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.
Topic: HTML
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.
From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey
Grab your galoshes and walking stick and follow along with A List Apart‘s Eric Meyer as he considers the vices and virtues of version targeting as a standards toggle.
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.
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.
Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid
As web designers, we sometimes may feel we’re on a relentless journey to bridge the gap between digital and traditional processes. Wilson Miner brings us one step closer by offering up a way to work with typographic baselines on the web.
Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet
Love it or hate it, Flash has become a fixture of modern web design. Author Dan Mall cuts through the misconceptions to show us how Flash can be used to enhance our standards-based web designs. (“Shiny floor” standards-friendly Flash project included.)
Quick CSS Mockups with Photoshop
It may seem like we’re trying to party like it’s 1999, but rest assured, we’re not. Casper Voogt shows us a way to use Photoshop, ImageReady, and slices to produce mockups that utilize clean XHTML and CSS.
