Scarf*oo

While I loved playing Lemmings, I never loved playing with IE. After spending a full week in bed, this is the first news I ended up stumbling into – IE8 Has Arrived. My head is still swimming around from the fever, so you’ll excuse me for not delving into the depths of this release.

If you’ve been looking for a nicer and free alternative to your old boring monospaced font, take a look at Inconsolata. While the author says he’s not done refining it yet, I’ve already been using it with pleasure for a while now, replacing the Bitstream Vera Sans.

If you are clueless about HTML 5, take a look at Christopher Schmitt’s Looking into HTML5 slides. No audio on the slides, but interesting to watch and read anyway.

Roughly another month and another issue of our beloved A List Apart is out on the webs with two fresh articles to dig your teeth into. This time it is Ethan Marcotte‘s time to write on Grid layouts, particularly on converting a traditional pixel-based fixed grid into a liquid one.
The second article written by Christina Wodtke is of a more philosophical nature as it delves into the social aspect of web applications.

Eeeeenjoy.

It was a pleasantly unexpected surprise to see that my favourite browser just got much better, more polished, and I must say, fancier too.

Safari version 4 sports new Chromesque tabs on the top of the window, a smart google-powered address field, a sexy coverflow history viewer and an even sexier favourites ‘Top Sites’ view.

This is a really nice upgrade to the ol’ and dull version 3. Get your beta version from apple’s website here.

If you are into em-based layouts, you probably want more precision when translating your photoshop designs into pixel-perfect HTML and CSS creations. Simply setting the font-size in your body element to 62.5%, will make sure that from now on, you can rely on the rule of 1em = 10 pixels.

body {
	font-size: 62.5%; /* 1em = 10px */
}

Note: Careful if you modify the font-size on a container element – that will break the 10px rule on all the contained elements!

This one’s got my heart pumping again – and it hasn’t happened in a while, mind you. I am talking about Mr. Jason Santa Maria and his latest article titled Making Modular Layout Systems over at 24ways.org.

The method is simple: write a bunch of well-thought classes, chain them together and you get a robust and versatile grid layout. A recommended read!

Roughly a month after the proposed recommendation status, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 have reached the final stage and it’s ready to be adopted.

Ever happened to you that after applying one of the many solutions for fixing IE’s png background image support, links on that element didn’t work? How about repeating background images? I bet most of you will nod in agreement. Well, Drew Diller from dillerdesign.com‘s got the solution for you. While his script fails to apply PNGs to the body element and to an img tag (for now), it solves the problem with background-position and background-repeat.

All you have to do is call the following script and voila, your headaches are over:

<!--[if IE 6]>
<script src="DD_belatedPNG.js"></script>
<script>
    DD_belatedPNG.fix('.png_bg'); //EXAMPLE
</script>
<![endif]-->

Head over to the DD_belatedPNG page for downloads and more examples.

On one hand you have a carefully written fast web site and on the other one, well, you have another carefully written web site that isn’t quite as performant – but why is it so?

The answer doesn’t lie in your web site’s size, but in the number of elements on your site, and consequentially the number of requests to the server to fetch those elements. Surely, you should always be careful to cut down image size, choose the appropriate image format, produce clean and nice (x)html and couple it with CSS, but as experienced web developers we already know that, right? Right?
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