10 May 2001
[3 am]
Jackpott.org is an attractive weblog designed entirely with Cascading Style Sheets. The designer, Jack Potterfield, is ten years old. :::
 
9 May 2001
[4 am]
Phong.com's Photoshop tutorials can help you learn to create plastic, metallic, and other popular visual effects. Remember, a little goes a long way. ::: Dr Menlo has his say about human portals and the primacy of personal content on the web. (Hat tip: Jimwich.) ::: It had to happen: elitist link whore tees. Make ours large. :::
 
[3 am]
From Disenchanted: "Frustrated web designers have cried into their beer long enough and have now begun a browser upgrade campaign—operating under the false pretense of standards support—as their way of dealing with the impotency that comes with the job. Isn't this just another manifestation of the dreaded 'Netscape Now!' button we learned to hate in 1995?"
        Uh, no it's not.
        From WaSP: "HTML, XML, CSS and the DOM are more than just a set of interesting technologies. They are a way of creating web pages that will facilitate the twin goals of sophisticated and appropriate presentation and widespread accessibility." See also: An Inexact Science, A Web Designer's Journey, What Are Web Standards And Why Should I Use Them?, To Hell With Bad Browsers, Why Does It Hurt When I <P>?, The Day the Browser Died, Why Gecko Matters, and Why IE5/Mac Matters.
        Yesterday we spent three and a half hours making the case for standards compliance to the web developers and coordinators of the New York Public Library's website. Standards advocacy is not about crying into one's beer. It's about working to promote a web that works for everyone. (Hat tip: Metafilter.) :::
 
8 May 2001
[10 am]
Free web design tools for your browser. IE4 Widgets provide one-click HTML validation, toggle stylesheets on and off (so you can see how your page looks without them), and more. IE4 and higher, Windows only. Hat tip: Anil Dash. ::: Previously reported here: David Lindquist's bookmarklets provide one-click CSS and HTML validation in any browser. Tantek Çelik's IE5/Mac bookmarklets toggle CSS on and off, provide detailed validation, present parsed style sheet rules, and do other fancy stuff. Everyone web creator should befriend at least one of these tools.

Over the weekend, we worked for 36 hours straight. Half was client business, the other half "look and feel" and usability issues on A List Apart, some of which you can see now if you poke around, and most of which you'll see on Friday. When you maintain long-running content sites, you become so familiar with them that you stop seeing navigational problems and ugly old visual ideas. Once you finally notice them, you become obsessed with fixing them. We're now a little closer to where we want to be.

On a related note, if you've noticed a bug in the ALA forums, the good news is the elves at Webcore Labs are fixing them now. The better news is, the existing custom forum software will soon be replaced with much better custom forum software, making the forums more inviting.

Gotta run. More later. :::