A transmission from the deep south.
You must check out this completely awesome exploration of what’s possible with modern web typography, with installations by Frank Chimero, Jason Santa Maria, and Naz Hamid.
The project (codenamed Operation Condor) was unveiled today as Lost World’s Fairs, to celebrate the release of IE9 and its support for WOFF webfonts (pity about the rest). It’s a tour de force of texture, colour and bravura web technique. Hat’s off.
A useful jQuery plugin developed by Dave Rupert and Trent Walton for the forthcoming Operation Condor, that splits an HTML element into its component letters, words or lines for easier CSS styling. From the announcement:
We developed a really simple, lightweight, easy to use jQuery plugin, we’re calling it “Lettering Dot JS”, and we’re releasing it today for free over on Github. Let me demo it for you:
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HTML5 video player with fallback support for IE and Opera. Image-free interface, skinnable via CSS, works with iPhone OS and supports H.264, Ogg Theora and WebM. No native full-screen playback, but I suspect that’s a browser API problem that will eventually be solved. (via John Ballinger)
Neven Mrgan’s new blog:
My goal is to collect examples of creative, innovative, and unexpected use of emerging web technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. It’s an itch I need scratched for myself, and something I expect others will find useful too.
Even if Firefox, IE, and Opera halted development today and added no new features, Apple and others on the WebKit team would be working their butts off to make the web richer — because they want it for themselves.
— Neven Mrgan, The WebKit monopoly. (via WebKitBits)
A jQuery plugin to style checkboxes, drop-down menus, radio buttons and file upload inputs the same across all browsers. Includes default themes by Josh Pyles and Made by Sofa, plus tools to build your own. (via Tim Van Damme)
A clever jQuery plugin by Jason Feinstein that co-opts the <canvas> element to provide true text wrapping around irregularly-shaped images. (via CSS Beauty)
Slick single-serve site — with nice interface touches — for displaying a user’s platform, browser, screen and window size, Flash version, JavaScript/cookie status and more. Perfect for giving to clients while troubleshooting.
Mark Pilgrim’s thorough investigation of HTML5’s <video> element provides a huge amount of general background about codecs and containers, plus useful hands-on direction for implementing cross-browser video in a standards-compatible manner, with fallbacks for Internet Explorer. There’s still no single container/codec combination that works for every platform, but Mark’s two-file solution is a good compromise. Contains some fascinating detail on the future of H.264 licensing as well. (via John Gruber)
If a font file fails to return, the page is blocked in IE, the text isn’t displayed in Chrome, and the browser’s busy indicators never stop in IE, Firefox, and Chrome.
— Sobering advice from Steve Souders regarding the use of @font-face custom font declarations in websites, particularly in relation to possible outages if your files are hosted by a third-party service. (via Jeffrey Zeldman)
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email me.
