WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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Jeff Croft is a web and graphic designer focused on standards-based development who lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas. As the senior designer at World Online, Jeff works on such award-winning news sites as www.lawrence.com and www.ljworld.com. Jeff also runs a popular blog and personal site at www.jeffcroft.com, where he writes about many topics, including modern web and graphic design. Jeff has been making the Web about as long as there has been a Web to be made. He created his first web pages in 1994 using SimpleText and Netscape Navigator 1.1N on a Macintosh Performa 600. He started working on the Web full time in 1996 and has been at it ever since. Although Jeff enjoys technology and gadgets, what truly inspires him about the Web is its ability to communicate and connect people. Jeff is a constant consumer of design, finding inspiration nearly everywhere. When he’s not hunched over a computer, Jeff enjoys photography, music, film, television, and a good night out on the town.
110 PNG, GIF, and JPEG The PNG image has been widely overlooked by the web design community—and mostly for good reason. Until recently, it hasn’t been possible to take full advantage of the format and have it work reliably in all browsers. But, with proper PNG support in Internet Explorer 7, and some handy JavaScript and CSS tricks to account for older browsers, we can use PNG images to greatly enhance our design vocabulary. What is PNG? PNG, usually pronounced “ping,” stands for Portable Network Graphics. It is a losslessly compressed bitmap image format. In plain English, it’s a way of saving graphic images that reduces file size without reducing image quality. It was originally created as a replacement for the ubiquitous GIF format, which used to require a patent license for producers of imaging software to use it legally (the GIF/LZW patent has since expired, so this is no longer a factor). PNG is also an International Standard (ISO/ IEC 15948:2003) and an official W3C recommendation (www.w3.org/TR/PNG/). Besides being a freely available format, PNG offers several practical advantages over GIF for the web designer: Greater compression: For most images, PNG achieves a smaller file size than GIF. Greater color depths: PNG offers truecolor up to 48 bits, whereas GIF allows only 256-color palettes. Alpha-channel transparency: Whereas GIF offers only binary transparency, PNG allows for virtually unlimited transparency effects by enabling an alpha channel for transparency. It’s worth mentioning that PNG does not allow for animation, as GIF does. There is a related standard called Multiple-image Network Graphics (MNG, www.libpng.org/ pub/mng/) that does allow both, but it is not widely supported by web browsers or imaging software. So why is GIF still so popular? You’re probably wondering why PNG isn’t the most commonly used image format on the Web, if it’s as good as advertised. The answer, for the most part, lies in misconceptions about the format and the browser support for it. Because Internet Explorer 6 and lower do not support the full spectrum of PNG’s features (including alpha-channel transparency), people seem to believe (albeit erroneously) that Internet Explorer doesn’t support PNGs at all, or at least doesn’t support transparency. In reality, Internet Explorer 5 and 6 both support enough of the PNG spec to make PNG images functionally equivalent to (or better than) nonanimated GIF images. All other notable browsers—including Firefox, Netscape 6 and higher, Mozilla, Opera 6 and higher, Safari, and Camino— offer full support for PNG transparency. Besides the misconceptions about browser support, GIF’s built-in support for animation was (and continues to be) a key reason for its success. In recent years, however, this use of GIF has become less popular as other technologies (notably Flash) have become more common for animation. Transparency is a key feature of both GIF and PNG that is often the reason either one gets chosen as a web designer’s format of choice for a particular image element. Although PNG offers far more extensive support for transparency, web designers are often required to create GIF versions of the images as well to accommodate older browsers. Using CSS, it’s possible (and somewhat commonplace) to send GIF images to older browsers and higher-quality PNGs to browsers that understand them. But the creation of two images is extra work for the web designer, and this has often resulted in people settling on the lowest common denominator, which continues to be GIF images. In the end, there are several reasons why GIF is still so popular, but most of them are based on misconceptions or use case scenarios that are becoming less and less common. Armed with some new knowledge of how PNG works and how it can be used reliably across browsers, you should be able to take advantage of all that the format offers without having to rely on GIF. What about JPEG? JPEG, the Web’s other ubiquitous file format, is almost always a better choice than either PNG or GIF for photographic (or photo-like) images. PNG was not intended to compete with JPEG. JPEG’s lossy compression (which results in some reduction in quality each time the image is saved) will produce considerably smaller files than PNG when dealing with photos. PNG, on the other hand, will produce smaller files when the images within are text, line art, logos, flat colors, and so on.
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CAMERON ADAMS ~ MARK BOULTON ~ ANDY
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Web Standards Creativity: Innovatio
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Contents About the Technical Review
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PART 2: EFFECTIVE PRINT TECHNIQUES
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About the Technical Reviewer Molly
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Mark Boulton I’d like to thank Kh
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Getting Creative with Web Standards
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Figure 5. The Zen Garden is still g
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Layout Magic Welcome to Part 1 of o
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Before starting Erskine Design in 2
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6 Figure 1-2. The completed Dirty P
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Dirty pretty presentation When buil
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Background Next, we apply the main
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Finally, the main content selector
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The markup is as follows. Note that
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Unless you study the end result clo
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Tables Descendant selectors are ess
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These very simple rules, and the fa
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Conclusion Of course, building the
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Dan Rubin spends his days blending
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Figure 2-1. On the left, the origin
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The CMS challenge It doesn’t take
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The next step was spending some tim
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Videos Photos Extras Links Forum St
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Ever find yourself getting lost in
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z-index:100; left:29px; top:39px; m
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By looking at the markup generated
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Creating the illusion of vertical t
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The first argument defines the CSS
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Figure 2-9. Before (right) and afte
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Such a #teaser After styling the #t
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When time is of the essence, hacks
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Ethan Marcotte has been designing a
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Getting started The article templat
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Structuring the CSS Looking above t
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Adding a layer of style OK, enough
Page 76 and 77: A quick preview of our code at this
Page 78 and 79: For our narrow, 190-pixel-wide righ
Page 80 and 81: Strictly speaking, these class name
Page 82 and 83: Our column’s “background” wil
Page 84 and 85: Figure 3-14. The exact same templat
Page 86 and 87: Figure 3-17. The anatomy of our nar
Page 88 and 89: So there we have it: a single class
Page 90 and 91: Figure 3-21. The text size can be i
Page 92 and 93: anchor.setAttribute("href", "javasc
Page 95 and 96: 78 4 Designing for Outside the Box
Page 97 and 98: 80 Worries? “Oh baby, what’s th
Page 99 and 100: 82 Stop worrying, start with markup
Page 101 and 102: 84 A third-level heading proudly an
Page 103 and 104: 86 Adding divisions from the conten
Page 105 and 106: 88 With the elements and appropriat
Page 107 and 108: 90 Styling WorrySome.net Whereas ma
Page 109 and 110: 92 Take a peek at how your design i
Page 111 and 112: 94 The final result of your column-
Page 113 and 114: 96 Each of the paragraphs of introd
Page 115 and 116: 98 While floats and image replaceme
Page 117 and 118: 100 Well, maybe you’re not quite
Page 119 and 120: 102 This will be followed by a spec
Page 121 and 122: 104 The result of this is that your
Page 123 and 124: 106 We'll give you another look at
Page 125: 108 5 Creative Use of PNG Transpare
Page 129 and 130: 112 The image that needs to work on
Page 131 and 132: 114 Wilson includes his transparent
Page 133 and 134: 116 Now I’ll create a 1-by-1-pixe
Page 135 and 136: 118 In another creative example, de
Page 137 and 138: 120 A bit of CSS is then used t
Page 139 and 140: 122 And then the CSS: a.photo-conta
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Page 143 and 144: 126 However, I’ve reversed their
Page 145 and 146: 128 var div = document.createElemen
Page 147 and 148: 130 6 Grid Design for the Web mark
Page 149 and 150: 132 What is a grid system? A grid s
Page 151 and 152: 134 Ratios and the canvas Ratios ar
Page 153 and 154: 136 Beginning with the pen I like t
Page 155 and 156: 138 Designing the columns The wiref
Page 157 and 158: 140 This makes 1em roughly 10px (16
Page 159 and 160: 142 The masthead includes several i
Page 161 and 162: 144 Building the CSS I’m at the s
Page 163 and 164: 146 Setting the width of the column
Page 165 and 166: 148 Figure 6-16 shows the masthead
Page 167 and 168: 150 It’s starting to look like a
Page 169 and 170: 152 Issues with the design The proj
Page 171: 154 Figure 6-20. The new WRC shares
Page 174 and 175: Rob Weychert is a graphic designer,
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The process Figure 7-1. Times New R
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Here is a simplified version of the
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Figure 7-5. Fixed-width layout: Hor
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Translation Figure 7-9. Final layou
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With just three short paragraphs to
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Figure 7-12. A cohesive text block
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As another elegant piece of insuran
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Image replacement But I’m still n
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All caps I am quite pleased with my
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Small caps There is one more typogr
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Figure 7-24. The effort was all wor
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DOM Scripting Gems What book on web
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Ian Lloyd runs Accessify.com, a sit
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Preparing the foundations With a cl
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Identifying the sections The basic
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The addEvent function primes the we
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That’s our AddEvent part, mention
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for (i=0;i
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It is generally considered bad prac
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hide the sections from printout el[
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The following is the code required
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Sliding in the code In the proof-of
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For the purposes of building on the
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Never mind all that—what about sa
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208 9 Creating Dynamic Interfaces U
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210 Different layouts for different
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212 Figure 9-1. The UX Magazine web
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214 Figure 9-3. The White Pages web
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216 Browser size, not resolution Al
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218 There are two major changes bet
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220 return document.documentElement
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222 } else if (typeof target.attach
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224 Figure 9-7 shows the default vi
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226 The markup The high-level struc
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228 if (typeof event.stopPropagatio
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230 Styling with CSS Now that we’
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232 event = window.event; } if (typ
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234 function getPosition(theElement
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236 document.getElementsByTagName("
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238 ghostMarker.marked.appendChild(
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240 Keeping track of changes The te
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10 242 Accessible Sliding Navigatio
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244 The killer feature Admit it. Yo
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246 Accessibility and JavaScript Fo
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248 After the main link is clicked,
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250 Switching between CSS states wi
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252 Adding sliding behaviors Now th
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254 // set the height to a new valu
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256 When using a screen magnifier,
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258 If the user does repeat the “
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260 There may be unforeseen consequ
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262 Croft, Jeff, 109 CSS (Cascading
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264 max-width, 58, 71 @media print,
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266 websites A List Apart, 134 New
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