WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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Based in the UK, Andy Clarke (Malarkey) has a background in advertising. He started his own design consultancy, Stuff and Nonsense (www.malarkey.co.uk), in 1998. Since then, he has designed sites for Disney Store UK, British Heart Foundation, Save the Children, and the World Wildlife Fund UK. Andy is passionate about design and about Web Standards; he bridges the gap between design and code. Outside the studio, Andy is a member of the Web Standards Project, where he redesigned the organization’s website in 2006 and is an Invited Expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group. Andy is an internationally known trainer and conference speaker, and he regularly trains designers and developers in the creative applications of Web Standards. He writes about aspects of design and popular culture on his personal website, All That Malarkey (www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk), and is the author of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, published by New Riders in 2006 (www.transcendingcss.com).
80 Worries? “Oh baby, what’s the matter?” she said. “You look so stressed and worried.” “I am,” I replied. “I’m worried that our car needs new tires, we have nothing in the fridge for tea except a paper bag of mushrooms and a tube of tomato puree, and my mother is having trouble with her feet again.” Worrying—it’s no laughing matter, I can tell you. If worrying about your own problems is not bad enough, worrying about someone else’s can be maddening. Still, help is on hand in the form of a new, fictitious service called WorrySome.net. This will not be your common or garden-variety web application, with enough venture capital to mount a small war and a call center in New Delhi. This site is “by real people, for real people”—people who will worry for you, for a fee, of course. The service will leave you free to live your life, free from worry, as long as you keep on paying the subscription. WorrySome.net needs a new website, and you are the just the person for the job. It’s a tricky one, but don’t worry; help is on hand to guide you through making this design into a reality. If you feel at any stage that you are starting to get even the tiniest bit concerned, you can always pay one of WorrySome’s worriers to take the weight off your shoulders. In this chapter, you are going to take the WorrySome.net homepage from design visual to a working prototype with XHTML and CSS. You will start with meaningful, contentout markup, which is always the first step in developing a creative, standards-based design. You will learn how to use powerful CSS selectors and layout techniques to bring this design to life. Worrying about the Web Personally, I’m very glad that WorrySome.net can worry on my behalf, because in the past two years, I have been worried about web design. The Web is a youthful, dynamic medium, where people should love to interact with sites that they visit. Creating sites that people love to use is one of the main goals of creative web design. But web designers and developers too often focus on the technical aspects of markup, CSS, Ajax, or on the “science” of usability and accessibility, rather than on connecting with visitors’ emotions through good design. We’ve seen advances in the tools provided by CSS and wider support for these tools in mainstream web browsers. I hope that we can stop worrying about supporting browsers that are past their sell-by date and look forward by creating new and inspirational designs that break out of the boxes of current thinking. Designing for WorrySome.net As WorrySome.net is a novel new way of dealing with the worries of the world, the site calls for a design that breaks away from the familiar conventions of many of today’s shiny web applications. The brief calls for this design to be open and friendly. It must make the visitor feel as “welcome as a trusted friend, rather than as a customer.” When creating the look for WorrySome.net, the design took on many forms. I made several experimental layouts with many different interface ideas, only a few of which made it into the final design. Figure 4-1 shows the one that you’ll be working on in this chapter. Let’s get started making the design for the WorrySome.net homepage into a reality. You’ll use meaningful XHTML markup and CSS, but not just any old CSS. This minimal markup will demand that you use techniques and CSS selectors that you may not yet have implemented in your own work. You can download all of the necessary files from www.friendsofed.com.
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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
Page 46 and 47: The CMS challenge It doesn’t take
Page 48 and 49: The next step was spending some tim
Page 50 and 51: Videos Photos Extras Links Forum St
Page 52 and 53: Ever find yourself getting lost in
Page 54 and 55: z-index:100; left:29px; top:39px; m
Page 56 and 57: By looking at the markup generated
Page 58 and 59: Creating the illusion of vertical t
Page 60 and 61: The first argument defines the CSS
Page 62 and 63: Figure 2-9. Before (right) and afte
Page 64 and 65: Such a #teaser After styling the #t
Page 66 and 67: When time is of the essence, hacks
Page 68 and 69: Ethan Marcotte has been designing a
Page 70 and 71: Getting started The article templat
Page 72 and 73: Structuring the CSS Looking above t
Page 74 and 75: 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: 78 4 Designing for Outside the Box
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 and 126: 108 5 Creative Use of PNG Transpare
Page 127 and 128: 110 PNG, GIF, and JPEG The PNG imag
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
Page 141 and 142: 124 I’ve specified #cc0000
Page 143 and 144: 126 However, I’ve reversed their
Page 145 and 146: 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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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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