Nifty Corners
The W3C has provided a property in CSS-3 called border-radius, which (according to the spec) is supposed to finally allow us designers to not need to use images to create the effect of having curved edges on boxes anymore. And this is great!
The only problem is that border-radius is universally UN-supported outside of Safari beta 3, and until it has better browser support, most of us will continue to use images for curved edges, but, a guy named Alessandro Fulciniti decided to do otherwise...
He came up with a brilliant JavaScript alternative, called Nifty Corners. (Now called Nifty Cube). Here is one such example.
With just a few lines of required CSS, and a <script> call to a nifty.js file you can have curved edges on any div element you choose. No opening up of an image editor, no GIF or JPEG decision to make, no "save for web" required.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="niftyCorners.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="niftyPrint.css" media="print">
<script type="text/javascript" src="nifty.js"></script>
Continue reading Comments (0) Jul 20, 2007
Words not of an everyday sort
Programming languages are often associated with using long-winded words, that sound more like rocket science, rather than plain English. And this is one of the reasons programmers are paid top dollar, they can decipher what appears to be gibberish to everyone else... they can crack the code.
So what I'm going to TRY to do here is make a list of the most convoluted programming terms, and also show their equivalent in plain old, ordinary English.
- concatenate [ combine ]
- exception [ error ]
- function [ action ]
- instantiate [ creation ]
- serialize [ format ]
- synchronize [ matching ]
- transient [ temporary ]
- volatile [ fragile ]
- More?
If you'd like to add to this list, or provide a BETTER suited word, feel free to chime in. This should be a pretty fun experiment.
Comments (0) Jul 10, 2007
Quirks Mode - what it is, and how to deal with it
There's been some question about what quirks mode is, and the parallel question, what standards mode is. For many web designers, these are still unknown words - so I hope we can clear some of this up and give a platform for further learning.
Up until version 5 browsers, there was a lot of non-standard rendering (unusual spacing, padding, margins, browser-proprietary HTML tags, etc.) built into user agents (browsers). A lot of this behavior didn't conform to the W3C rendering recommendations at all, but it was what we worked with, and we got very used to it.
And then came the move to standards, with Document Type Declarations (DTD) and all that. But how can new browsers handle those legacy pages, which still exist all over the web, and that depend on "quirky" behavior in order to look good?
Continue reading Comments (0) Jul 08, 2007
