Float is a CSS positioning property. If you are familiar with print design, you can think of it like an image in a layout where the text wraps around it as necessary.

So begins  All About Floats, a brief and unassuming tutorial which, with a single web page of text and a few illustrations, thoroughly explains how designers use “float” to create CSS layouts, the difference between “float” and absolute positioning, and the leading browser quirks to keep in mind when using float to create web layouts.

If CSS confuses you, this page will greatly help you. If you’re an old hand at CSS layout, this page will make a handy reference for you. This page is not new, but it was new to me. Congratulations to author Chris Coyier on a job elegantly done. Hat tip to Elliot Jay Stocks for pointing it out.

[tags]CSS, layout, essentials, overview, tutorial[/tags]

Filed under: CSS

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Introducing Typekit:

We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

See also: “Web Fonts Now: How We’re Doing With That” (23 May 2009) right here at zeldman.com.

[tags]webdesign, webstandards, @font-face, typekit, realfonts[/tags]

Filed under: Design, Fonts, Ideas, industry, Typography, Web Design, Web Standards

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While the entire HTML 5 standard is years or more from adoption, there are many powerful features available in browsers today. In fact, five key next-generation features are already available in the latest (sometimes experimental) browser builds from Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome.

Tim O’Reilly: Google Bets Big on HTML 5

Striving to avoid the mistake Microsoft made when it bet on binary applications over the web, Google is counting on HTML 5 adoption to expand the capability of web applications. Tim O’Reilly describes Google’s strategy and lists five key HTML 5 features that are already supported in Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome.

[tags]HTML5, Google, O’Reilly, TimO’Reilly, canvas, browsers, webapps, web applications, webstandards[/tags]

Filed under: Advocacy, Code, Design, development, HTML, HTML5, Web Design, Web Standards, XHTML

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There was a point in the 90s when I felt like a sucker for doing HTML and CSS.”

The .net Zeldman interview is available for your downloading pleasure (4.2 MB PDF). For more of the best in web design and development, visit netmag.co.uk.

Update, 27 May 2009

An HTML version of the interview has now been posted on .net’s website.

[tags]webdesign, webdevelopment, magazine, interview, .net, netmag, interview, interviews, zeldman, jeffreyzeldman[/tags]

Filed under: Interviews, Press, Publications, Publishing, reportage, reprints, Standards, Typography, Usability, User Experience, UX, Web Design, Web Standards, wisdom, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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In Issue No. 284 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Creating Intrinsic Ratios for Video

by THIERRY KOBLENTZ

Have you ever wanted to resize a video on the fly, scaling it as you would an image? Using intrinsic ratios for video and some padding property magic, you can. Thierry Koblentz shows us how.

Burnout

by SCOTT BOMS

Does every day feel like a bad day? Blurry boundaries between work and home, and the “always on” demands of the web can lead to depression and burnout. Learn the signs of burnout and how to maintain your bliss.

And don’t miss this issue’s Editor’s Choice:

The ALA Primer: A Guide for New Readers

by ERIN LYNCH

New to A List Apart? Welcome! ALA’s own Erin Lynch suggests a few good places to start reading. (Originally ran: September 12, 2006.)

Filed under: A List Apart, business, Career, Design, HTML, industry, Layout, User Experience

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The Web Fonts Wiki has a page listing fonts you can legally embed in your site designs using the CSS standard @font-face method. Just as importantly, the wiki maintains a page showing commercial foundries that allow @font-face embedding. Between these two wiki pages, you may find just the font you need for your next design (even if you can’t currently license classics like Adobe Garamond or ITC Franklin and Clarendon).

The advantages of using fonts other than Times, Arial, Georgia, and Verdana have long been obvious to designers; it’s why web design in the 1990s was divided between pages done in Flash, and HTML pages containing pictures of fonts—a practice that still, bizarrely, continues even in occasionally otherwise advanced recent sites.

Using real fonts instead of pictures of fonts or outlines of fonts provides speed and accessibility advantages.

Currently the Webkit-based Apple Safari browser supports @font-face. The soon-to-be-released next versions of Opera Software’s Opera browser, Google’s Webkit-based Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox will do likewise. When I say “soon-to-be-released,” I mean any day now. When this occurs, all browsers except IE will support @font-face.

IE has, however, offered font embedding since IE4 via Embedded OpenType (.EOT), a font format that enables real fonts to be temporarily embedded in web pages. That is, the reader sees the font while reading the page, but cannot download (“steal”) the font afterwards. Microsoft has “grant[ed] to the W3C a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide right and license under any Microsoft copyrights on this contribution, to copy, publish and distribute the contribution under the W3C document licenses,” in hopes that EOT would thereby become a standard. But so far, only Microsoft’s own browsers support EOT.

Thus, as we consider integrating real fonts into our designs, we must navigate between browsers that support @font-face now (Safari), those that will do so soon (Opera, Chrome, Firefox), and the one that possibly never will (IE, with a dwindling but still overwhelming market share).

The person who figures out a designer-friendly solution to all this will either be hailed as a hero/heroine or get rich. Meanwhile, near-complete solutions of varying implementation difficulty exist. Read on:

CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing

“Instead of making pictures of fonts, the actual font files can be linked to and retrieved from the web. This way, designers can use TrueType fonts without having to freeze the text as background images.” An introduction to @font-face by Håkon Wium Lie, father of CSS.

Real Fonts on the Web: An Interview with The Font Bureau’s David Berlow

Is there life after Georgia? To understand issues surrounding web fonts from the type designer’s perspective, I interview David Berlow, co-founder of The Font Bureau, Inc, and the first TrueType type designer.

The W3C: @font-face vs. EOT

A discussion that shows why the W3C may not be able to resolve this conflict. (It’s kind of like asking the Montagues and Capulets to decide whether the Montagues or the Capulets should rule Verona.)

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Mike Davidson’s scalable and accessible remix of Shaun Inman’s pioneering use of Flash and JavaScript to replace short passages of HTML text with Flash movies of the same text set in a real font. The Flash movies are created on the fly. If JavaScript or images are turned off, the user “sees” the HTML text; text set in sIFR can also be copied and pasted. sIFR was a great initial solution to the problem of real fonts on the web, but it’s only for short passages (which means the rest of the page must still be set in Georgia or Verdana), and it fails if the user has a Flash block plug-in installed, as half of Firefox users seem to. It’s also always a pain to implement. I don’t know any designer or developer who has an easy time setting up sIFR. In short, while sIFR is an awesome stop-gap, real fonts on the web are still what’s needed. Which also leads us to…

Cufón – Fonts for the People

Simo Kinnunen’s method of embedding fonts, regardless of whether or not a browser supports @font-face.

Combining Cufón And @Font-Face

Kilian Valkhof: “Everyone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.”

Adobe, Web Fonts, and EOT

Why Adobe supports Microsoft’s EOT instead of @font-face.

Introducing Typekit

Update May 28, 2009: Working with Jason Santa Maria, Jeff Veen’s company Small Batch Inc. introduces Typekit:

We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

Read more

• Web Fonts, HTML 5 Roundup: Worthwhile reading on the hot new web font proposals, and on HTML 5/CSS 3 basics, plus a demo of advanced HTML 5 trickery. — 20 July 2009
• Web Fonts Now, for real: David Berlow of The Font Bureau has proposed a Permissions Table for OpenType that can be implemented immediately to turn raw fonts into web fonts without any wrappers or other nonsense. If adopted, it will enable type designers to license their work for web use, and web designers to create pages that use real fonts via the CSS @font-face standard. — 16 July 2009

[tags]fonts, webfonts, webdesign, embed, @font-face, EOT, wiki, css, layout, safari, opera, firefox, chrome, browsers[/tags]

Filed under: Accessibility, Advocacy, content, copyright, creativity, CSS, Design, development, DWWS, Fonts, Ideas, industry, links, Real type on the web, Standards, State of the Web, Tools, Web Design, Web Standards, webfonts, webtype

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Ooh, la la! Jeffrey Zeldman, photographed by Daniel Byrne for .Net Magazine.

[tags]zeldman, .net, press, magazine, webdesign, carygrant, handsome, helloladies[/tags]

Filed under: Press, Zeldman

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After viewing this site’s redesign in progress, Peter Petrus wrote:

[Y]ou’re using footer to clear floats (content + sidebar). This creates a large drawback, because before footer is downloaded and displayed in the browser, parent wrapper lacks any background.

It means that we’re staring on black text / orange background combo for a few moments. Well, few moments now, but should you put any unresponsive widgets in the sidebar, everything can render much slower. Having main content flash like this isn’t very pleasant – especially when you named the redesign “Designing from the content out”.

Solution is very simple – use ‘:after’ clearing for the main wrapper. Sure, it won’t work on IE, but 1) setting width to wrapper sets hasLayout and triggers clearing 2) #footer is still there, in any case.

I’d read about using “:after” clearing but hadn’t implemented it and thought I could solve the problem an easier way. This afternoon, with about five minutes’ work, I did so.

I solved the orange background flash by moving the faux column background image up in the CSS hierarchy.

• In the original CSS, I used the faux column background image on the wrapper element only.
• In the updated CSS, I’ve now added the same background image to the body element as well.

Doing so fixed the orange background flash problem, because the browser no longer has to wait for the footer to clear before showing the background image.

Compare body element on new z.css and previous z-bak.css. (Likewise, compare body on alt.css and alt-bak.css.)

[tags]css, workarounds, clear, float[/tags]

Filed under: CSS, development, zeldman.com

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In “Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS,” Andy Clarke proposes a novel approach to the problem that has vexed standards-based designers since time immemorial (or at least since we could quit worrying about Netscape 4).

The problem is IE6. Outdated but still widely used, especially in the developing world, its inaccurate and incomplete CSS support forces web designers and developers to spend expensive hours on workarounds ranging from hacks, to IE6-only styles served via conditional comments, to JavaScript. Some refuse to serve CSS to IE6 at all; others stop IE6 users at the gate. In some situations (personal site, web app used by first-world hipsters), ignoring IE6 may work; but mostly it doesn’t.

After a brief but thorough tour of current IE6 solutions and their limitations, Andy unveils his zinger. He proposes to serve IE6 users a set of universal styles completely unrelated to the design of the site in question. Not unlike Arc90′s awesome Readability plug-in, the styles Andy has designed concern themselves with typographic hierarchy and whitespace. Here’s the theory: make the page easy to read, make it obvious that somebody designed it, and the IE6 user will have a good experience.

(By contrast, block styles from IE6, as some developers suggest, and that user will have a bad experience. Most likely, in the absence of styles, the user will think the page is broken.)

No hammer fits all nails, and no solution, however elegant, will work for every situation. But if we’re open minded, Andy’s proposal may work in more situations than we at first suspect. Where it works, it’s what business folk call a “win, win:” the visitor has a good reading experience, and client and developer are spared tedium and expense.

Check it out.

[tags]IE6, workarounds, design, development, webdesign, hacks, legibility, styles, CSS, andyclarke[/tags]

Filed under: Accessibility, Browsers, business, CSS, Design, development, DWWS, Layout, Standards

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• Blog post template final (with rotation in footer)
• About page template final (with rotation in footer)
• Contact page template final (with yadda, yadda)
• 404 page – my favorite!
• New! 21 May Subscribe page
• New! 21 May Style switcher in footer
• New! 22 May WordPress tout page
• New! 22 May (mt) Media Temple tout page

Note: Top left and top right footer elements rotate. ALA element (top middle) changes every two weeks, upon publication. Bottom three elements are static, at least for now.

Thanks to Mark Huot for the rotation script (same one we use on Happy Cog) and Noel Jackson, Daniel Mall, and Media Temple for the love and support.

A couple more templates to go, and then we can build this thing. Can’t wait.

[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, design, redesign, designingfromthecontentout[/tags]

Filed under: Design, development, Redesigns, Web Design, work, Working, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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