A List Apart No. 170
In Issue No. 170 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
Exploring Footers
With old-school table layout methods, vertical positioning is a piece of cake. With CSS layout, it’s a piece of something else. New ALA contributing writer Bobby van der Sluis shows how to regain control of footers and other vertically positioned layout elements via CSS, JavaScript, and the DOM.
JavaScript Image Gallery
by Jeremy Keith
Making an online gallery of pictures should be a quick process. The gap between snapping some pictures and publishing them on the web ought to be a short one. Here’s a quick and easy way of making a one-page gallery that uses JavaScript to load images and their captions on the fly.
Also in this issue
The front page of Issue 170 summarized the W3C validator problem discussed in yesterday’s Report and asked readers to write to the W3C and request that they fix the fifth bug mentioned in this October 2001 note to the W3C validator mailing list.
The bug has now been fixed. We are grateful to Sijtsche Smeman for turning it around so quickly.
The CSS validator is an open source project built by volunteers. The W3C Quality Assurance team has taken over management of the project and says it is working to create a strong technological base for the next generation of validation tools. As always, they could use help from the community.
Highlights from recent Daily Reports
- CSS Validator
Changes the Rulesis Broken - [Note: Within two days of reading this post, a few of the volunteers who maintain the W3C’s CSS validation service went in and fixed the bug.]
- The W3C’s CSS validation service has accidentally changed the way it interprets CSS authoring practices. Many sites that were designed valid no longer validate when run through the service via standard linking methods. These sites are still valid per the CSS2 spec. The trouble is not with the authoring method used, but with the validator, which suffers from a long-standing bug. It needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Until it is fixed, workarounds are available — although you might find some of them more trouble than they are worth. An in-depth Report for designers and developers.
- A List Apart No. 169
- Brian Alvey: Everything I Need to Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz. Stuart Robertson: CSS Design — Custom Underlines.
- Don’t Design on Spec!
- No matter how juicy the potential project, it is never a good idea to produce designs on spec.
- Design: Chip Kidd
- A mid-career retrospective on the excellent and influential graphic designer.
- Creativity: Alfred Hitchcock
- Best Hitch bio ever.
There is more
More highlights may be found in our Essentials Department.
