As seen on Google Code’s new and improved source browser.
“I hold that simplicity is the most important attribute of design,” I say. To which Tufte would reply, “No, you don’t.”
Today it occurred to me that, after a little over ten years of basic fluency in HTML, I have absolutely no idea why the href attribute is named “href”. Why not “url”, “link”, or even just “ref”?
I didn’t know it was possible to build such nice closed-source programs.
“The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.”
Did I ever tell you about the guy that spent the better part of a day making his site’s layout entirely em based …
Somebody pinch me; this must be a nightmare.
How to understand what those barbarians are doing over there and why your going to keep on hearing about it.
Hilarious! What Mark doesn’t know is that much of my “minimalist redesign” was ripped directly from what he’s had in place for 2-3 years; “administrative debris” was just a convenient alibi.
Compare (as in, diffs) the output of 15 different Markdown implementations. Includes every Markdown implementation I've ever come across and then some…
An implementation of Markdown in portable ANSI C that’s roughly 28.5x faster than the canonical Perl implementation on a 179K test file. Looks like a complete implementation; includes smarty and footnote extensions.
What Mark Pilgrim has been working on at Google for the past year or so: an encyclopedia of web development.
JavaScript based source highlighter with support for many languages in separate modules. Similar to the JavaScript Prettifier in that <pre><code> blocks are automatically detected and highlighted without an explicit language class.
Brad Neuberg (Google Gears): “Our historical closeness to the web creates a kind of myopia, where we can’t see how amazing it is. It’s a billion Library of Alexandria’s dropped into our laps.”
Sam Ruby filling in for Mark Pilgrim (and featuring Mark Pilgrim in the comments) skewers Joel Spolsky over his “Martian Headsets” piece on the IE8 standards-mode dilemma. I use the word “skewered” in the nicest way possible, of course.
“If you can’t control the text width the next best thing you can do to compensate for an overly wide text measure is to increase the leading.” — I never considered that but it makes sense.
From the comments: “HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts.”
I need to give jQuery a serious look. Prototype’s Ajax.Request stuff is crippled (no PUT or DELETE) to the point of being worthless; the jQuery selector magic looks a lot more intriguing than what you get with Prototype, too.
Makes the background of hexadecimal color codes the respective color. So, background-color:#f00 will have a red background in the vim editing window. Nifty.
From the comments: “the only things i find [useful] in Web Developer Extension is the shortcut to clear cache… for other things i use Firebug…” — Me too!
Bert Bos and Håkon Wium Lie show off some of Prince’s more advanced CSS and HTML features, including styling page size, generating headers/footers, advanced use of the CSS content attribute, page numbering, cross-references, and table of contents.
Ahh, it turns out Håkon’s Wium Lie (Opera CTO and the guy who first proposed CSS) is on YesLogic’s board, makers of PrinceXML. I'm not sure how I missed that.
Holy crap, this is insane. Just let people run IE6 and IE7 as separate standalone browsers side-by-side with IE8. As James said in my previous post, they can even rebrand it as “Intranet Explorer” :)
This is a good idea. The w3c hosted validators tend to perform on the bad side of horrible. I've run the validator locally but never thought to look for mirrors.
Simple print typesetting using HTML/CSS. Targets the 80% of common print tasks w/ HTML/CSS. I'm going to be looking into mozilla’s cairo PDF output abilities within the next few weeks so it will be interesting to compare.
This trumps Leopard for most important Mac development this year as far as I'm concerned. Words cannot explain the hatred I've developed for booting up multiple Parallels VMs to get at IE.
“There is an important tradeoff between the computational power of a language and the ability to determine what a program in that language is doing.”
“… CSS 3 is a joke. A sad, sick joke being perpetrated by people who clearly don’t build actual web apps…”
“But when I say HTML mail still sucks, I don’t mean it sucks because support for design in e-mail today is like support for standards in web browsers in 1998. I mean it sucks because nobody needs it. It impedes rather than aids communication.”
Oh wow. I've been trying to find a single page that has every unicode character on it with its hex counterpart but this is pretty fantastic.
Looks like things are starting to heat up over here.
Yes! I've been doing this for a few months now with the corp. assets and I won’t go back. You can really see the text snap into a vertical rhythm when you hit it.
Browser-side JavaScript template engine with concepts borrowed from Kid. Used by Freebase to drive formatting around JSON. Looks interesting.
Another interesting take on multi-select lists that uses checkboxes with labels and colors.
I'm real close to hating multi-select list boxes right now. Using an overflowed UL of checkboxes has some interesting pros (and cons).
Nugget of wisdom: “… developing for the web is frequently about accepting small compromises to big philosophical ideals.”
Awesome. Robert Sayre just checked in his document.getElementsByClassName implementation to mozilla trunk.
Very nice list of CSS techniques.
Chairing the WG is one way to fix your validation issues! (yes, I'm just being mean now — ignore me. no but seriously.)
Oh, hell yes:
“The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.”
Sam with a very simple, step by step tutorial on using your site as an OpenID identity provider.
Whose going to get this running on OS X? I guess it doesn’t really matter. I can always X over to a Linux box…
Holy… This is big. Huge big.
Big list of resources on CSS based forms.
The best attempt I've seen at splicing multiple API references together. This uses the external documentation but provides indexing and browsing features.
This site is really starting to come along now. The latest addition on how to manage vertical spacing in intervals is something I've been wondering about for a while now.
Firefox extension with some promising script debugging/spying features.
Animated GIFs designed to indicate your site is doing something…
Tim Berners-Lee’s blog. Finally!
Nice list of DOM events and the varying support of different browsers.
CSS specifity chart based on Sith power levels — to good to be true.
this site rocks
Decent javascript reference. I really like the format but the cards are images so you can’t use your browser’s find to locate stuff…
Big list of sites that provide CC licensed CSS layouts and tools for generating layouts.
Information on quirks vs. strict mode for HTML/CSS rendering: how to trigger, what DOCTYPEs do what, etc.
Excellent look at various HTML and XML templating methodologies..
Styled for landscape printing…
Some information on using proper q and blockquote elements in HTML and then styling them with CSS to fix all the browser brokeness.
The recommendation..
red/green/yellow for specific css attribute support in major browsers.
a thorough look at how to use HTML tables correctly.
Some tips I haven’t seen before for dealing with IE’s broken CSS support. Using conditional comments for ie specific css, setting manual defaults, etc.
A nice breakdown of how float works in CSS, which isn’t always intuitive.
Various CSS layouts.
One of the nicer reference sheets for HTML 4.0.
Everything that you can possibly know about iframes.
Floating images and other objects using CSS.
More goodness from the archives of Tim Bray.
Tips and techniques for helping Googlebot. If you are a symantic markup perfectionist, you probably already have most of these right.
Methods for creating a 2-col layout using CSS.
Color name chart with hex codes and overlays.
..that rocks. Quite possible the only javascript treeview I'd ever consider using.
XML.com: Dealing with tagsoup HTML in Python.
A bunch of nice bullet images best used to style UL tags using CSS.
List of XHTML Sites
You can never have too many of these to choose from..
“…only 21, or 4.6 percent, of 454 member sites Karppinen could access passed the W3C’s own HTML validator…”
Entity Declrarations / Decimal and Hex values for important unicode code points.