Alexander Sperl » Web Development

The 14 Best Tutorials for Designing Forms in HTML/CSS

Alexander Sperl — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:20:59 +0000

Alright, here’s one for the Thursdays’ group in Presenting Content. I have tried to find useful tutorials for styling HTML forms and came up with a list of 14.

Hope you find something that is worth redoing.

Sources:

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Don’t use the emboss effect on body text

Alexander Sperl — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 09:08:27 +0000

Why? Well, I’m almost certain that it messes up the readability of longer texts.

I came across a couple of websites recently that use the following CSS bits on dark body text

text-shadow: 0 1px 0 #fff;

or some such thing. Of course, sometimes including the vendor-specific extensions as well.

Please, don’t that. I pretty sure that it makes body text harder to read and I’m not quite sure whether it really looks that good. I mean, I haven’t got any scientific studies at hand and it somehow looks good in the beginning but once you try to read it, your eyes are complaining sooner or later. At least my eyes are.

I will conduct a non-representative study about this but until then: Please only use this effect for headlines. Please!

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Padding is a Strange Creature

Alexander Sperl — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:20:22 +0000

While redesigning my pages, I came across an odd behaviour when trying to manage a white box and the padding within it. This tells you a lot about browser defaults and how they can be a pain.

Have a look at the following piece of code:





Margin Padding Test





 Hello!
 Blabla


 First Heading
 blabla
 Second Heading
 blablabla

Keep your eye on where it says content { padding: 0; }. This is how the page now looks like in Firefox (3.6):

CSS Details: content { padding: 0; }

And now, let’s change the padding in the content div to 0 0 1px 0. And here’s the result, again in Firefox (3.6):

CSS Details: content { padding: 0 0 1px 0; }

Man, how can you take anything for granted after you see the bottom padding here… Maybe those browser reset stylesheets are not such a bad idea after all… At least it looks the same in FF and IE.

The person who can come up with the best explanation will get a pat on the back with this machine.

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New VCT Portal

Alexander Sperl — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:45:30 +0000

Aaaah! Finally.

Today sees the launch of the new portal of the Virtual Center for Teacher Training. Actually, it looks like the old one, but ask our programmer and he will tell you how much work he put in there.

Inform yourself about the site and its new features at the VCT.

So now the world has two important things going on on this date .

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Google Chrome (surfing on hype waves)

Alexander Sperl — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:21:04 +0000

Well, well, well, well, well… What’s this all about?

Google release a browser today and of course everybody is downloading it and commenting on it. I have to, too. Do I? I’d rather write about the high tides of hype that we are able to surf on once again.

Surprisingly, I didn’t hear about Chrome until today, when the BBC International News feed on my netvibes page showed the headline “Google launches internet browser”. Besides the fact that the site for the browser was not available for another 18 hours or so, it is interesting to see that it took even heise.de some time to publish a news item on this. But by now, everybody will have something on Chrome (just checking delicious: 1212 entries 2 hours after the launch, a bit disappointing actually…).

I must admit, I have downloaded and installed the version they are currently offering the moment the page came online. It’s version 0.2 something and I’m not very impressed. It’s a nice piece of software and it is very fast indeed, at least from my subjective opinion. It does some things other browsers don’t do, it has been ‘inspired’ by some other browser (by that I mean Opera) and it does some things that I don’t want it to do (but maybe I’m too finicky about my harddisc and the files on it). It passes the Acid2 and fails the Acid3 test. Still it displays all pages fine that I usually work on. In other words, it’s just another browser.

Still, it’s a browser created and distributed by Google, which very much makes it an object that all the big news portals think it is worth writing about. Does it make the lives of users better? Time will tell. Does it make the lives of web developers and web designers easier. Hardly, because it is yet another browser with faulty standards support and a potential to be a thread for the other big players just because Google is always good for a headline.

Hey, you might say. Scott McCloud did a comic for them. Yes, he is one of my heroes, too. Still, did you see the comic?

After all, I might be just too negative about it all. Let’s just wait for how it turns out and then we can all write some more posts on Google Chrome. What would we do if it wasn’t for Google?

Update: Today’s edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung had an article on page one. It said that Google is giving away its browser for free (!) in order to attack Microsoft. Can anyone tell me, if there’s a browser that is not for free? I mean, one with a market share of more than 0.1%? How over-the-top is that? If you are multi-billion dollar company, I guess you don’t have to care for marketing your products anymore, because journalists will do the job for you. However, there are slight hints towards critical undertones in the article as well, something about data security and such… Still, as far as I get it, Chrome is still very much beta. And they all make such a big fuzz about it. Is it really that important?

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Interesting Links #6

Alexander Sperl — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:56:22 +0000

It’s time for a new edition of Interesting Links.

Nick La has gathered some very nice Single-Page Portfolio Sites at his Web Designer Wall. Some interesting concepts and a lot of high end use of web dev techniques. I personally love We Bleed Design for its fancy PNG effects and Fröjd for its simplicity.

Then, there is the Reverse Graffiti Project. If you don’t know what reverse graffiti is, go and have a look at the video. Incredible!

For those of you who haven’t heard this already: NASA has their photos online on a new website called NASA Images (you would have guessed) powered by Internet Archive. If you’re not into astronomy, you will still like the trippy images anyway…

And finally, especially for my students, there’s the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, “a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics.”

Well, isn’t there something here for everyone of you?

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Acid3

Alexander Sperl — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:29:42 +0000

There’s been a lot of fuzz going on about the necessity of the Acid3 test. It was about time that someone wrote about this all with some soberness.

Here are some articles which I guess are worth reading about the tests that push browsers to the limit:

Oh, and just in case, someone forgot: This is why you should use semantic markup.

All articles have been listed in the ever so useful newsletter “Web Design References” by Laura Carson which can be subscribed to at: http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdevlist

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7 minutes to spare…

Alexander Sperl — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:21:26 +0000

… and you really, really, really don’t know what to do? Well, let’s see how many CSS properties you can name.

This is how I did in this quiz:

Where did that time come from???

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Interesting Links #1

Alexander Sperl — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 12:04:00 +0000

I decided to post links in my blog from time to time that are too interesting to get thrown into my del.icio.us vault. Let’s start off with three of them:

There are a lot of things to be discovered at Dan Fietsam’s site, although there are far too many Bud ads there. At least for someone from Germany like me. No offence…
Molly Holzschlag talks about the future of web standards at Vitamin. It’s a must read.
Interesting navigation solution: XRS Nowe Media from Poland.

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