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3 April 2002
[5 pm | 4 pm]
Stereotypography bills itself as “the ultimate link pimp” but is in fact a series of news feeds from a number of popular design mags and portals. Hat tip: Ralph.

Dubya Goes to War! will offend some viewers, but it’s a brilliant Flash application and as amusing as anything in this tragic world.

Singlefile, from our friends at 37signals, is a web app that helps the compulsive organize their books.

Bluerobot’s Centering: Auto-width Margins offers a workaround for MSIE5/Win’s inability to center block level elements when left and right margins are set to “auto.” We forgot about this IE defect when designing the interim version of Happy Cog, and the results were dire indeed. The display has now been corrected by a retarded, but valid, CSS tweak. No wonder the kids prefer Flash.

While IE5/Win has trouble centering elements, IE6 centers things it should not. Microsoft’s latest browser centers table cell content by default instead of left–aligning it, breaking norms dating back to the introduction of the graphical browser. Kids. Flash. No. Wonder.

An upgrade to our favorite HTML editor is free for registered users of the previous version. PageSpinner 4.0 requires CarbonLib 1.5, an Apple system component. The component is free, but don’t bother downloading it. Apple’s disk image is damaged; the damage can’t be repaired because the disk image is locked. Buggy software is the least of this world’s problems, but still. :::

2 April 2002
[5 pm | noon]
Our corporate site, Happy Cog, is undergoing redevelopment. More will be revealed.

Francois Jordaan has created downloadable Dreamweaver mods based on Carrie Bickner’s Modifying Dreamweaver to Produce Valid XHTML in the current issue of A List Apart.

Quickhoney presents the fascinating pixel and vector illustration work of Nana Rausch and Peter Stemmler. The site is deeper than it seems and will repay the time you spend investigating its sections. Some content is unsuitable for children.

W3C’s take on the business benefits of accessibility in web design might make good reading for clients or bosses who don’t understand that accessible design can help them reach up to 20% more people.

The Spring 2002 issue of Born Magazine offers eight interpretations of poetry and prose, plus three additions to The Birthing Room. ::: The Morning News is changing to a magazine format. :::

1 April 2002
[10 pm| 5 pm]
Ryan Fitzgerald’s When I Was 12 brought tears to our eyes.

The Desktop Wallpaper section launched over the weekend has grown by 250%. Download your heart out. Also updated: Linker’s Delight and Mac Daddy. :::

30–31 March 2002
We’ve launched a new Desktop Wallpaper section to replace the old Desktop Pictures collection. Dress that desktop for success. Also updated: Steal These Graphics!, the long–running gateway to our variously cheesy downloadables.

One of these things is not like the others: “Committed to Section 508 compliance and accessibility of websites,” and tasked with “educating Federal employees” about web accessibility and U.S. law, the U.S. Government’s Section 508 website proudly proclaims that it is “best viewed with MS Internet Explorer 5+.” :::

29 March 2002
[4 pm | 11 am | 10 am]
We’re back after a week in sunny Menlo Park, California—not that we caught any sun. We spent the week empaneled in a tall, dark room, evaluating hundreds of websites to help determine which few were the absolute best. Winners will be announced in the September issue of Communication Arts Magazine.

WebReference’s Pure CSS2 Rollovers provides three graceful methods of creating “active” nav bars using no images and no JavaScript. The three methods work well and the tutorial is easy to understand.

“Users don’t read. Users don’t click. Users don’t scroll.” Powazek debunks these verities in Design For Community.

As Adobe hires multiple vendors to redesign bits and pieces of its main and satellite sites, navigation and legibility are flying out the window. Screenshots (1) and (2) show the same page in IE5 and Netscape 6, both broken in different ways, due mainly to screwy style sheet authoring mis–tailored to specific browsers instead of to standards supported by all current browsers.
        Glitches like this are inevitable when more than one firm works on the same site at the same time. We love Adobe and hope they’ll fix these minor but annoying errors. (While they’re at it, they could try spelling our name right.)

NUblog’s A Better Printable Page is filled with tips on the arcane art of preparing online pages for offline reading and printing.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Glenn Davis and others claim the web has lost its luster. As the medium becomes more and more of an accepted commodity, it naturally becomes less and less of a shiny new toy. Throw in years of dot com hype followed by recession, and it’s easy to see why some online pioneers would grow disenchanted. We, however, are still having fun, and we doubt the web’s potential has even begun to be revealed.

Also in the Times, New Path to Web for Pornography charts the rising tide of porn–napping.

News.com’s “Web developers wary of AOL switch” casts America Online’s testing of a Mozilla–based browser as a scary thing (it’s not), and suggests that authoring to web standards is antithetical to designing sites that will work well in IE5+ (it’s not).
        A quotation from yours truly implies as much, but it’s taken out of context. Our point was that designing and building with standards frees you from worrying about browsers, because recent versions of IE, Netscape, and Opera support many of the same technologies.
        If you’re making heavy use of the W3C DOM, you’ll need to provide alternatives for Opera users. Other than that, for the most part, one size fits all. A subtle shift in the browser market will be good, not bad, for the web. :::