I love coming into an answer machine message which is just another machine telling me of an opportunity somewhere! Today’s was a machine telling my machine that there was a message for me and the message was, “Mail gone” - so seems like that message didn’t hang around long enough on their machine for the other machine to tell my machine! Who needs humans???
The newest transparency-ping-fix kid on the block is from Uninteractive Labs and manages to make the simplest, smallest and most versatile png fix for IE so far.
For thos unfamiliar with the transparency woes of web designers, a png file allows to a very sophisticated transparent overlay technique that other file types simply don’t allow - jpeg has no transparency at all and GIF has a very crude on/off style transparency. PNGs alpha transparency allows background elements to be seen beneath your image. Its all very lovely and allows web designers greater flexibility when designing their slick, web 2.0 style sites. As usual however, the main stumbling block is Internet Explorer 6 and below (and those users who insist on using them). IE6 doesn’t display PNGs with alpha transparency correctly - instead of the transparency you get a dull grey/blue block around your image which looks awful. Now there is the ability build right into windows to show png files correctly in IE - but for some reason, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom turned this off in their pre IE7 web browsers.
Traditionally, in order to recall the alpha functionality in IE6, the designer would have to write a separate style sheet targeting IE6 (yes, firefox, navigator, opera, konquerer, camino…etc. all managed to include alpha functionality into their systems), and each background png file would be individually targeted and have Microsoft’s AlphaImageLoader string applied, and some cute javascript applied to img tags for inline images. Then a range of JavaScript fixes were made available by independent developers. These would allow alpha transparency to be applied almost automatically, so long as the designer jumped through a couple of low-and-wide hoops first and target them correctly, they applied the necessary transparency elements with out too much pain. These js files were certainly useful and to some extent satisfied a desperate need for a simpler method of applying the png fix. The best of these methods I found was iepngfix.htc by Twin Helix but I often found this method a little flakey and it would occasionally miss apply elements or not apply them at all - other times it would work a treat. I founfd also, that when using pngs for buttons or links, I would have to apply cursor:pointer; to the link’s CSS. So another fix method was still desired.
So enter Uninteractive Labs. Their fix is the smallest I’ve come across, weighing in at just 2kb. It doesn’t require any additional CSS entry nor any additional coding other than to call the script. So a conditional comment to call the js file when IE6 or below is present and bob’s your uncle!
You can download the javascript file and its partnering black.gif from the Uninteractive Labs website.
This has to be the best new in a long time. According to Ars Technica, mozilla are producing a plugin for Internet Explorer to address its lack of ‘canvas‘ support. This in itself is a great thing - but where might it end? Could this see Firefox ‘fixing’ all of IE’s bugs? Would the people who use IE and are blissfully unaware that they are browsing the web with an awful browser and are being denied the rich web experience that the rest of us enjoys, actually install such a plugin? Surely only those who are forced to use IE in their work or college and are aware of the drawbacks of doing so, will bother to install the plugin. All other users who are still using old browsers or defaulting to the windows browser because that’s what the computer comes with… aren’t going to install any plugin ever! Of course, mozilla have thought of this, and has enlisted the help of Adobe, so such a plugin could ‘piggy-back’ on a flash-style update.
We’ll see what happens, but its a very positive step for web development!
So, what do: semantic naming conventions; semantic or not; what is web standards anyway?; speech impediments; accessibility and wcag 2.0; have in common? Well, they’re all half-written blog posts that haven’t made it to the shubox blog… yet. I’m sure you’ll agree that they are, for the most part, tantalisingly interesting titles - and I’m sure that they would have been (and still will be with any luck) interesting, impassioned, thought-provoking and in places misguided ramblings on contemporary web design issues. For some reason however, I find myself unable to complete some of my blog posts. Sometimes this is due to workload - other times it might be down to completely losing the plot or when that special and all too allusive moment of clarity has dissipated.
Whatever the reason, I feel that I have robbed myself, if not the world, of a few decent insights into how my mind works and how my thoughts and views relate to my contemporaries. In any field its important to contemporise ones own development and knowledge - this doesn’t mean blindly agreeing with every new trend that abounds, but understanding why you don’t agree.
A good, well researched blog post can help form ones own opinion on a particular subject more fully that reading someone else’s opinion, and can facilitate a greater clarity that ultimately breeds a genuine insight. It’s this insight that I feel that I risk losing (or not even achieving) with these half finished blog-posts and although I will strive to complete them (particularly now that I’ve highlighted their existence here - I’m now pretty much obligated to) I do wonder how many full-time small-world web designers (or anyone else for that matter) manage to create interesting and regular blog content or are they too sitting on a backlog of unfinished works of genius?.
Finally there’s a wordpress app in the iphone/iPod touch appstore!! I’m writing this using the new app and it works well and has a nice, smooth and logical layout. Recommended!!!
I don’t normally post stuff like this, but I thought it was interesting and clever… so have a butchers!
Clever!
Finally Moo Cards are doing proper sized business cards. Now I’ll have to sort myself out to design something special and buy a handful.
Well, it sounds daft but I find it a hindrance to my blogging activity to have to visit this site and log on and then use the admin interface to write a blog post. So I have begun looking around and desktop alternatives. After a little research I’ve decided to go with Ecto because it looks nice. With any luck its behave nicely too and I’ll have my desired app at the first attempt!!
Ooooh, I forgot to mention, I have posted this blog-post using Ecto and then edited it in Ecto when I realised that I’d forgotten to mention that I wrote it in Ecto 
Ok, so I spend my time building websites for other people and hopefully establishing their web identity in the process. But what about shubox? It’s well documented that hairdressers often have the worst hair styles, well, web designers are no different - my hair’s a mess! my web identity is a mess! So, with a little time on my hands yesterday I’ve begun the redesign/reinvent process and this is the result… so far!
