Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with CSS, DOM Scripting, and XHTML
Author: Cameron Adams
- Be inspired by 10 web design lessons from 10 of the worlds best web designers
- Get creative with cutting-edge XHTML, CSS, and DOM scripting techniques
- Learn breathtaking design skills while remaining standards-compliant
Here at friends of ED, we know that as a web designer or developer, your work involves more than just working to pay the bills. We know that each day, you strive to push the boundaries of your medium, unleashing your creativity in new ways to make your websites more engaging and attractive to behold, while still maintaining cross-browser support, standards compliance, and accessibility.
That's why we got together ten of the world's most talented web designers to share their secrets with you. Web Standards Creativityis jam-packed with fresh, innovative design ideas. The topics range from essential CSS typography and grid design, effective styling for CMS-driven sites, and astonishing PNG transparency techniques, to DOM scripting magic for creating layouts that change depending on browser resolution and user preference, and better print layouts for web pages. We're sure you will find something here to inspire you!
This full-color book's examples are not just stunning to look at, but also fully standards-compliant, up-to-date, and tested in current browsers including Internet Explorer 7. Playing by the rules doesn't have to mean drab or dull websitesWeb Standards can be fun!
Table of Contents:
About the Technical Reviewer ixAcknowledgments xi
Getting Creative with Web Standards xiii
Layout Magic 1
Semantic Structure, Dirty Pretty Presentation 2
The brief 5
Semantic structure 7
Dirty pretty presentation 9
Background images 9
Background, masthead, and menu 10
Content highlights 18
Conclusion 23
Taming a Wild CMS with CSS, Flash, and JavaScript 24
Setting the scene 26
A crash course on CMS 28
The CMS challenge 29
Design on a dime 30
The visual elements 30
The markup is but a shell 32
The layout and styles 35
The typography 40
Spit and polish 44
Issues with the design 45
Such a #teaser 47
Taking care of Internet Explorer 48
Conclusion 49
New York Magazine: My, What a Classy [left angle bracket]body[right angle bracket] 50
Mo' metro, mo' style 52
Getting started 53
Structuring the CSS 55
Adding a layer of style 57
Negative margins and columns and stuff! Oh my! 58
Getting column-tastic (finally) 60
My class-fu is unstoppable 62
Intelligent modules 68
Additional classes, additional control 71
Starting small (980 pixels' worth) 71
Tying in JavaScript 72
Summary 76
Designing for Outside the Box 78
Worries? 80
Worrying about the Web 80
Designing for WorrySome.net 80
Stop worrying, start with markup 82
Adding the content elements 82
Adding divisions from the content out 86
Satisfying your soul (with CSS) 88
Styling WorrySome.net 90
Dealing with legacy browsers 106
No worries! 107
Creative Use of PNG Transparency in Web Design 108
PNG, GIF, and JPEG 110
What is PNG? 110
So why is GIF still so popular? 110
What about JPEG? 110
Some great uses for the humble PNG 111
The gradient 111
The image that needs to work on any background 112
The translucent HTML overlay 113
The watermark 118
The mask 121
The color-changing icon 123
OK, but what browsers does it work in? 126
The Internet Explorer workaround: AlphaImageLoader 126
A real-world use of AlphaImageLoader 127
Conclusion 128
Effective Print Techniques Applied to CSS Design 129
Grid Design for the Web 130
What is a grid system? 132
Through the ages 132
Ratios and the canvas 134
Putting grid systems into practice 135
Beginning with the pen 136
Breaking down the elements 136
Designing the columns 138
Adding gutters, margins, and padding 139
What about colors and other visual elements? 140
Building the XHTML 141
Building the CSS 144
It's starting to look like a website 150
Issues with the design 152
Conclusion 152
Bridging the Type Divide: Classic Typography with CSS 156
A brief history of type 158
Know your text face 158
Introducing Georgia 158
The process 159
The right man for the job 159
A page for Poe 160
A readable line length 161
Paragraph indents 166
Drop caps 170
All caps 175
Text figures vs. titling figures 176
Small caps 177
Conclusion 180
DOM Scripting Gems 181
Print Magic: Using the DOM and CSS to Save the Planet 182
A printing technique is born 184
The basic idea 184
Preparing the foundations 185
Sectioning the page 185
Identifying the sections 187
Pseudocode first 137
Event planning 188
From pseudocode to real code 190
Recap: what these scripts do 195
What about the CSS? 197
A couple of refinements 198
Let's see it in action, already! 200
Sliding in the code 201
Styling the print links 203
Pulling it all together 204
Never mind all that-what about saving the planet? 205
Conclusion 206
Creating Dynamic Interfaces Using JavaScript 208
Different layouts for different needs 210
Resolution-dependent layouts 210
Browser size, not resolution 216
Multiple CSS files 216
Turning on the style 218
Optimizations for Internet Explorer 5.x 222
Modular layouts 223
The markup 226
Expanding and collapsing modules 226
Reorganizing modules 231
Keeping track of changes 240
Conclusion 241
Accessible Sliding Navigation 242
The killer feature 244
Accessibility basics 245
Accessibility guidelines 245
Accessibility and JavaScript 246
The accessible solution 246
Starting with pristine HTML 248
Adding the presentation 249
Switching between CSS states with JavaScript 250
Adding sliding behaviors 252
Where does the accessibility come in to it? 254
Low vision 255
Voice recognition 256
Screen readers 259
Keyboard-only use 259
Conclusion 260
Index 261
Go to: Probiotic and Prebiotic Recipes for Health or Skywalker
The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century
Author: John Brockman
A brilliant ensemble of the world’s most visionary scientists provides twenty-five original never-before-published essays about the advances in science and technology that we may see within our lifetimes.
Theoretical physicist and bestselling author Paul Davies examines the likelihood that by the year 2050 we will be able to establish a continuing human presence on Mars. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi investigates the ramifications of engineering high-IQ, geneticially happy babies. Psychiatrist Nancy Etcoff explains current research into the creation of emotion-sensing jewelry that could gauge our moods and tell us when to take an anti-depressant pill. And evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explores the probability that we will soon be able to obtain a genome printout that predicts our natural end for the same cost as a chest x-ray. (Will we want to read it? And will insurance companies and governments have access to it?) This fascinating and unprecedented book explores not only the practical possibilities of the near future, but also the social and political ramifications of the developments of the strange new world to come.
Also includes original essays by:
Lee Smolin
Martin Rees
Ian Stewart
Brian Goodwin
Marc D. Hauser
Alison Gopnik
Paul Bloom
Geoffrey Miller
Robert M. Sapolsky
Steven Strogatz
Stuart Kauffman
John H. Holland
Rodney Brooks
Peter Atkins
Roger C. Schank
Jaron Lanier
David Gelernter
Joseph LeDoux
Judith Rich Harris
Samuel Barondes
Paul W. Ewald
Publishers Weekly
Agent Brockman has collected 25 of his writers to discuss the future of science in their respective fields of study. Several of these writers surpass ordinary trend spotting to entertain some rather pulse-quickening ideas completely beyond the kin of the so-called dominant paradigm. And some are of a magnitude to radically advance the nature of humans' interaction with each other, the planet and beyond. The neurologist Robert Sapolsky, for example, posits that sadness will take its place alongside AIDS and Alzheimer's as the most notorious medical disasters of the next half-century. Brockman, who is also an author-editor (The Third Culture; The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years, etc.), divides his collection into two parts: the future in theory and the future in practice. Theoretical topics include cosmology, what it means to be alive, the nature of consciousness and the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence. Mars exploration, DNA sequencing, neuroscience, child rearing and the like are addressed in the practical half. These essays can be quite technical, intended as they are to make the latest scientific information available for cross-disciplinary research. The intellectual adventures collected here point to a future that is dazzlingly bright, at least to the eyes of these unorthodox thinkers. The general public, for whom these essays are also written, should be similarly bedazzled. (May 21) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
How will the world change over the next 50 years as a result of scientific research and discovery? Providing a forum in which more profound meanings for the future of humankind and science are theorized, Brockman, a noted literary agent specializing in science writers, compiled this collection of essays by leading scientists from various disciplines. One piece by Marc D. Hauser, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think, demonstrates science's present and future ability to alter brain tissue across species and manipulate genetic material, but asks, Should we? Robert M. Sapolsky (biological sciences and neurology, Stanford Univ.) illustrates how societal forces, such as divorce rates, transient lifestyles, and a technology that raises expectations, will continue to contribute to one of our most serious epidemics, depression. Brockman's intriguing view that popularized scientific writing, benefiting both scientists and lay people, has created a new "public culture" is well demonstrated in this work. Recommended for academic and large public libraries. Loree Davis, Broward Cty. Lib., Fort Lauderdale, FL Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Enterprising editor/literary agent/Web-site meister Brockman (The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years, 2000, etc.) is at it again, cajoling his buddies to speculate on what brave new world lies half a century ahead. In Part I, theoreticians ponder whether we will ever understand the Big Bang, learn the origin of time, or arrive at a quantum theory of gravity. Maybe yes, but we may still be in the dark about why elementary particles have the masses they do or whether we are alone in the universe (or multiverse). A mathematician sees hope for computer-aided proofs to resolve celebrated problems. A biologist conjectures that all the stuff we call emergent properties (like consciousness and feelings) are really not emergent but present in matter; he opts for a new science of qualities. Others also call for new paradigms that would enable us to read the minds of animals, understand how brains learn, see psychology mature toward the study of love, aesthetic judgment, and moral development. Maybe we will even create life. Amidst the optimism comes an essay speculating that stress and depression will increase and another that suggests we may be bystanders in awe of ever-smarter computers. In Part II, "In Practice," Richard Dawkins suggests we could eliminate our species-ism by letting a surrogate mom birth a latter-day Lucy. Other practitioners envision the merger of flesh and machines, virtual schools where kids will experience reality, and information-beam fantasies limited only by complexity "ceilings." Medical speculations include the idea that discoveries of genetic variants that increase susceptibility will revolutionize treatment of mental illness. At the same time, there will benew interest in studying wellness and what protects people from adversity. A final essay suggests that in 50 years we may discover that chronic diseases from cancer to schizophrenia are infectious in origin. An ample anthology whose chief virtue lies in each presenter's snapshot history of a field: where we are, how we got there, where we might be headed
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