web design

On browser compatibility

Here is a quote for you on browser compatibility from an excellent book Diving Into HTML 5, which is available online.

The last time I tried to count, there were 5 doctypes that triggered “almost standards mode,” and 73 that triggered “quirks mode.” But I probably missed some, and I’m not even going to talk about the crazy shit that Internet Explorer 8 does to switch between its four — four! — different rendering modes. Here’s a flowchart. Kill it. Kill it with fire.

And just in the flowchart link will break anytime soon, here is a copy of the image.

Corporate design process

This video would have been so much funnier if it wasn’t so true. This is one of the main reasons I don’t want to work for a large company – neither be employed by one, nor have one as a client.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wac3aGn5twc]

The simpler the thing that needs to be done, the more people participate and feel competent. This is also known as Parkinson’s Law or a bike shed discussion.

CySec logo copy-paste design

A friend of mine pointed at the almost lack of difference between the logos of United States Department of Health & Human Services and Cyprus Securities & Exchange Commission. Here are the screenshots from both web sites in case they will change them.

And here is the United States Department of Health & Human Services logo as a stand-alone image. Just to make it easier to spot the similarities.

Upcoming WordPress 3.0 in detail

I know I’ve mentioned the awesomeness of the upcoming WordPress 3.0 release before. But there is more to learn. Dougal Campbell was running WordPress 3.0-beta for a few days and wrote a post describing the new features in detail.

Also, if you add a post thumbnail which is as big as (or bigger than) your defined header size, the image will be used as a custom header specific to that post or page.

VaultPress – yet another goodie from Automattic

Automattic – an awesome company behind WordPress, Gravatar, IntenseDebate, Akismet, and a few other – announced that they are starting up a new service – VaultPress. While the details of the service are not completely clear yet, it looks like a real-time backup solution plus some security monitoring and automated updates. This service is primarily targeted towards stand-alone WordPress blogs, not the ones hosted at WordPress.com . Maybe WordPress.com support will come later, but for now those guys are settled pretty well anyway.

If you want to try VaultPress, it is in the invite-only stage now. You can request an invite. And while you are there, please do enjoy the beautiful form, which doesn’t follow the conventional “captions, fields, and the submit button” concept. That’s what happens when you have a good web designer around and enough sense to let him work.