Speed Up Your CSS

Elliot Swan has posted a great article on how to speed up your css development. Check it out

Download CrossFont

Crossfont allows you to convert any Mac Font to a PC OpenType font. For all those PC developers out there that have Mac Designers using Mac Fonts, this program is perfect for you. 15 Day Free Trial, $45 to purchase a license.

http://www.websitetemplates.com -$50 to $64. Wow.

Flash developers love eye candy. Especially flash eye candy that makes you go, “How’d they do that?” Here’s a site that will make you say that and make you want to be better. Check it out.

http://lab.mathieu-badimon.com/

Hostgator offers hosting of unlimited domains for only $9.99 a month. If you are a web developer and have clients, they have reseller accounts for only $25.00 a month. You can then bill each of your clients separately.

After trying out 2advanced.net’s web hosting and the foobah that happened there, I will never, ever go back to them. Their server uploads speeds were slow. Uploads were continually interrupted. They didn’t even have MySQL 4.0 nor did they intend on upgrading (so much for having Wordpress 2.0). They never responded to my ticket requests. They refused to give me a refund on my money even though they offered a 30 day money back guarantee. Don’t get 2advanced.net hosting.

Go check them out:
http://www.hostgator.com

Article: What’s Next? The Same Thing! @ The Autistic Cuckoo

Many ask what web standards are. Here’s the list that web standards prevent.

Web Standards prevent:

• lack a specified document type,
• contain invalid (X)HTML,
• use tables for layout,
• require a particular browser to work,
• require client-side scripting to work,
• require third-party products such as Flash to work,
• cannot be used by people with disabilities,
• are semantically meaningless,
• are unnecessarily heavy to download, thereby also placing unnecessary load on the server,
• force links to open in separate windows whether the visitor wants them to or not, and
• do not allow the text to be resized in the most commonly used browser.

Link: http://www.defencemechanism.com/color/

This Macromedia Flash color scheme matcher is very nice for determining contrasting colors for layouts. Simply insert a hex value then the results are computed on the fly. 3 color hex values from the same tint plus 2 grayscale hex color values are given to you. A must have when developing a color scheme for a site.

Link: Happy Cog Studios: Zeldman Video Keynote

Zeldman presents a very entertaining video on the history of web standards and how it is revolutionizing society. He highlights four other members of A List Apart and their main contributions to the Web Standards Project.

Article: Jason Santa Maria | Grey Box Methodology

Great article on the methodology of designing a web site. You start with pen and paper freeing yourself of technology to create a design. Next you move on to Illustrator using the ‘Gray Box Methodology”. This step allows you to create a perfect functional layout without worrying about which font works best or which color to use. You have a simply grayscale layout to look at. Then you finally move on to implementing the CSS / XHTML / FLASH / PHOTOSHOP graphics and coding at the end to produce exactly what you want without the distractions. Read the full article.

If you’ve been doing web design for the past few years and just recently learned about web standards, welcome. Let’s get started.

• What’s CSS


• XHTML


• W3C Validation


• Get Started!

What’s CSS?
What happens when you say to someone, ‘I do web development’? Their answer is, “Yeah, I learned that h… t… m… l…. once.” Well good for them, they know how to make tables… with frontpage. Why am I telling you this? Well because people think that HTML is the design language of them web. Wrong. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets that allows an xhtml page of content to be formatted. CSS is the design language of the web, while HTML or XHTML is the content language of the web.

XHTML
What is XHTML? What is the difference between HTML and XHTML. Web browsers allow web developers to write sloppy html. Just like the english language, HTML has grammar. When HTML is written sloppilly, the browser tries to figure out what the writer was trying to say, and then guesses. Each browser has a different guess which makes the exact same page show up different in each browser. XHTML compliant pages use grammatically correct HTML.

More questions about XHTML? Check out w3.org.

W3C Validation
W3C validation is how XHTML checkts to see if it is strictly compliant. It’s just like taking your English paper to your teacher, and she tells you everything that is wrong with it and what to fix. By checking to make sure your page is W3C compliant, you have officially accepted web standards.

Get Started!
Start using web standards!
Here are some links to get started:

• 9rules


• A List Apart


• Stop Design


• Digital Web Magazine


• Simple Bits

Still debating the fact of whether or not CSS is worthwhile. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets that allows an xhtml page of content to be formatted. An example you say? Check out www.cssvault.com.

Going from pure flash sites to pure CSS sites is quite an overhaul. Taken the fact that Flash is completely ‘on-the-fly’ versus the static nature of css, it will be hard to decide which is better. Conforming to universal standards is always a plus, such as the W3 standards of CSS.

Right now the main plus of CSS is fast, and I mean uber-fast content. Secondly, any browser can view the content. Thirdly, you can proclaim yourself a CSS God when finished (a few years back I claimed myself to be linux god as well…)

Well here goes my live test of CSS in the working world…