Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

It should be theoretically possible with CSS to design a page where the type falls on a vertical grid. In reality, you rarely see this happen because multi-column sites make matching the grid values across the columns difficult, and browsers, particularly IE, have awkward ways of inserting inconsistent space around some block elements.
But the basic [...]

I’m putting enough energy into this particular theme that I think I might keep it around a while. Today I addressed a problem with my daily link posts, which come from del.icio.us with some embedded markup. The formatting of that markup was causing some bogus line breaks (on Firefox, the list bullet displayed on a [...]

I’m writing this working list so that I can keep a record of what I did to the Excel theme to get it the way I like it, as well as for anyone else who’s interested in learning how to hack up WordPress themes.
Issues:

The amount of vertical space consumed by the header region (seems to [...]

Today is CSS Naked Day 2007, a day when some thousand-plus web sites have cast off their styling to illustrate their semantically-beautiful bones beneath.
Which is why my site looks, um, weird. All the normal styling has been stripped out.
We do this to illustrate that the Web ain’t all pretty colors; at its root, it’s about [...]

International Herald Tribune: Quirky serifs aside, Georgia fonts win on Web. The thesis of the article is that, because of its use in some fairly high profile redesigns (the New York Times website among others), the font Georgia is undergoing a comeback. A slim thread on which to hang an article, particularly when [...]

As I keep forgetting to prove by posting some old work, I was once an ardent amateur typographer before the web rendered that pastime, as well as most desktop publishing, all but obsolete. As someone who used to code my favorite font family into my stylesheets on the off chance that someone would have Minion [...]

I’ve meant to blog The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web for quite a while but now (thanks to a sick day while I fight off the remnants of this cold) am finally getting around to it. The site is just what it says, a work in progress that takes each of the [...]

The second notable redesign today is at News.com. Reviewing this design is a little more difficult, because it’s harder to spot what has changed. The yellow is still there, now actually looking a little orange. The front page is still a total mess, and it’s still impossible to find an individual headline there. The URLs [...]

Two big sites unveiled new designs today. Salon (as pointed to by BoingBoing) and CNET’s News.com both rolled out new user interfaces. I’m a little mixed on the design effectiveness of both, but there are a few interesting corners in the mix too. I’ll write a quick post on CNET but want to focus on [...]

A trifecta of interesting CSS links in my aggregator this morning. First, Luke Melia points to an interesting post about maintainable CSS, and proposes modular CSS and Dave Hyatt’s rules for CSS use in Mozilla skins as possible solutions. For myself, I lean toward the former approach; I separated structural markup (the definition of header [...]

Alex Barnett blog: IE7 and CSS: the Acid2 test - Microsoft has now been challenged. This is a smart way to put the pressure on Microsoft to fix CSS support in their (aging, broken) browser: get a community effort going early in the development process to put together a comprehensive CSS test suite. This would [...]

mezzoblue: CMYK (for Those Who Do RGB). The post is actually a fantastic primer on all sorts of color related issues for those who grew up with RGB. When I was doing page layout for various independent and student magazines, it took me a long time to try to do anything in color for precisely [...]

Standards-Schmandards: An accessible bar chart. Very cool use of tables plus CSS to produce a graph that can be understood by a downlevel browser or screen reader.

Today is a low-posting day. I’m doing some coding on the site, adding a feature—and relearning a lot of CSS lessons I had forgotten. One of the nice things about the site is that I haven’t had to touch the CSS stylesheets in almost a year, but things have gotten a bit rusty in the [...]

Following up on an old thread, the reason that MSN Search thought my pages were in Chinese and other languages rather than English was a problem with the charset specified for my pages. My site used to specify its charset as Macintosh: <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=macintosh”>. Unfortunately, MSN’s search crawler doesn’t understand this charset. So [...]