Tag : HTML

First things first, this post is going to out me. Despite working at a digital agency, one that calls itself a "social technology" company no less, I don't know a whole lot about coding. In fact until last Thursday's Internet Week event Coding for Dummies hosted by BBH Labs and Google, I didn't know my <p> tag from my padding. Luckily for me, it turns out I'm not alone...

Typekit launched recently amid a tremendous buzz from designers and bloggers across the web.

What Typekit offers are ‘real’ fonts on the web. Don’t quite know what this means. Surely Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma et al are all ‘real’ fonts. I think what they mean is that there is now access to a huge library of extra fonts to employ in browser-based design beyond the standard set of ‘browser-safe’ fonts.

Isaac and I have been discussing how users consume media and news which has raised some interesting questions around online publishing. Specifically: how we construct content templates, how that content looks when it’s in place, art direction at a micro level and how we can create richer, more engaging and, importantly, more ‘useful’ reading experiences online.

Over the last 4-5 years there has been a gradual convergence in how most newspaper sites construct their article pages. Based on a grid system, they employ a wide central column for the body copy and a number of other columns, usually on the right of the screen, for related information, links to other stories, MPUs, tools, etc. We should know, we’ve designed a number of sites for media owners, as well as countless blogs that conform to these conventions.

I’ve been meaning to check out the more complex selectors in CSS 2.1 for a long time but never seemed to find the time to experiment. So having some downtime the other day I thought I should get constructive.

Descendant selectors seem well used in CSS these days and are a powerful way to target HTML elements within the page (for e.g. div.message p, which targets all p tags within div elements that have a class of ‘message’). It’s a good way to keep your HTML as clean as possible because it reduces the need to give every element on the page a unique id or a class for targeting purposes. And they’re well supported in all the major browsers that I usually test with – Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE down to 5.0.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files are great – the lovely little graphic file format that allows for a gradation from full colour to transparency within a graphic. It’s a handy little tool in your kit to help you translate a designer’s vision into a web page.

Well, handy in some browsers. In other browsers it’s more of a “hmmmm, how does this work?” kind of thing. Those “other browsers” being IE6 and IE5.5.