It's Blue Beanie Day on the Web and we've all joined the fray by donning our indigo toques and updating our avatars. But what does it all mean? Advocacy without action is meaningless. The purpose of Blue Beanie Day is to raise awareness and adoption of Web Standards . We all updated our Twitter avatars and placed the azul cap on our Websites to show support, but how many of... continue »

So there you are, admiring your hard work. Your pixel precise, artfully crafted design with it’s clever use of 24bit alpha-transparent PNG images to create the perfect effect you wanted. Bravo! Well, that is until you look at it in IE6. So you hack the CSS or add special Javascripts to force things to playing nice. How about this? Instead of using one of the many Javascript or CSS... continue »

Jeff Croft started a fire. A fire that needed to be set. I've watched luminaries within the Web community jump on and off the standards soapbox. There is so much fragmentation on this topic, no wonder the proposed finalization date for HTML 5 is 13 years away . I think the value of the firestorm that came from all of this is it brings attention to the fact that somewhere,... continue »

I recently had someone ask me how I did the Polaroid-ish photos on the company 'About Us' page . The technique is quite simple so I thought I would outline it here for other curious minds. For the About Us page we wanted the polaroids to be about 170 x 140 so I'll use those dimensions in this example. Create the Polaroid image First open Photoshop (or your favorite graphics... continue »

During a session at SXSW on Web Standards and SEO ( transcribed here ), the conversation revolved around how search engines treat semantically correct, valid pages versus the spaghetti mess of code that makes up the bulk of the web. Tim Mayer from Yahoo! said that they do look at valid markup as a 'signal of quality', but can't give extra weight to pages using web standards yet because there... continue »

PHP and Smarty Search Bookmarklets Do you ever want a quick way to search PHP or Smarty Documentation for a function? Here it is! Just drag this link to your browsers bookmarks (or links) toolbar and voila! Search PHP.net Search Smarty Docs Modifiers to Make Life Easier These simple Smarty modifiers have made life easier for me. The use them just save the... continue »

Using classic FIR or similar Image replacement techniques is fabulous except that IE doesn't follow the rules on image caching and CSS. Here's how to configure your server to force IE to behave.Thanks to Dean Edwards and Ryan Carver for figuring this out. It took me a while to find the two pages linked above so I've included this here for fast reference. Here's a lightweight overview: ... continue »

When specifying colors in HTML or CSS it's best to use the hex code which is something that browsers understand and convert into colors. Choose a color from the list below and look to its right to get the hex code. If you wanted a nice blue for example, you could use "#0000cc". You can print this chart if you like, just make sure that "Print background colors and images" option is on in... continue »