A transmission from the deep south.
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)
Following extensive testing, Joe Leech and Fiz Yazdi conclude that users do scroll beyond the fold in the vast majority of cases, and that cramming all of the content above this imaginary line might actually have the opposite effect:
The surprising thing we learnt was that actually having less above the fold (one large content block as opposed to 2 smaller ones) encouraged exploration below the fold.
IE6 lives on.
Box model—and heart—broken.position: fetal;
— Mat Marquis’s winning haiku in Dan Cederholm’s recent contest.
Jeffrey Zeldman and friends with a guide to the major niggles and inconsistencies in the HTML5 specification. Lots of valuable clarification, common sense and good suggestions here people. Plus there’s a unicorn at the bottom.
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email
