Simian Design

March 27, 2006

Design Links

A bunch of design and development links for you today. The majority (90%?) of these links came from etc the past couple of months.

• Create really cool new windows using prototype. You can then use script.aculo.us to have the sexy effects on the window. You must try the demos.
• 24ways really deserves it’s own post. It’s got 24 great tutorials/posts on how to do things. Things such as:
  • Swooshy Curly Quotes without Images is great for pullout quotes.
  • Improving Form accessibility with DOM Scripting.
  • An explanation of ems.
• Russ Weakley shows us how to create simple, accessible external links. He uses a class in this example, but I’ve seen the same thing done using a Regex parser to loop through all the links. But that’s probably a bit much.
• Tagcloud lets you create and manage clouds with content you are interested in, and lets you publish them on your own website.

• Create a Star Rater using CSS. This doens’t cover the back-end coding to store the rating, but rather the CSS to manage the stars. There is a another tutorial on using PHP for the code behind the stars.
• The Form Architect is brilliant. It’s an online editor that lets you create complex HTML forms without using tables, nor coding.
• The Octopus Engine is an attempt to unify all the techniques for rounded corners, drop shadows, custom borders and faux corners. It’s not pretty not bad.
• SkimmCSS wants to be Digg for your development efforts.
• The Comment Showcase is just smart. It’s what it sounds like, a showcase of how people show comments. I find comments are a difficult thing to display, and this works nicely.
• Navigation Magnification is a cool little effect. It mimics the OS X Dock magnification on your list. Sure, there are a ton of documented issues with this type of effect (see #4), but it is fun.
• You ever want beautifully numbered lists? Now you can.
• Having a collection of external links on a MT blog is difficult. But there is a decent walkthrough for this, using no Perl of PHP coding skills, there are enough plugins to provide all necessary funtionalities.
• A cross-browser drop-down cascading, validating menu. Why you would want a menu like this, with no JavaScript, I don’t know. But the important thing is that it can be done.
• MapSurface is pretty amazing. It’s s web page activity widget that helps you quickly see how people find, navigate and value the pages of your web site. Go to the site, and hit alt + x. Like I said, pretty amazing.
• More pure-CSS proof of concepts. Here is a Tabbed Page with embedded links and pictures that is fully-cross browser compliant.
• Rounded Corners have been making the rounds recently. We have Spiffy Corners, using only CSS. We have Spiffy Corners Cube, using only Javascript. And we can put borders on those spiffy corners. It’s rounded corner overload!

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Tagged As Accessibility, Browsers, CSS, Coding, Design, Development, HTML, Javascript, MT, Reference, Tip, Web Standards

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Posted at 08:03 AM