I don’t know about anyone else but I’m so excited about CSS 3 and web standards that I’m not even waiting for Microsoft to catch up. Heck four out of five of the most popular browsers on the market support CSS 3 so why wouldn’t I? The time it saves in producing sites is amazing. No more nested divs and sliced up images just to make rounded boxes. I’ve been using CSS for a few years now and can’t say enough good things about the results. My whole blog is built on standards. But since I’ve be employed at my present job I’ve neglected my own blog. It’s getting to be that time again and I’m getting the itch to redo this site ( and another site I started working on) in full HTML and CSS 3. So stay tuned, I’ve got big ideas running around in my head.

I was talking to a co-worker today and had a realization. HTML5 can never replace flash.

One of the primary goals of HTML and JavaScript is transparency, the accessibility to the code that drives the page. Exposing code so that others can learn from it. In fact this attribute is credited with the proliferation of the web. This poses a serious risk for some web content. If you produced a highly interactive, community driven game would you want you intelectual property (ip) exposed? Web sites don’t expose their business logic. No one expects Amazon to expose how they drive their shopping logic. If Poptropica, a popular game/community for kids, was produces in HTML and JavaScript anyone that visited your site could copy the code, modify it, republish it, and monetize that ip. Who would want that? So think twice before wishing that HTML5 should replace Flash.

I have started working with a new client for some web design work and they were reviewing my site to see my skills… When whammo, my menus are broken and they can’t get into my portfolio. I immediately open IE8 to see what is wrong and I don’t see anything weird.

That’s when I remember that I installed with compatability mode disabled by default. I turn it on and kablooey! my menus break.

So if you develop using standards put this meta tag in your document head. Or in the wordpress header file.

<meta http-equiv=“x-ua-compatible“ content=“IE=8“>

Now my menus work again, stupid Microsoft.

It’s out. I had to read about it in another blog to find out about it. It seems that version 2 isn’t an update to version 1.x… Because I wasn’t alerted that there was a new version.

So far so good. It’s UI has been reworked for better access to features, and there were a number of bug fixes. It allows for comment moderation and there is talk of push notification and commmenting on comments.

Keep up the good work.

Today I did a presentation on web design and design process to my daughters’ gate classes. It was an exciting opportunity to offer their classes some insight into the exciting world of design and learning new technologies.

So for any of the kids at Taylor Street Elementary reading this… I enjoyed speaking with you today, and look forward to learning with you again.

I never thought I’d see the day when I would upgrade past Windows XP, but it is here. Windows 7 RC is nice; it is almost bug free, fairly well organized, supports Direct X 10, and seems to support most of my hardware. Additionally, I felt no growing pains with my current level of RAM, and system resources. It seems to be the best of XP and Vista put together. But here’s the downside…
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Handcrafted CSS, the latest contribution of Dan Cederholm to the world of Web Design and Development is a fantastic book! To say that I’m a fan of his work is a bit of an understatement. No web designer or developer should be without these books; Bulletproof Web Design, Handcrafted CSS, as well as Designing With Web Standards, and DOM Scripting. These books are fantastic resources, and push web development out of the dark ages of table based layout, css hacks, and duplicating sites for each browser version. But there is a particular philosophy the makes Handcrafted CSS special. Continue Reading »

I’m not much different than most designers and developers, I loath Internet Explorer. But I understand why they are slow to embrace change, specifically standards.
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There has been a lot of advertising lately indicating that the browser wars have resumed their assaults on our senses and reasoning skills. Just for kicks I thought I would verify the latest Acid3 scores posted in some recent press. Let’s just say I can’t find a 100% to match the WWDC screens…Not that the competition in Redmond is doing anywhere near as well. 3/100 cough cough 20/100 cough. Pathetic.

I am presently on a quest to get my gear connected. My iPhone to pump music and phone calls into my helmet, and my ChatterBox HJC-FRS so that I can communicate with other riders and my passenger. I do listen to music on long rides to break up the wind noise, but don’t really plan on making phone calls while driving. (probably just listening in on early morning conference calls) So how am I going to do this? The obvious solution is to use the equipment I already have and modify it to meet the requirements. So here’s the inventory. EDIT: This cable may break your ChatterBox. I have discovered that the Microphone circuit on my ChatterBox no longer transmits! I do not know if it was this cable that did it… Continue Reading »