// February 16th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // RSS Feeds
Well, here we are again with the third installment of “Look What My RSS Dragged In”. Apologies for not putting up one last month, but with a busy festive period and such, I just didn’t have time with so many other things going on, so without further ado, here is the february edition for you!
Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring
Our first item comes from the wonderful A List Apart. Here Alex Bischoff explains how we can make pseudo class selectors work in IE6 with some simple DOM Scripting coupled with some lightweight CSS. Alex also shows us how create effective navigation without “bloated code” and “numerous classes” by using descendant selectors from a simple unordered list.
Read: Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring
Why getElementById sometimes does not work in Internet Explorer
Here’s a great post by Roger Johansson at 456 Berea Street regarding a problem he recently encountered whilst trying to reference an element using an ID attribute. The problem being that in IE, this will mirror an attribute whose name attribute contains the same value.
Basically, Roger outlines how we should not have similar ID names within our mark up. If we tried to reference an ID of “index” in our document and the <title> of our mark up page was “index” then IE would look for the first instance, in this case the word index comes first as it is in the <title> of our document, so IE would parse that and cause us a few headaches.
Read: Beware of id and name attribute mixups when using getElementById in Internet Explorer
Playerversion.com
If your a Flash developer, have you ever wondered what version of Flash player you or your users are running? Aral Balkan has developed a cool website which has a tool to do just that. And fair play to the guy – he wrote it using just one finger – now thats a richter scale of 10 of coolness in my book! Get Well Soon Aral!
Visit: PlayerVersion.com
Award Winning Newspaper Designs
My Smashing Magazine feed pulled in a fascinating article about the similarities over the last few years between design for the web and printed newspapers. The emergence of grid based layouts and white space being the most common features applied. Here we can view a selection of newspaper designs from around the world for design inspiration and look at how the web has slowly borrowed some layout principles from the printed page.
Read: Award Winning Newspaper Designs
Stay On:target
Can’t wait for CSS 3? Me neither! Brian Suda gives us an introduction to the CSS 3 pseudo selector called :target in this ThinkVitamin.com tutorial.
:target can be used to apply rules to an element with a fragment identifier – being, an anchor name or an id. It will be a useful tool in the future as complex styles can be applied without the need for javascript.
Read: Stay On:target
Pattern Inspiration
Have you noticed the current web design trend lately of using vintage repeated backgrounds? Veerle Pieters has posted a few links on her site to places where we can gain inspiration for producing our own in Illustrator, or even (dare I say it) doing up your house!
Read: Pattern Inspiration
Moving the Font Matrix forward
Back in December on 24 Ways, Richard Rutter proposed the concept of a font matrix. In a nutshell what Richard is talking about is that Windows and Mac Operating Systems have a core font matrix of all western fonts installed, and some users may have more fonts installed than the default fonts these operating systems currently have. Richard Rutter has proposed is that if a font matrix was available, those of us who don’t have all the fonts can still see what they look like. An interesting idea, something I certainly would like to see develop.
Read: Moving the Font Matrix forward
The Trouble With Web 2.0
Oh how I hate those words! Web 2.0 throws up visions of shiny reflective logos, rounded boxes and countless more useless interactive features than you could throw an ajax data format at.
In this Boxes and Arrows item by Alexander Wilms, we discover how Web 2.0 technology and design patterns have been a large success – but will they also work in the environment of a large enterprise?
Read: The Trouble With Web 2.0
Imitating A Scanner Darkly
Have you ever wondered how to achieve those surreal vector line art effects found in A Scanner Darkly? By visiting Illustrator Techniques.com you can learn how this is done by using Adobe Illustrator. It’s a time consuming process, but is well worth the effort as the end results can be magnificent.
Read: Imitating A Scanner Darkly
