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Archive for 10/02/2007

Zoomify

Zoomify makes high-quality images zoom-and-pan for fast, interactive viewing on the web! Just JPEGs, HTML, and Flash!

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CSS Turoial (Listamatic)

Max Design has an excellent CSS showcase called Listamatic which will show you how to create a navigation menu of just about any shape, size and arrangement you want using a simple unordered list.

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CSS Tutorial (how to use floats)

There are thousands of CSS tutorials out there, but one CSS feature that it took me a while to understand is the float: feature. Floats are an easy way to create the multi-columned layouts that many popular sites utilize, without resorting to table tags.

The best tutorial I’ve found on how to use floats comes from Max Design. But “Floatutorial” isn’t just a one trick pony, it’s actually a whole bunch of tutorials condensed into one easy to browse page. These tutorials will walk you through “the basics of floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts.”

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CSS Tutorial: CSS Positioning

Continuing with our CSS theme for the tutorial of day, today we’re featuring a tutorial on positioning. The best tutorial I’m aware of for explaining how element positioning works in CSS can be found over at BrainJar (there’s also a French translation available).Perhaps the most difficult thing to understand in CSS is the “box model.” When people complain about CSS and cross browser incompatibility, the box model is responsible for 90 percent of the problems.

While BrainJar’s tutorial covers many aspects of CSS position elements, it stands out for its dead simple explanation of the box model. From the tutorial: “For display purposes, every element in a document is considered to be a rectangular box which has a content area surrounded by padding, a border and margins.”

How those spacial elements are rendered varies somewhat by browser, but Internet Explorer is the main culprit here since it fails to comply with the box model defined in the W3C’s specs.

The box model is what requires the most hacks when trying to get cross-browser perfection from your style sheets, but fear not, the hacks are fairly minor and generally don’t mean all that much extra work.

And for the record, lest anyone think I’m Microsoft-bashing, the problem with IE is not so much that it gets the box model wrong, but that it renders it differently than the W3C spec.

The way IE renders the margin and padding on box elements actually makes sense once you understand it and is occasionally even preferable to the W3C specs’ definition, but the fact remains, it doesn’t adhere to the standards set forth by the W3C, which nearly every other browser uses.

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CSS Tutorial: alistapart ‘Suckerfish Dropdowns’

“DHTML” dropdown menus have notoriously involved nasty big chunks of JavaScript with numerous browser-specific hacks that render any otherwise neat, semantic HTML quite inaccessible. Oh, the dream of a lightweight, accessible, standards-compliant, cross-browser-compatible method! Enter Suckerfish Dropdowns.

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Tutorial ‘O The Day: CSS (Working With Alternate Style Sheets)

So you’ve got a pretty good handle on CSS and your design is well separated from the actual markup of your site, but now you’re thinking you’d like to offer multiple style sheets. Perhaps you want to offer a high contrast design to users with visual difficulties so your site is easier read.Or perhaps you just want to have two, three or even ten different designs available for your readers. Well it isn’t hard to serve up multiple style sheets. Just add the appropriate link tags to your document’s header.

Of course if that were the end of the story there wouldn’t be a need for a tutorial. Naturally that isn’t the end of the story.

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How doth human language evolve?

Lots of animals make noise; much of it even conveys information. But for sheer complexity, for developed syntax and grammar, and for the ability to articulate abstract concepts, you can’t beat human speech. MIT linguist Noam Chomsky