Jon Phipps's Library tagged design → View Popular

28 Mar 08

Today we are presenting a round-up of 101 CSS techniques designers use all the time. Definitely worth taking a very close look at!

12 Aug 06

There is a better way to manage this vast complexity than by making big decisions up front and hoping for the best. To make better sites — sites that are functional, beautiful, and "usable" — we have to break our design problems up into small independent chunks based on the real issues within our requirements. Christopher Alexander, who came up with this stuff, calls these chunks patterns.

I'm going to show you how to sidestep your habits and assumptions and use patterns to make better design decisions. A lot of fancy stuff has been written about patterns. To be simple and clear in this introduction, I'll just call them chunks.

05 Aug 06

When tables are used to mark up actual data, they aren’t just a layout grid. Sighted people can get a feel for the relationship between header and data cells by looking at the layout and visual presentation of the table. Blind or severly vision impaired people can’t do that. For a table to be accessible to people using a screen reader or some other non-visual user agent, it needs to tell the user agent how the information it contains is related.

Fortunately, HTML provides plenty of elements and attributes for that. Less fortunate is the fact that it can be pretty difficult to understand how to use some of these accessibility features. In this article, I’ll try to explain how most of them can be used.

03 Aug 06

his article will go through some useful techniques I use to get my sites to look the same in several modern browsers. It’s fairly easy to send out different versions of your site to different browsers. This should be avoided though since it will end up with you having to maintain the site as if it was in fact several. That defeats the whole purpose with standards, why are they even needed if you are adapting to the browsers instead? My opinion is that good cross-browser coding is to find the set of standards that are supported and then use them.

CSS forces you to make a choice in your coding techniques, a choice that becomes more obvious the larger a site grows. As the amount of variance between different templates increases, you can go in one of two directions: you can either code for redundancy, or code for dependency.

20 Jul 06

Progressive enhancement is an approach to web design that builds documents for the least capable devices first, then moves on to enhance those documents with separate logic for presentation, in ways that do not place an undue burden on baseline devices bu - jonphipps on 2006-07-20

In the first half of the article I will discuss a common display problem for all these show/hide techniques, and offer a solution how to overcome it. In the second half I will extend the concept, by offering an alternative technique to show and hide eleme - jonphipps on 2006-07-20

I’ve tried to create a form-styling solution that is both accessible and portable (in the sense that I can move the code from one project to the next). Floats have often provided a solution to my problem, but given the complexity of some layouts and the - jonphipps on 2006-07-20

This isn’t rocket science, but I’ve started thinking more and more about the most efficient way to build out markup and CSS. I’ve always varied my process a little bit depending on my environment and the circumstances, but I’ve finally settled on - jonphipps on 2006-07-20