Long form design is one of the most challenging aspects of my job, this is in part due to the restrictions of styling these elements, the most difficult being the select box.
This does not bother me so much as long as I am able to give balance to the form to make it usable and fit well within the design. This is not so easy as Internet Explorer does some odd things to Check boxes and Radio buttons.
It is very important to present a design to a client in best way possible so that they can visualise how the design will translate to the end product. The design can only communicate so much to a client, it is difficult to easily incorporate a sites narrative and interactions into a design, and it’s is usually impractical to do so.
Since I started as a web developer I have simply supplied a client with a high quality JPEG image of their new website design, usually via email, to view on their PC or Mac. This appeared to work well enough, communicating such common elements as layout, fonts and colour. But is that enough? Is it possible to provide more information to a client in a design without jumping into the build phase?
Today the following post arrived in my RSS Inbox:
http://www.shauninman.com/archive/2008/05/05/css_qualified_selectors
Shaun Inman is a leading voice on the web, so when he talks about proposing new features to the CSS Working Group a lot of people will listen. His idea about the creation of CSS Qualified Selectors are well thought-out and his examples more than justify the proposals. Anything that reduces the number of unique ID’s and classes in HTML code can only help with building and maintaining websites.
It’s true that it will be a long time till we can take advantage of this, if the proposals are accepted. But in my view the idea would be a great addition to the CSS specification.
It’s been a while since the news broke of Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo, but today all the speculation is over as Microsoft has walked away from the merger. It appears Mirosoft’s valuation of £24.1 billion is too cheap for a seemingly failing company like Yahoo.
When the news broke I was positive that a Yahoo/Microsoft merger would only benefit Internet users. I understand most people see Microsoft as the big bad software company, and that may be true. However Microsoft Live, the companies online arm, cannot be tainted in the same way. Instead in the online world this honour goes to Google.
Unfortunately time to post regularly has been hard to come by recently as I’m working flat out on the next version of this website. Also plans are afoot for a of a series of posts centered around a single subject, this will come as soon as a find a spare couple of hours to write it.
For this post I want to state my views on the growing hype around CSS3.
Firstly CSS3 looks awesome, and will very likely change the way sites look and how they are built. It’s a pity that we still have such a long wait till we get to play with it. At the moment the specifications are still being worked on, so until they are finished we don’t know exactly what we’re getting, but even when these are released we have more time to wait.
From the people behind the Photoshop tutorial site PSDTuts comes NetTuts, a new tutorial site focusing on web based developments. Hopefully this site will follow the successful template set by it’s sister site PSD Tuts and provide well written tutorials with good downloadable examples all surrounded in a clean design void of obtrusive ads.
