Easy Reader

I just got the best comment spam ever:

I’m very, very impressed that this sort of work is being done; Web Design is getting stagnant with people using just styled block-level elements to produce artwork. The incorporation of SVG into sites excites me a lot.

How long do you expect it will take for this sort of technology to be widespread?

Obviously you can only speak about WebKit realistically, but if it’s going to take ten years for IE Win to gain (full) support, we can’t design with it.

I’m amused by the “Becoming more important” line in the first paragraph. This has been a HUGE problem for years - ever since HTML-2.0 was introduced to be more of a layout language and less of a markup language. For an example, you just have to look at this site sex partners [link removed -ed.]. Why is all the text crammed over on the left side of the page with a big blank space on the right side?

Why is the default font tiny and unreadable? Fortunately most browsers now let you override the latter problem.

It is a little disjointed, but the fact that it mentions “block-level elements,” SVG, WebKit and (of course) “sex partners” is hysterical. Someone’s been paying attention in my training sessions.

This has been one crazy Fall work-wise, so I apologize for the scarcity of posts, but I do have a few holiday treats for you.

From my day job at Cronin and Company, we’ve got Cronin’s “Grab Bag of Goodness.” As with most internal projects, this was a major rush job. I take no credit for the design (which was handed to me with no wiggle room), but when it comes to the CSS and DOM Scripting, that I’ll proudly take credit for. Use the code “9301” to get in. Of particular note in this piece:

• Taking a page from Dan’s Bulletproof Logos, most all of the text is in (shock) images. Toss in the text as an alt attribute and with images and CSS off, you’re still golden. As this was a one-off, sIFR seemed like overkill.
• Ooh, check out that marquee. Brings back memories, doesn’t it. Well, this one’s a little different. The markup is an ul and each item is a li. CSS makes it all display: inline; and then JavaScript keeps reducing the margin-left of the first li by 2px until the absolute value of it’s margin-left is greater than the li’s width. That li is then plucked from the front of the list and appended to the end. Though I am not a big fan of scrolling marquees, this was a pretty fun experiment.
• Those animated icons you can click to make a donation are actually form controls. Originally, I had made them into custom submit inputs, but Safari’s inability to customize certain form controls made me abandon that element in favor of button. It’s a great effect too (IMHO).

Then there’s the Easy Designs holiday card. I will spare the commentary on this one with the exception of giving major props to Dave for building the game in a day. I’m pretty darn proud of it, especially since we pretty much went from concept to execution in a matter of days (yeah, procrastination’s a bitch). If you’re interested, you can see a rough approximation of the email that went out (our first Campaign Monitor mailing) or simply play the game.

A fantastic new t-shirt from J!NX.

We always knew San Francisco was filled with rainbow pride, but it now seems the source was not what I expected. It reminds me of the mashed potato CN Tower scene in Canadian Bacon.