When designing interfaces for browsing data-driven sites, creating navigation elements that are also visualization tools helps the user make better decisions. Wilson Miner demonstrates three techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based navigation patterns.
Topic: CSS
Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?
Version targeting shakes our browser-agnostic faith. Its default behavior runs counter to our expectations, and seems wrong. Yet to offer true DOM support without bringing JScript-authored sites to their knees, version targeting must work the way Microsoft proposes, argues Jeffrey Zeldman.
Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring
Ashley Bischoff introduces Offspring, a JavaScript library bringing the power of advanced CSS selectors to browsers that can’t quite handle the real thing.
Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8
For seven years, the DOCTYPE switch has stood designers and developers in good stead as a toggle between standards mode and quirks mode. But when IE7, with its greatly improved support for standards, “broke the web,” it revealed the flaw in our toggle. The quest was on to find a more reliable ensurer of forward compatibility. Is version targeting the answer?
How to Size Text in CSS
It’s a tug-of-war as old as web design. Designers need to control text size and the vertical grid; readers need to be able to resize text. A better best practice for sizing type and controlling line-height is needed; and in this article, Richard Rutter obligingly supplies one.
CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing
Ten years ago, Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos gave us typographic control over web pages via CSS. But Verdana and Georgia take us only so far. Now Håkon shows us how to take web design out of the typographic ghetto, by harnessing the power of real TrueType fonts.
Conflicting Absolute Positions
All right, class. Using CSS, produce a liquid layout that contains a fixed-width, scrolling side panel and a flexible, scrolling main panel. Okay, now do it without JavaScript. By chucking an assumption about how CSS works in browsers, Rob Swan provides the way and means.
Frameworks for Designers
Frameworks like Rails, Django, jQuery, and the Yahoo User Interface library have improved web developers’ lives by handling routine tasks. The same idea can work for designers. Learn how to harness the power of tools, libraries, conventions, and best practices to focus creative thought and energy on what is unique about each project.
How to Grok Web Standards
For designers who find web standards as easy to grasp as a buttered eel, Craig Cook shows how to stop the hurting and turn on the understanding. Learn how web standards work, and why they are more than simply an alternative means of producing a visual design.
Super-Easy Blendy Backgrounds
Gradients: a nutritious part of your Web 2.0 breakfast. Wouldn’t it be swell if you could get all that goodness without opening Photoshop every time you needed a little gradient bliss? Matthew O’Neill explains how you can.
