1. Dec 6th, 2007

    Rounded Corners – 170 (For certain values of normal)

    Make it RESTful! Back in the early days of OOP, developers fell in love with objects so much, they decided to turn any problem into an OOP solution. Classes for the sole purpose of holding a single function, globals giving way to singletons (and all sorts of factory bugs), integers tucked safely inside IntHolders.Well, get ready. REST is now at the receiving end of this unconditional love.I’ve already witnessed a few Rube Goldberg contraptions made of unnecessary resource complexity for the sake of toping on the RestRank. Trust me to say something snarky, but I do like Derek Haynes’ take better.

    Enterprise class. Here’s another buzzword for you: CSS frameworks. I bumped into that a while back, and for all the obvious reasons, didn’t chase the link down. Do I really need another overbearing framework to manage my CSS? Then I came across Blueprint CSS, a clean template that takes care of the basics, like typography, grid placement and prettier buttons. And it fancies itself a “CSS framework”. So there you have it. The label is obviously attractive to some people, and a “stay away!” sign for others. Apply with care.

    Separately, the sexy stylesheets Vitamin article is choke full of useful advise on doing CSS right.

    Audio out. Matthieu has a recipe for streaming audio from Flash (Pandora, Deezer) to the otherwise not that useful Airport Express. That is, if you’re running Linux.

    Upgradophobia. Speaking of proprietary operating system, interesting trend:

    Because I keep hearing from people who want to upgrade their PC but won’t because they don’t want the latest version of Windows, or Leopard for that matter.

    A dozen a day. Apparently normal is getting ~12 spam messages in your inbox every single day.

    Above, Virgin America pre-flight safety video, via Laughing Squid.

    Posted by Assaf Filed in general 3 Comments »

    1. Dec 6th, 2007

      dkubb

      While I’m not the biggest fan of CSS Frameworks, I do like the Tripoli CSS package. Its light-weight and mostly consists of Stylesheets that reset browsers and “levels the playing field” so browsers display content as close as possible by default. This forces you to add rules explicitly and not rely on default browser styling — default styles which may or may not be present on other browsers.

      The problem I have with many CSS frameworks is they encourage you to use non-semantic classes in the HTML. In my mind that’s a mistake. An non-semantic class name is worse than font tags or table based layouts since a developer *thinks* they are following web standards, and doesn’t encourage further learning in the area. At least with fonts and table based layouts its obvious to the developer (and everyone else) that the he has more learning to do. If you’re going to do it, learn to do it right.

    2. Dec 6th, 2007

      Lyle

      _Rude_ Goldberg?

    3. Dec 6th, 2007

      Assaf

      dkubb, I was most scared of the label “framework”, but I’m playing with Blueprint CSS right now (pretending it’s a template, not a framework, helps). I’ll have a look at Tripoli.

      Semantic is a fine line. I think .error is better for error messages than .red, but .red does have semantics of its own. Most often what you need is a .sidebar, but ever so often it matters which side you’re on, and .left-pane makes a difference. When in doubt I choose to err on the side of being too semantic.

      I’m still evaluating Blueprint CSS, I think they have just enough semantics for the common stuff (and I’m adding a lot of my own styles), not so sure if the CSS-based grid is any better than using tables.

      Lyle, thanks, corrected.