A quiet month for links worthy of bookmarking it would seem—I only managed 17—and a mixed bag too, but some important discussion to be had nonetheless.

The new blog I Love Typography gets a big thumbs-up for design and content from me with concise articles on type terminology. Steve Souders, author of the YSlow plugin for Firebug and High Performance Web Sites, a book title from O’Reilly, released a video over on the YUI Blog and to compliment this new interest in website performance, Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville announced their latest venture Website Performance with a new CSS sprites generator—a useful tool to create a single image file for CSS backgrounds in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests made for image resources referenced by your site. I’m looking forward to more tools and the book coming from these guys.

Perhaps the biggest talking point of the month was Ian Lloyd’s Teach a Man to Fish over at Accessify. In his post, Ian talks about educating site visitors in the use of their browser rather than providing text-sizing widgets and provides a good example of doing this through video (ignore the fact that it’s low-res YouTube, it’s the technique we’re interested in). Coupled with a transcript of the presentation this is a great idea to educate users so text-sizing widgets are dead, OK? especially if we could perhaps point to one website (like the BBC’s My Web, My Way) for this info. Wrong. Grant Broome chips in with a good counter as to why we’re not there yet—the technophobes. We’re providing these widgets because some users are unable or unwilling to dive into the menu systems of their browsers. From my perspective of working in local government, perhaps they’re in the library and it’s not their browser to “break” if it goes wrong. I still don’t believe in using widgets either but Mike Davies gets to the core of the problem—browser manufacturers need to be told to put a button on the toolbar by default.

Pick of the Bunch:

• Who shot the Serif?—great article title from I Love Typography.
• The Name Riddle—An examination of the structure and usage of names around the world and how to capture that information in a form.

Technorati Tags: typography, website-performance, accessibility, text-resizing, widgets

Pulse. A commentary on the web development resources I saved to del.icio.us this month. I read and digest a lot more than this!

A lot of work and opinion on CSS frameworks since the release of Blueprint and Tripoli. A lot of anti-opinion which I can understand to a point but I detect tones of elitism in a lot of the commentary to be honest. Come on guys, do you never re-use your CSS from other projects? Never use the same reset.css over and over? Never dug out the fonts.css file with a vertical rhythm of 12px/1.5em from last month? Never used the math from a previous project to apply to your latest multi-column layout? Bollocks you haven’t. I bet you’re using your own un-published frameworks to a degree. Ah, but of course, these other frameworks are unsemantic too. Show me where in Blueprint’s or YUI Grids’ documentation it says to replace an H2 with a div? That’s right, it doesn’t. Like every tool it can be abused I guess but it’s got to be better than tables-based layout, surely? Class names unsemantic you say? Pfft, like your typical web visitor even cares. Get over yourself and get a real deadline at the same time. If it bothers you that much, use a framework to beat out your prototype and then rename the classes to suit the content (and delete the unused selectors).

At the least, these frameworks might see the death of a few more tables-based designs and at its best enable a lot of novices to experience and understand vertical rhythm and how to put together interesting combinations of columns that work cross-browser. After working with a few projects they too may have outgrown the one-size-fits-all framework and really understand CSS as a result.

I have only one caveat to apply to CSS frameworks - make sure the content makes sense when you disable CSS because that is how a screen reader sees it.

On other topics you’ll notice that a majority of the links are design-oriented, reflecting my view that my HTML/CSS skills are top-drawer and that personally as well as professionally I am worrying about how websites come about in the first place - no, not from your customer providing a layout in Word but coming to you with a problem that needs to be solved. I have three big projects at work at the moment that I am actually managing by following Kelly Goto’s Web Redesign Process. So far it’s working great for both the customer and myself.

Pick of the bunch:

• CSS Sprites generator
• OptimalSort - online card sorting
• RSS in Plain English - quirky video that nails it

Technorati Tags: css, framework, blueprint, YUI, design, development, process

OJR’s “five guide” to do-it-yourself website usability testing

Online Journalism Reviews offers steps and forms to test how readers will react to a new multimedia project or website design.

Video: Wikis in Plain English | Common Craft

We made this video because wiki web sites are easy to use, but hard to describe.

Video: RSS in Plain English | Common Craft

We made this video for our friends (and yours) that haven’t yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader… if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn’t yet tried it, point them here for 3.5 minutes of RSS in Plain English.

Line short numerical and mathematical expressions with hard spaces

From The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. Use a non-breaking space to maintain association between number-word pairings like dimensions or chapter numbers. A regular expression in the CMS could effect this automatically.