CSS Drop Shadows
June 12th, 2006
The CSS2 text-shadow property makes it easy to add a drop shadow to a web page’s text, but so far it’s only supported by the Safari browser for OS X. Today we’re going to create CSS drop shadows for other browsers, including Firefox.
The text-shadow property has been around for a few years, allowing you control the colour, offset and blur of drop shadows below elements on your page. Although not widely supported, some designers have decided to use CSS text-shadows anyway, even if it only enhances their design for a relatively small number of users.
Tim Bray and Wikipedia
May 30th, 2006
I thought it an interesting coincidence that yesterday, Bob Rae mentioned Wikipedia during his keynote speech. Earlier that morning I had mentioned Wikipedia and politicians during my own presentation, so I decided to ask Bob about updating his own entry.
In an even more interesting coincidence, today’s keynote covered virtually the same topics I had been talking about yesterday – although admittedly with a bit more detail and eloquence.
...continue readingBob Rae and Wikipedia
May 29th, 2006
I was speaking at the Ontario Universities Computing Conference (OUCC) today about Knowledge & Learning in the Internet Age. I think it’s an interesting topic and there was some good discussion, but an hour didn’t leave us all that much time to cover the material in much detail.
During my presentation I talked about Wikipedia and how the accuracy of some topics can be in question—particularly for politically sensitive topics, or the entries for politicians.
...continue readingDigg Effect
May 25th, 2006
Hello to everyone visiting from Digg.com today. Dreamhost has set a connection limit to our site to allow only 25 users every 5 seconds in an effort to keep their webserver from crashing.
If the site doesn’t load properly, or you get a “Service Temporarily Unavailable” message, please be patient and try again in a minute or two. If you’re here to see the new Hoverbox Menu article, the nice folk at digg have also mirrored the page.
If this is your first time visiting, Top 5 Posts at Design Meme is a good article for reviewing some of the things I’ve posted here in the last few months.
Hoverbox Menu
May 23rd, 2006
After seeing the Hoverbox Image Gallery developed by Nathan Smith, I thought that a similar approach would work very nicely for a menu. This would allow you to create a much larger rollover image for each menu item, overlapping the neighbouring menu items and other elements on the page.
The original Hoverbox code uses two img elements, one for the thumbnail and one for the larger image. For a menu it’s more important to avoid duplicating the links themselves, and I also wanted to control the image with CSS rather than img elements. This meant making some changes to the original Hoverbox code.
Film Literacy Scorecard
May 8th, 2006
Jim Emerson recently published a list of what he considers the 101 102 basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.” I’ve noticed a few people post their personal movie literacy scorecards on their sites, and thought I’d do the same.
I haven’t been watching as many movies since my son was born, but I did go to film school, so I guessed I’d do okay. I’d at least be somewhat movie-literate—wouldn’t I?
...continue reading