WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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Cameron Adams has one degree in law and another one in science. Naturally, he chose a career in web development. When pressed, he labels himself a “web technologist,” because he likes to have a hand in graphic design, JavaScript, CSS, Perl (yes, Perl), and anything else that takes his fancy that morning. He runs his own business (www. themaninblue.com), and has done work for government departments, nonprofit organizations, large corporations, and tiny startups. As well as helping his list of clients, Cameron has taught numerous workshops around the country and spoken at conferences worldwide, such as @media and Web Directions. He released his first book in 2006, The JavaScript Anthology, which is one of the most complete question-and-answer resources on modern JavaScript techniques. Cameron lives in Melbourne, Australia, where, between coding marathons, he likes to play soccer and mix some tunes for his irate neighbors.
210 Different layouts for different needs As the Internet becomes more pervasive, users are beginning to access web pages from a greater number of devices—laptops, desktops, PDAs, mobile phones, fridges . . . who knows what’s around the corner? And with each new device comes a different design constraint. Mobile phones certainly don’t have the screen space that a desktop computer has, so the way that users can—and should—view content will be vastly different. Even on the same device, different users have different needs. Visitors come to your site to do different things, and your interface should be able to accommodate all of them. You want to be able to provide users with the optimal experience for their chosen device and purpose. This chapter explores techniques for dealing with these design problems using JavaScript and CSS. I call these dynamic interfaces. We’ll look at creating two types of layouts: resolution-dependent layouts and user-controlled modular layouts. All the source files for the examples are available to download from www.friendsofed.com/. Resolution-dependent layouts It’s quite obvious that different devices have different display capabilities. Nowhere is this more apparent than when comparing mobile devices, such as PDAs, with their desk-locked cousins. The resolution on a PDA can be as low as 240✕320, whereas a desktop monitor can go up to 2048✕1536 and beyond. Even on desktops, the variance in resolution is astounding. Your parents could be browsing on a (now prehistoric) 800✕600 system, while your power-user sister is on a 1280✕960 screen. The difference between the two is huge, with an over 150% increase in available area. And the design requirements for each are equally different. Throw widescreen and dual-screen systems into the mix, and the possibilities explode. With such large differences, it’s no longer viable to say, “Well, just create a fluid layout that stretches for all resolutions.” What we are talking about here is a fundamental difference in the way a page should be laid out. More information is going to be visible to someone with a higher resolution, so your design should take this into account. Less information will be visible to someone with a lower resolution, and your design should also be able to handle that.
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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
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A quick preview of our code at this
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For our narrow, 190-pixel-wide righ
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Strictly speaking, these class name
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Our column’s “background” wil
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Figure 3-14. The exact same templat
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Figure 3-17. The anatomy of our nar
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So there we have it: a single class
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Figure 3-21. The text size can be i
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anchor.setAttribute("href", "javasc
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78 4 Designing for Outside the Box
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80 Worries? “Oh baby, what’s th
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82 Stop worrying, start with markup
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84 A third-level heading proudly an
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86 Adding divisions from the conten
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88 With the elements and appropriat
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90 Styling WorrySome.net Whereas ma
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92 Take a peek at how your design i
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94 The final result of your column-
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96 Each of the paragraphs of introd
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98 While floats and image replaceme
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100 Well, maybe you’re not quite
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102 This will be followed by a spec
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104 The result of this is that your
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106 We'll give you another look at
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108 5 Creative Use of PNG Transpare
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110 PNG, GIF, and JPEG The PNG imag
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112 The image that needs to work on
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114 Wilson includes his transparent
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116 Now I’ll create a 1-by-1-pixe
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118 In another creative example, de
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120 A bit of CSS is then used t
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122 And then the CSS: a.photo-conta
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124 I’ve specified #cc0000
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126 However, I’ve reversed their
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128 var div = document.createElemen
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130 6 Grid Design for the Web mark
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132 What is a grid system? A grid s
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134 Ratios and the canvas Ratios ar
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136 Beginning with the pen I like t
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138 Designing the columns The wiref
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140 This makes 1em roughly 10px (16
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142 The masthead includes several i
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144 Building the CSS I’m at the s
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146 Setting the width of the column
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148 Figure 6-16 shows the masthead
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150 It’s starting to look like a
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152 Issues with the design The proj
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154 Figure 6-20. The new WRC shares
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Rob Weychert is a graphic designer,
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Page 192 and 193: All caps I am quite pleased with my
Page 194 and 195: Small caps There is one more typogr
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Page 200 and 201: Ian Lloyd runs Accessify.com, a sit
Page 202 and 203: Preparing the foundations With a cl
Page 204 and 205: Identifying the sections The basic
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Page 218 and 219: Sliding in the code In the proof-of
Page 220 and 221: For the purposes of building on the
Page 222 and 223: Never mind all that—what about sa
Page 225: 208 9 Creating Dynamic Interfaces U
Page 229 and 230: 212 Figure 9-1. The UX Magazine web
Page 231 and 232: 214 Figure 9-3. The White Pages web
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Page 241 and 242: 224 Figure 9-7 shows the default vi
Page 243 and 244: 226 The markup The high-level struc
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Page 247 and 248: 230 Styling with CSS Now that we’
Page 249 and 250: 232 event = window.event; } if (typ
Page 251 and 252: 234 function getPosition(theElement
Page 253 and 254: 236 document.getElementsByTagName("
Page 255 and 256: 238 ghostMarker.marked.appendChild(
Page 257 and 258: 240 Keeping track of changes The te
Page 259 and 260: 10 242 Accessible Sliding Navigatio
Page 261 and 262: 244 The killer feature Admit it. Yo
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Page 265 and 266: 248 After the main link is clicked,
Page 267 and 268: 250 Switching between CSS states wi
Page 269 and 270: 252 Adding sliding behaviors Now th
Page 271 and 272: 254 // set the height to a new valu
Page 273 and 274: 256 When using a screen magnifier,
Page 275 and 276: 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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WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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