professional CSS book. So, in the style of Where’s Waldo, let’s play Where’s Durstan?!

SXSW was the venue for Ethan Marcotte to announce the up-and-coming publication of Professional CSS, a new book by Christopher Schmitt, Dan Cederholm, Porter Glendinning, Mark Trammell, Dunstan Orchard and Ethan himself.

Almost once a week during meetings with clients or prospective clients, I need to explain the concept of web standards. Sometimes it’s during a pitch, and always to a non-technical person who knows little or nothing about anything remotely ‘webby.’ I have…

It’s always gratifying when someone calls or emails out-of-the-blue and says something like, Can you do… for us?. It’s even nicer when that person is halfway across the world.

I’ve been experimenting with a’magazine contents’ or news style page for a current project and thought I’d give it a whirl here.

Just like Scrivs announced this week that the CSS Vault has been sold, this site too has a new owner and I’d like to introduce him to you. His name is Malarkey. (Ed: What are you rambling on about now?) OK, I’ll get to the point.

As a company, we give each member of the team a ’25.00 per month allowance to spend at Amazon on anything they think will benefit the company. We don’t vet what people buy, it’s a way of encouraging them to expand their knowledge (and our range of skills).

It seems to be the season for discussion on rips, with Shaun Inman and Dave Shea both again highlighting design theft and the most professional methods for dealing with such occurrances. I’m not interested in going over old ground.

Whether working alone or as part of a team, there are many separate tasks in any project. If you are working as a team it is important that everybody involved understands the structural requirements needed to implement a design, and even if working alone it…

My CSS Zen Garden submission, unimaginatively titled’Invasion of the Body Switchers’, has been accepted. Thanks Dave!:D

We are in the final stages of completing our project for Young Flintshire, an initiative for young people in the county. And the process of design has taken many things from the stuff that I have talked about this week.

Testing a site design to ensure the widest practical audience should be an essential part of the design process on every web site. Of course in an ideal world, every web site developed would be tested both for usability and accessibility using real people.

I thought that it might be fun to talk a bit more about design for a while rather than standards, and release a few work-in-progress designs for sites that will be launched in the next few weeks.

Here it is, the new Stuff and Nonsense portfolio site. I always find it hard to design our own company portfolio site. So this time I took a different approach and decided to concentrate on the content first and let content dictate the design.

Saturday afternoon was spent in pleasant company at Tate Modern, walking the galleries and thumbing through hefty books in the shop. Conversations were often focussed on the arts and there were some very thought provoking works to see.

it made me sit back and wonder if’we’ in the web-standards’community’ have anything left to say about standards. It’s been a short, but busy few years since deploying standards for day-to-day, commercial web ventures became practical.

I’m damn sure that like coffee and cigarettes, blogs contain some chemical that makes them addictive. Just because I felt like it, I’ve been tinkering again with And All That Malarkey, although this time the changes are mostly’under the duvet’.

Photographers commonly use depth-of-field to emphasise certain parts of image by de-focusing others such as backgrounds. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the sharpest part of any image.

I don’t want to tread on Dan’s or his Simple Quiz toes, but… I’ve been trying recently to better optimise my CSS, and this has lead me to wonder where certain rules are best arranged. So with that, and with this example of a navigation list in mind.

(For the non-Brits (or anyone too young to remember), the picture is actor Robert Lindsay in the BBC’s 1977 sit-com, Citizen Smith written by John Sullivan who went on to write Only Fools and Horses.

I’ve been thinking about making a CSS Zen Garden entry for a little while now, but before I think about design, I wanted to understand the Garden’s XHTML structure.

Day four: I couldn’t say thank-you enough to all the people who left kind comments about the 2004 Disney Store UK project, here, at CSS Beauty, CSS Vault, and Style Gala.

Day three: I ran through how the 2004 Disney Store UK was developed, looking specifically at XSLT. The 2004 Disney Store UK website was developed using an ecommerce platform called Karova Store.

Day two: First of all I wanted to say the biggest “thank you” to everyone who gave their time to review the accessibility decisions that I made during the design and build of the 2004 Disney Store UK.

Day one: A skip through some of the markup and styles I used on the 2004 Disney Store UK store. One of the things that I found fascinating then about working with CSS was the application of new techniques to solve the real dilemmas which crop up during a site…

It was a busy ten days in the web-standards world. Jeffrey Zeldman was a new dad (congratulations) and Dave and Doug made big noises in Australia at Web Essentials. Here was my news in October 2004.

When awarding the latest version of the Mozilla site a WSA Silver Star, Johan pointed to the mozilla.org Markup Reference.

Following on from the recent discussion about accessible alternatives for complex graphics and images, Bob Easton made an interesting point which compounds browsers’ lousy support for the longdesc attribute, Yet another reason to avoid LONGDESC … There is…

I’m working on the early stages of my new design company web site and I have become interested in the subject of accessible, ’alternative’ content for complex graphics and images, in particular portfolio images and screen captures of client sites.

This is likely to be my last column before I take off for France on Saturday for a two week holiday with Sue and Alex. We have just completed a small site redo for a long standing client, the Empire Hotel in Llandudno, North Wales.

In 2004—after eight weeks, 1,600 cups of coffee, 1,920 cigarettes, 16 pork sausages and one instant BBQ—I was pleased to announce the launch of a new online store for WWF UK.

Stuff and Nonsense is in the final stages of testing a new e-commerce store for a client (more about that when the site goes live on Wednesday).

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about fluid layout design over recent weeks and have made it my goal to attempt fluid (or fluid/elastic hybrid) layouts with each new design. And you know what? It’s a damn site harder than I thought it would be.

In a recent conversation with Swedish web accessibility advocate Tommy Olsson, Tommy impressed on me again the importance of fluid, rather than the more commonly used fixed-width design techniques that I and so many others designers favour.

A discussion at Accessify got me thinking about the usefulness of compliance badges or icons. What purpose do they serve the public who have little knowledge or interest in accessibility or code validity?

Web forms often ask users for both essential and non-essential (marketing purposes and research) information. Long and complicated forms can often slow down the progress through a web site and in the case of e-commerce, can seriously hinder the sales process.

Looking back at an old site I made for a client made my rethink the way that that I have been coding my sites over recent months. So much so, that I thought I’d look again at the code structure of this blog and redevelop the HTML in a totally different way.

Simon Collison opened a can of worms recently when his (rather fantastic) personal site launched with the now famous’ticks’ for visited navigation links.

Time travel. It’s a subject that often keeps me awake at night, pondering… So I thought I’d interview a bunch of bloggers to help me out. Thanks to Brit Packers Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Jon Hicks, Gordon Mackay, Tim Parkin and Richard Rutter.

Eric Meyer’s recent comments about my original What’s in a name column have prompted me draw some conclusions from the comments and suggestions made on And All That Malarkey and elsewhere. First I want to lay a few ghosts to rest.

In the first of an occassional column on one of my favourite graphics applications (the largely under-rated) Macromedia Fireworks, I thought I’d write about how I often use a combination of Fireworks MX and XML to create a site-full of graphical text headers…

A number of designers and developers have asked me for recommendations on how to layout product range pages using semantic mark-up and CSS. So I decided to write a mini tutorial for our training manual and try it out here first.

I have been pondering whether or not to replace my personal design machine with a shiny new Apple PowerBook. A new Mac will certainly give me the power and flexibility that I need and looks sooooo sexy too!

Andy Budd wrote about Semantic Coding and said, This got me thinking about the benefits of naming conventions and I began to realise that these conventions matter, not just for the sake of web designers (and easier site redesigns), but for users too!

I can’t think of many web sites that don’t include at least one form, and I can’t think how many times I have compromised on a form’s visual design because of looming deadlines, leaving a Must get around to styling this form properly comment in the code.

Standards-based designers often appear to loath Microsoft’s behemoth browser, sometimes for good reasons. Internet Explorer’s patchy support for W3C CSS (particularly attribute selectors), its non support for the abbr tag or PNG transparency on the Windows…

Way back when the web was young and active volcanos spewed molten rock into the sea just north of Morecambe, I dodged falling boulders and lava flows and headed into my local bookcave.

When I sold my shares in Karova earlier this year, many people wrote to me asking whether or not I was still using Karova Store (KS2) accessible, css based e-commerce software for my clients and whether I would still recommended it to them.

Back in June 2004, I wrote about a new chapter in the story of Stuff and Nonsense, the design company that I have owned since 1998. It was at that time that I combined the running of the two businesses that I owned, Stuff and Nonsense and Karova.

It is the first new month after the relaunch of And All That Malarkey and for the redesign I introduced a new Editorials category. As a single author site, you might be wondering why there is a need for such a category.

Yes it’s another Transcending CSS, book related grovel. If you or anyone you know owns a vintage (or semi-vintage) Lambretta or Vespa scooter and you live in or close to Manchester (UK), please read on.

Carson Workshops have announced a second day and limited availability for the CSS for Designers Workshop in London. I am very pleased that demand for seats at the workshop has been so high as to require a second day.

With the many excellent design and CSS resources and blogs available, there seems little point in my humbly chiming in. Nor can I compete with the staggering talents of Shaun or Jon.

Transcending CSS seems to be doing rather well so far, largely I’m sure down to those kind people who places cover buttons on their sites to help promote it.

I was very pleased to have been invited by Bert Bos to briefly speak alongside him and AOL’s Kevin Lawver at WWW2006 in Edinburgh.