[WSG] Off-topic - Earthquake/Tsunami help
Apologies for this unusual post. There are times when discussions about web development seems totally insignificant and irrelevant. Like now. In Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, people are suffering. Luckily, there is something we can all do - we can give assistance to an aid organisation of our choice. If you feel the urge, here are a few: Australian Foundation for Asia and Pacific http://www.afap.org CARE Australia http://www.careaustralia.org.au The Australian Red Cross http://www.redcross.org.au Oxfam http://www.oxfam.org.au World Vision http://www.worldvision.com.au UNICEF http://www.unicef.org.au. American Red Cross http://www.redcross.org Mercy Corps http://www.mercycorps.org Catholic Relief Services http://www.catholicrelief.org Oxfam America http://www.oxfamamerica.org International Medical Corps http://www.imcworldwide.org Care USA http://www.careusa.org Direct Relief International http://www.directrelief.org Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org International Orthodox Christian Charities http://www.iocc.org Operation USA http://www.opusa.org I'm sure there are many other organisations that are also seeking financial aid to help those in need. Apologies, again for this off-topic post. Feel free to abuse me off-list. Russ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Critique
On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 11:32:18 -0600, Collin Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hey y'all, I just redid my personal blog, moving from movabletype to wordpress, and wanted some critique on design. There are a few things up front I'm going to change. The odd line under the header image for one, shortening the dotted lines around the storyline text for another. The link is: http://collind.myftp.org/blog/ Any suggestions? Thanks, Collin Davis Granted black sets the mood; however, white text set on black is extremely difficult to read-- coupled with a line length of 960px in FF on a 1280 optimal LCD, it verges on impossible. XP_SP2 at 800: IE6.0 None of the diagonal type is visible. FF Throws a horizontal scroll bar. Some of the diagonal type is not visible. Opera7.54 Throws a horizontal scroll bar. Some of the diagonal type is not visible. at 1280: IE6.0 Text line length is 470px Part of diagonal type not visible at text-size Largest FF Text line length is *960px* Part of diagonal type not visible on 2nd zoom click. Opera7.54 Text line length is 470px CSS error: .feeedback You use clear: all; It's either: none, left, right, or both. -- http://www.dlaakso.com/ Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Critique
Collin Davis wrote: I just redid my personal blog, moving from movabletype to wordpress, and wanted some critique on design. For the most part, the design looks fine, a bit too dark, perhaps, but otherwise fine. From a functional standpoint I do have a couple of criticisms. First, at my default font size, the L, first o, and about a quarter of the second are blocked by the menu. By removing the background color from #menu solves that problem and creates a nice effect. Even if you increase the font size several times it's still OK. Second, at over 123k, the image big for dial-up. As a .jpg I'm sure you can increase the compression without a serious loss of quality. ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
[WSG] Stylesheet switching problem in PC IE6
Hi all, I¹m building a designer friend of mine a simple portfolio site. All files validate (CSS, XHTML1Strict pages) and can be found here: http://www.pilatesworks.be/jean I¹m using 2 javascripts, one for fading in the main photo and one to switch the text inside div#main from english to dutch and back without reloading the whole page. This is done with the style sheet switcher from alistapart. The text is inside two divs marked up as below: div lang=nl class=nl pdutch text here/p /div!-- closes langnl-- div lang=en class=en pEnglish text here /p /div!-- closes langen-- ...and uses two style sheets nl.css and en.css to hide or show these paragraphs. All looks and behaves as it should in Mac Safari, Firefox, IE5 (bar a small float problem) and Netscape and PC Firefox and Netscape. Only PC IE6 displays both the divs at the same time and the switching between english and dutch doesn't work. I'm no javascript expert but it seems as IE doesn't give preference to any of these two stylesheets. I feel like I'm missing something obvious but what? Any and all help appreciated, since this site has to go live by Friday! Cheers, Erwin Heiser ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Non-validation and web standards
Lyn Patterson wrote: Bert and Jeroen Your advice much appreciated. You're welcome. Am blushing as I report that when I removed ALL the hacks, the site stayed the same and it now validates perfectly. I think those hacks came from a very early attempt at css and I just kept putting them into stylesheets. I haven't tested in older browsers yet but it looks OK in current ones. No problem, I've been there myself. Next to writing CSS rules, deleting them can also prove to be very enlightening. ;-) Good luck with the site, Jeroen -- vizi fotografie grafisch ontwerp - http://www.vizi.nl/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Critique
Collin, Some of your users may not of eaten as many carrots as you did as a child. Best, David. On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 13:13:34 -0600, Collin Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David, Thanks for the comments. Regarding the black on white - I use two Sony P232s with ICC profiles created by Monaco systems, along with a 17 iMac, as well as two Sony GDM-F520s. I have no legibility issues at all with any of the monitors concerning the color scheme. I have noticed the problems with the diagonal text on the header background image when the page is resized. I think I've tracked it down to the absolutely positioned #menu div, and using a background image for the header. The header seems to slide right up under the #menu div. I'll be tinkering with that next. Thanks for the tip on the .feedback CSS error. Bojhan, I have changed most of the text colors and fonts - hope you like them better. I went with a small-caps Verdana for the posts font. Too bad Trajan Pro (my absolute favorite font of all time) isn't available on most computers, eh? :) Thanks for the comments so far! Collin Davis Web Architect Stromberg Architectural Products p 903.454.0904 f 903.454.3642 e [EMAIL PROTECTED] web www.strombergarchitectural.com ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** -- http://www.dlaakso.com/ Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Critique
Collin Davis wrote: Header image is now 34KB It is still sharp and much faster to load. I really love how it looks also when the page is resized now - thanks! You're welcome. I think it even looks alright when the text gets overlapped (though fortunately, it takes a lot of resizing before that happens). Too bad Trajan Pro (my absolute favorite font of all time) isn't available on most computers, eh? :) So what? Just insert it at beginning of the list of font names. That way, the other person who has it will also be able to enjoy it. ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
[WSG] Browser Check - such inconsistencies!
So, before heading this way for some help, I checked out the site on many platforms. http://www.zenfulcreations.com/sites/sss/ http://www.zenfulcreations.com/sites/sss/c/global.css There are some minor inconsistencies that I can handle, but for the most part it renders correctly in: FF1.0 - PC Moz 1.7.3 - PC Mos 1.6 - PC Moz 1.6 - Mac Moz 1.6 - Linux NN 7.0 - PC NN 7.0 - Mac NN 7.0 - Linux IE6 - PC IE5 - PC (too much whitespace Safari 1.2 Konqueror 3.0.5 It is most definitely a mess in: Netscape 6.2 - PC IE5 - Mac (looks different at different resolutions) IE4 - PC All Versions of Opera So - can I get a double check on the ones that appear to work okay, and some possible direction on what I need to do to get it to work right in the ones that don't... I really DON'T want to use hacks any more than absolutely necessary. Thanks! Lori Leach ZenfulCreations ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Browser Check - such inconsistencies!
Konqueror 3.0.5 Wow, amazing it works. CSS in Konq 3.0 is sooo bug ridden. Safaried Konq 3.3 behaves much better. IE4 - PC Ignore it. IE4 is suicidcal when it comes to CSS. All Versions of Opera If in Opera 6, you can ignore it. But if it breaks in latest Opera you have a problem. Opera 7.5 has one of the best CSS implementations around, so you should double-check your CSS against validator and specs (because CSS validator is absolutely dump in some cases :() -- regards, Kornel Lesiski ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
[WSG] making money out of web standards
Hi, In Singapore, web design as a profession has gotten a bad rep over the past few years. The barriers to entry aren't exactly high and the fact is as long as someone has a pirated copy of Dreamweaver, (ye gods) Frontpage, Photoshop and a half-assed grasp of how to use them would be able to thrash out something that's acceptable to clients. Myself, I grew disillusioned with the rates and limits on creativity that we were getting about 3 years ago. Imagine your employer offering a template-based website to multiple clients at S$500 for 10 pages and you get a pretty good idea of the lengths you have to go to so that the budget isn't broken. My then-employer didn't value creative personnel highly either so he refused to employ a graphics designer and for a long time, I had to outsource design work at cutthroat prices for a single PSD template document. Needless to say, I'm not proud of my work from that period and I actively avoided doing websites for a while. After a 2 year hiatus, I am honestly feeling good about web design again. Separating content and layout made perfect sense to me as a programmer. XML/XSLT is good 'cos it allows me to modularize sections of a site without having to resort to server-side technologies. CSS is great, just great. But the best thing for me so far, is that after looking through most of the major corporate and government websites in Singapore and the South East Asia region, nobody's doing it yet. That's right, we're far away from standards utopia as yet but where there's room for change, there's money to be made in my book. I've been spending the past half year learning up on standards-compliance but one thing still stands out: how to market it. In US and Australia, there're a growing number of web design outfits using compliance as a marketing tool. They include: 1) http://www.stopdesign.com 2) http://www.simplebits.com/ 3) http://pixelplain.com/ Problem is though that when I read through the literature on those sites, it seems that they might appeal to MIS managers who have an eye on bandwidth costs but to a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) owner? Bandwidth would have nearly no bearing on their decision as they would hardly go beyond the allocated bandwidth of a cheap hosting package. Neither would accessibility unless you're selling Braille e-books. To this breed of decision makers, IE *IS* the web so telling them you intend to fix this would brand yourself in the same category as a Linux-zealot hippie almost immediately (not that I'm not, but I'm having my marketing cap on right now). So, I would like to solicit some feedback on how exactly would you market a standards-compliant approach to website design. My take on this: 1) Choose the right firms to sell it to. SMEs may not be the right people 'cos accessibility and HTML download sizes are not a priority. Government and major retail sites would be good. 2) Choose the right person in the target client to sell it to. A general manager would not bother with background technologies as much as an MIS manager. 3) Judicious use of catch-phrases. I love Firefox, I really do, but I would be wary of dropping the name on a potential client as the last thing they need is the impression that they need to install yet another software. I already have problems getting graphic designers to install it. Thanks to the mass media however, the words XML-compliant has much better connotations. 4) Hard data. For practice, I've been taking major content-based websites such as the local paper and re-implementing it using CSS/XSLT. If I can get my foot in the door and do a presentation, imagine the impression I could make if I show them their home page and how big it is right now and then show them my optimized version (identical pixel for pixel) and the 70% savings in download sizes that it yields. THEN, I show them how I can change the entire layout just by changing the CSS file. You get the idea. Challenges: The main challenge is that the whole process may seem like it's much ado about nothing visually. Nobody was kidding when the phrase a picture is worth a thousand words was coined. No matter how the HTML is optimized, the visual layout is still the same. If your potential client doesn't care about anything else, you're barking at a wall. Feedback please: 1) Designers, how would YOU approach selling this concept? Or would you? 2) Managers, what would catch YOUR attention in a pitch geared towards this? Just airing some thoughts and trying to get some feedback. I hope it's not off-topic. Thanks! Wong ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Browser Check - such inconsistencies!
Lori Leach wrote: http://www.zenfulcreations.com/sites/sss/ http://www.zenfulcreations.com/sites/sss/c/global.css So - can I get a double check on the ones that appear to work okay, and some possible direction on what I need to do to get it to work right in the ones that don't... I really DON'T want to use hacks any more than absolutely necessary. As commented by others; text fonts are way too small, and your page is relying on that font size. Pixel-perfection based on font size is not reliable... No problems in any of my browsers: Opera 7.54 - Firefox 1.0 - IE6. - all on win2K-pro. However, no hacks will save it if a visitor knows anything about browser-options like minimum font size, text zoom or font size override (in IE/win). regards Georg ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] making money out of web standards
Hi, It occurs to me that a way of marketing web standards is in fear of not being seen. There is a big boom in mobile and handheld computing and access to the net, and it seems to be gathering pace. Keeping to standards allows such devices (and anything else that may come along) to access pages without mangling them (too much). At the moment many sites look a total mess on my Palm computer and completely unreadable on a mobile. I often waste time cleaning up pages so that I can read them at my leisure on my Palm. Other people would just not bother, but what can I say, I'm both obsessive and lazy. I now spend more time reading my Palm than reading paper-based books or my desktop screen. I spend more overall time on my desktop, but that is mostly programming and writing -- the Palm is still a bit inconvenient for that. Best wishes, - Miriam (waves - hi Bob :) Wong Chin Shin wrote: Hi, In Singapore, web design as a profession has gotten a bad rep over the past few years. The barriers to entry aren't exactly high and the fact is as long as someone has a pirated copy of Dreamweaver, (ye gods) Frontpage, Photoshop and a half-assed grasp of how to use them would be able to thrash out something that's acceptable to clients. Myself, I grew disillusioned with the rates and limits on creativity that we were getting about 3 years ago. Imagine your employer offering a template-based website to multiple clients at S$500 for 10 pages and you get a pretty good idea of the lengths you have to go to so that the budget isn't broken. My then-employer didn't value creative personnel highly either so he refused to employ a graphics designer and for a long time, I had to outsource design work at cutthroat prices for a single PSD template document. Needless to say, I'm not proud of my work from that period and I actively avoided doing websites for a while. After a 2 year hiatus, I am honestly feeling good about web design again. Separating content and layout made perfect sense to me as a programmer. XML/XSLT is good 'cos it allows me to modularize sections of a site without having to resort to server-side technologies. CSS is great, just great. But the best thing for me so far, is that after looking through most of the major corporate and government websites in Singapore and the South East Asia region, nobody's doing it yet. That's right, we're far away from standards utopia as yet but where there's room for change, there's money to be made in my book. I've been spending the past half year learning up on standards-compliance but one thing still stands out: how to market it. In US and Australia, there're a growing number of web design outfits using compliance as a marketing tool. They include: 1) http://www.stopdesign.com 2) http://www.simplebits.com/ 3) http://pixelplain.com/ Problem is though that when I read through the literature on those sites, it seems that they might appeal to MIS managers who have an eye on bandwidth costs but to a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) owner? Bandwidth would have nearly no bearing on their decision as they would hardly go beyond the allocated bandwidth of a cheap hosting package. Neither would accessibility unless you're selling Braille e-books. To this breed of decision makers, IE *IS* the web so telling them you intend to fix this would brand yourself in the same category as a Linux-zealot hippie almost immediately (not that I'm not, but I'm having my marketing cap on right now). So, I would like to solicit some feedback on how exactly would you market a standards-compliant approach to website design. My take on this: 1) Choose the right firms to sell it to. SMEs may not be the right people 'cos accessibility and HTML download sizes are not a priority. Government and major retail sites would be good. 2) Choose the right person in the target client to sell it to. A general manager would not bother with background technologies as much as an MIS manager. 3) Judicious use of catch-phrases. I love Firefox, I really do, but I would be wary of dropping the name on a potential client as the last thing they need is the impression that they need to install yet another software. I already have problems getting graphic designers to install it. Thanks to the mass media however, the words XML-compliant has much better connotations. 4) Hard data. For practice, I've been taking major content-based websites such as the local paper and re-implementing it using CSS/XSLT. If I can get my foot in the door and do a presentation, imagine the impression I could make if I show them their home page and how big it is right now and then show them my optimized version (identical pixel for pixel) and the 70% savings in download sizes that it yields. THEN, I show them how I can change the entire layout just by changing the CSS file. You get the idea. Challenges: The main challenge is that the whole process may seem like it's much ado about nothing visually. Nobody was kidding when the
Re: [WSG] Browser Check - such inconsistencies!
On 29 Dec 2004, at 9:21 am, Lori Leach wrote:
http://www.zenfulcreations.com/sites/sss/
http://www.zenfulcreations.com/sites/sss/c/global.css
Netscape 6.2 - PC
IE5 - Mac (looks different at different resolutions)
IE4 - PC
All Versions of Opera
So - can I get a double check on the ones that appear to work okay,
and
some possible direction on what I need to do to get it to work right
in the
ones that don't... I really DON'T want to use hacks any more than
absolutely necessary.
Others have mentioned it, the body text in your left column is really
too small for me to read.
The right column drops below the left one in IE Mac; div#right is
floated but you didn't specify a width on it; hence it expands to the
full width of the parent container.
Give it a width (required for floats per CSS2.0), and it should work OK
Your top menu disappeared; a positioned object within a 100% high div
(100% of what ?) is asking for problems
#top {
position: relative
height: 100px /*height of graphic*/
}
#nav is doing nothing usefull
#nav div {
position:absolute;
/*width:500px; */
bottom:0;
right:0;
border-left:1px solid #00245D;
}
This should get your menu to show up.
#nav a are floated elements, again without a width, each block expands
to the full width of their parent.
Take a look at how I coded this navigation:
http://www.l-c-n.com/IE5tests/phantom-links/inline-block_list.php
Using inline-block instead of float to deal with IE Mac.
HTH
Philippe
---/---
Philippe Wittenbergh
now live : http://emps.l-c-n.com/
code | design | web projects : http://www.l-c-n.com/
IE5 Mac bugs and oddities : http://www.l-c-n.com/IE5tests/
**
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list getting help
**
RE: [WSG] making money out of web standards
1) Designers, how would YOU approach selling this concept? Or would you? Here's my take as a designer/IA/coder who works in a similar market space to you: Sell the aesthetics, functionality and usability of the product. This is what makes your solution intelligent and different from the competition. Standards are just the means of executing the solution, like FrontPage, except good not evil. The point is, it's just a tool. The right tool for the job. If anything, you sell standards as something others aren't doing. Reaching the widest possible audience, coding efficiently saving bandwidth and offering greater long-term time cost-saving benefits along with all the other real-world benefits of standards are factors that will show you take the time and effort to do the job right, but I wouldn't make it my unique selling point. After all, our job here is to encourage everyone to produce sites using standards, so one of these days (hopefully) standards will just be... standard. If Singapore is anything like Australia, there's that whole legal angle too. If the site offers a service and is inaccessible, there can be costly legal issues. hank - http://henrytapia.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Wong Chin Shin Sent: Wednesday, 29 December 2004 4:09 PM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: [WSG] making money out of web standards Hi, In Singapore, web design as a profession has gotten a bad rep over the past few years. The barriers to entry aren't exactly high and the fact is as long as someone has a pirated copy of Dreamweaver, (ye gods) Frontpage, Photoshop and a half-assed grasp of how to use them would be able to thrash out something that's acceptable to clients. Myself, I grew disillusioned with the rates and limits on creativity that we were getting about 3 years ago. Imagine your employer offering a template-based website to multiple clients at S$500 for 10 pages and you get a pretty good idea of the lengths you have to go to so that the budget isn't broken. My then-employer didn't value creative personnel highly either so he refused to employ a graphics designer and for a long time, I had to outsource design work at cutthroat prices for a single PSD template document. Needless to say, I'm not proud of my work from that period and I actively avoided doing websites for a while. After a 2 year hiatus, I am honestly feeling good about web design again. Separating content and layout made perfect sense to me as a programmer. XML/XSLT is good 'cos it allows me to modularize sections of a site without having to resort to server-side technologies. CSS is great, just great. But the best thing for me so far, is that after looking through most of the major corporate and government websites in Singapore and the South East Asia region, nobody's doing it yet. That's right, we're far away from standards utopia as yet but where there's room for change, there's money to be made in my book. I've been spending the past half year learning up on standards-compliance but one thing still stands out: how to market it. In US and Australia, there're a growing number of web design outfits using compliance as a marketing tool. They include: 1) http://www.stopdesign.com 2) http://www.simplebits.com/ 3) http://pixelplain.com/ Problem is though that when I read through the literature on those sites, it seems that they might appeal to MIS managers who have an eye on bandwidth costs but to a small and medium sized enterprise (SME) owner? Bandwidth would have nearly no bearing on their decision as they would hardly go beyond the allocated bandwidth of a cheap hosting package. Neither would accessibility unless you're selling Braille e-books. To this breed of decision makers, IE *IS* the web so telling them you intend to fix this would brand yourself in the same category as a Linux-zealot hippie almost immediately (not that I'm not, but I'm having my marketing cap on right now). So, I would like to solicit some feedback on how exactly would you market a standards-compliant approach to website design. My take on this: 1) Choose the right firms to sell it to. SMEs may not be the right people 'cos accessibility and HTML download sizes are not a priority. Government and major retail sites would be good. 2) Choose the right person in the target client to sell it to. A general manager would not bother with background technologies as much as an MIS manager. 3) Judicious use of catch-phrases. I love Firefox, I really do, but I would be wary of dropping the name on a potential client as the last thing they need is the impression that they need to install yet another software. I already have problems getting graphic designers to install it. Thanks to the mass media however, the words XML-compliant has much better connotations. 4) Hard data. For practice, I've been taking
