Cast not the first stone...

I have been accused of creating web design that is reminiscent of 1999. In a world where people view old beat-to-hell cars as "classic", old run-down houses as "historic", beat-up, damaged, finish peeling, rotting, bug-infested furniture as "chic", and polyester clothes that should have been banned from the face of the Earth along with the era and music it represents as "retro", who are thee, I ask, to cast stones at me.

 

Say hello to the future...

Tim Bray speaks on the benefit of dropping support for version 4.0 browsers and below.

Speaking of Browsers... Hooray!.

• You can use ECMAScript/JavaScript to animate your interface and interact with the user with only a very moderate amount of crazy-making pandering to incompatibility.
• You can cram a lot of the styling information into CSS, which gives you better, more professional-looking pages, and makes them smaller and faster.
• You can cut out a lot of design compromises that are probably lurking in your HTML-generation code.
• You can ship valid, well-formed XHTML, which may surprise you by coming out usable on a variety of non-PC wireless devices right now today.[ongoing]

Personally, if you're still using a version 4 browser, you've got issues and you need to upgrade. I will not, and do not, build just to support your backwards compatible ass.

 

TopStyle Pro...

While doing a little bit of fix-it work over at CampinGuy.com I decided to try out a CSS editor that Dane had turned me onto. I have to admit I'm pretty impressed.

Bradsoft's TopStyle Pro is a superb CSS editor. A simple interface much like the VB/J++ interface makes it easy to make changes to your code. I was thrilled it let you view your CSS in an active page in the interface and even showed what tags are supported by which browser when you selected them in the interface. Rave reviews from me.

 

Adobe to offern new versions of PDF format...
Adobe divides to conquer. The software maker hopes to boost its PDF document format with new versions of Acrobat for ordinary office workers and power users. [CNET News.com]

As if it's not confusing enough for us design professionals? How about coming up with 1 standard first.

 

Looking for a Muse...
I'm thinking of redesigning the banner of this site again. I really like how the banner over at Campin' Guy.com came out. So, send me your thoughts and suggestions. I want to see what other people think.