I know I only used the new IE7 for a couple hours, but it has to go. To be fair: the CSS support has gotten much better than the last build I tried. But the simple fact is: everyone sending me bugs here at work is most likely using IE6, so I just need to be having the same experience as them to figure out what’s going on.

In other news: giving the new Firefox 2.0 alpha 1 (what kind of name is “Bon Echo” anyway?) a quick spin and liking it so far (hat tip to WaSP).

As much as I love Make Magazine, I still cannot let them go without a big slap for using Helvetica (actually Helvetica Neue) for the default typeface on their new website. I work in design, I have both of those, but still: It renders like crap on PCs!™

So just the other day Alex added his shiny new Vanilla forum to CSSBeauty.com. Then he posted a quite helpful thread in there where he gathered together a bunch of good CSS articles from the past year which made the Number one slot on Del.icio.us/popular and made the front page of Digg. This made his hosting company very unhappy so he’s been forced to pretty much shut down the beauty as a whole for the moment. Point being: if anyone knows any place that might be interested in helping him out with hosting, feel free to chime in on it.

Update: Alex has resolved his situation and is in the process of moving to a new host.

Alex has gone all nutty and added his own Vanilla powered forum to CSSBeauty called SkillShare.

Dear (what I assume to be mostly Mac-based) Web/CSS designers.

I really do agree with the groups of you out there that like Helvetica, I think it’s a wonderful font family. However, I think you should all be aware that it renders like ass poorly in Firefox and IE for windows regardless of the “font smoothing” settings I choose for my system.

So, seriously, consider giving something a little more “mainstream” (and/or designed for screen use instead of print) a shot. I know, Arial is lame, but have you tried giving Verdana or Tahoma (at an equally small size) a shot lately?

Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages

We ask that you please update your pages to not use these CSS hacks. If you want to target IE or bypass IE, you can use conditional comments .

Remember all those CSS hacks everyone had to learn to get stuff to work right? (* html anyone?) All of those will make pages break in IE7 now. So all that stuff you did totally in CSS with hacks in it? Now you’ll have to go back and recode all that CSS to move your hacks into Conditional Comments to just give them to the version of IE that needs them.

A good read for how CSS selectors and specificity work, for the nerd set:

Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and geeks!

A few weeks back in Cupertino, I saw Molly and Aaron explain how the specificity of CSS selectors is calculated in a way which I hadn’t seen before. Then today I came across a knotty problem while building XHTML and CSS templates for a new project where two selectors behaved differently to how I expected and I realised that I had not completed my training.

More related info at Molly.com as well.

So I have this friend who runs one of the more popular CSS showcase sites. And every now and then he shares with those of us that know him a snippet from his barrage of emails he gets slammed with every day. Today he had this to share.

Hi, I really enjoy your site. It is well designed, as are the sites you showcase. However, is there any way we can see the CSS for the sites you are showcasing? If not, I don’t see much benefit beyond the “ooh-aah” of looking at a well-designed site.

It’s 2005 and there are people trying to build web sites who have never heard of view source?

Web Development Trends for 2006 from Anil Dash has some interesting little bits for everyone to mull over when thinking about the coming year.

Curious about what technologies and techniques are going to be popular in the coming months and into the next year? Well, our crack team of editors here at dashes.com (that is to say, me) have assembled a list of up-and-coming trends that you should keep an eye on. Call it vocational education for people building Web 2.0.

BBEdit CSS Syntax Checker 1.0

If you work on CSS using either of Bare Bones Software’s text editors, you might be interested in my latest project: CSS syntax checking scripts for BBEdit and TextWrangler. They’re a combination of Perl and AppleScript that allows you to syntax-check CSS files using the W3C’s CSS Validation Service. Errors and warnings from the validation service are displayed in a results browser, very similar in effect to BBEdit’s built-in HTML syntax checker.

Hat tip to Chris.

…Slashdot goes CSS?

After almost 8 years, Slashdot’s HTML is finally getting an overhaul. For now the changes are almost entirely under the hood, as we migrate the current skin to CSS. Slashdot itself will migrate in the next few weeks, but for now, we’d appreciate it if people who understand CSS could take a look at Slashcode.

So while in New York I picked up a copy of Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide to read on the train while I was headed home. And I will admit that once the author gets into the sections on actual CSS it makes for a decent primer. However, being a fairly particular nerd, the first 30 pages (on XHTML) had me on that tenuous borderline between “somewhat bothered by gaps” and “machete wielding bloody rampage”.

So without further ado, here’s some of what bothered me so much.

1. Declare a Doctype (Page 12)
   If the author of the book is to be taken at strict face value then the only doctypes available are XHTML1.0 Strict, or HTML4.01 Transitional and 4.01 Transitional framesets. No mention is made at all of XHTML1.0 Transitional or XHTML1.1 or what makes the various flavors of XHTML doctypes different (target=”_blank” anyone?).
2. Using encoded values for special characters (Page 16)
   While the author makes it a point to say “if you want to use an ampersand you must use an encoded ambersand”, he totally shoots past that ampersands used in URLs and links must be encoded as well. Obviously the argument can be made that if it’s meant for one, it’s meant for all, but that’s not the way the rules worked in HTML4 so I (personally) wouldn’t want to just assume that everyone would pick up on that change. (Wevah has pointed out that I’m a retard and that actually was the rule in HTML4, I guess I didn’t think of that since I never used to really validate stuff way back then. Either way, it’s a thing that a lot of people tend to glide past without paying attention to.)
3. You can also use the @import tag to link to a style sheet… (Page 19)
   @import is a CSS directive used between style tags, not a tag unto itself (which would imply an <@import /> syntax of some sort).
4. Code example (Page 22)
   It could just be a quirk of how it was laid out or edited, but if you just strip the text off this page and keep the example code then there is one start div that ends twice.
5. These same markup techniques can also be applied to the abbr (abbreviation) tag. (Page 23)
   Despite coining a new acronym that would be a perfect match for this situation IDWIMIE, nobody feels the need to mention that abbr doesn’t work in Internet Explorer.
6. A personal peeve that I can’t find the right page for
   alt is an attribute, NOT A TAG!

Having the neighbors clog up all the washing machines when I need to be doing laundry for my NYC trip makes for a good time to finally record that “about the new site” podcast I threatened in one of my test posts. It’s my first attempt at recording with a laptop so there’s a bit of odd noise (and Bailey barks a couple times in the background) but I think it came out alright.

• Firefox Hacks
• Firefox Hacks: Hack #27 - Fix Web Servers to Support Firefox Content
• Comprehensive guide to .htaccess
• Mod_Rewrite
• Textpattern
• WordPress

I totally spaced on the fact I was suppsoed to be redesigning everything over here for the CSSReboot. I started a new design, I just never got around to rebuilding anything. Crap.

I forsee fun times ahead.

go go firefox action!