HTML / CSS Web Log Entries
Web Form Design By Luke Wroblewski
Posted: August 22, 2008 at 9:09 AM by Ben Nadel
The other night, I finished, "Web Form Design" by Luke Wroblewski . In it, Luke Wroblewski discusses everything you'll ever need to know about designing web forms in your applications. He covers a myriad of topics including common strategies among the internet giants, label placement, dynamic forms, button placement, eye tracking, field size, fie... read more »
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A Reminder About Interfaces And The User Experience
Posted: April 15, 2008 at 8:29 AM by Ben Nadel
Let's face it, we're programmers - we think about code - wonderful, beautiful, well-tabbed code. The biggest problem that we face is in our applications is that our target users are not programmers and they don't think about code at all. The only thing that they think about is what they can see and feel, which is of course, the user experience. Ev... read more »
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Defaulting To The Numeric Keyboard On The iPhone
Posted: April 14, 2008 at 8:56 AM by Ben Nadel
As I have been using my Dig Deep Fitness iPhone fitness application over the last few months, I have noticed a few things that need to be improved; one of the biggest points of friction is the fact that 98% of the text input in the application is numeric and yet, every time I click on an input field, I am presented with the iPhone's Alpha keyboa... read more »
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Negative CSS Margins Are Not Cool
Posted: March 5, 2008 at 8:29 PM by Ben Nadel
This is a bit of blanket statement, so clearly it is not going to be true all of the time; but, it is my very strong opinion that if you have any negative margins on an XHTML element, then the code is not cool. I know that every now and then I come out with these very black and white statements like this and get heat for it, but I just feel this s... read more »
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Dig Deep Fitness iPhone Fitness Application Prototype
Posted: February 16, 2008 at 3:52 PM by Ben Nadel
Last weekend, I put down some initial thoughts and screen ideas for Dig Deep Fitness , my iPhone fitness application. This is basically just a way for me to combine my love of ColdFusion with my love of working out while simultaneously breaking into the mobile device world. Since last weekend, I have taken my rough ideas and fleshed them out into... read more »
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What Does It Mean To Be A CSS Class?
Posted: February 11, 2008 at 3:29 PM by Ben Nadel
This last week, I started converting a prototype application into some really clean XHTML and CSS. As I was doing this, I kept finding it hard to choose the most appropriate CSS class names. As I started to get more frustrated, I was reminded of OOP guru, Hal Helms . In the past, both in presentations and in face-to-face conversation, Hal Helms w... read more »
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Using Inline List Elements
Posted: December 31, 2007 at 9:46 AM by Ben Nadel
List elements (the LI within UL and OL elements) are, by default, block level elements. As we, as a community, have moved more towards web standards, many of us have began to use lists for our navigation claiming that semantically, navigation is a "list" of links to sections of our site. To do this, many of us, myself included, have turned list el... read more »
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Easy Print CSS Integration - NoPrint (Thanks Rick Osborne!)
Posted: December 31, 2007 at 8:23 AM by Ben Nadel
Last week, I talked about a little bit about a revelation that I had as far as print CSS vs. printer friendly pages go. I had said that print CSS was optimized to make haphazard printing better and printer friendly pages were optimized for purposeful printing. In response to this, Rick Osborne had some very good comments. For starters, he made... read more »
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Print CSS vs. Printer Friendly Format
Posted: December 28, 2007 at 5:20 PM by Ben Nadel
It used to be that the way I created the printer friendly version of a page was with a logical step inside of my header and footer. See, most of my pages include a header and a footer template: <!--- Include header template. ---> <cfinclude template="_header.cfm"> <!--- CODE. ---> <!--- Include footer template. -... read more »
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David Stamm On Styling Form Elements
Posted: December 7, 2007 at 8:27 AM by Ben Nadel
David Stamm, a colleague of mine, sometimes referred to as the "Secret Weapon", feels very strongly about the styling of form elements. Specifically, he feels that we as web developers should not try to style form elements - the look and feel of form elements is determined both by the computer's operating system and the given browser and it doesn'... read more »
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How Many HTML Elements Can You Name in 5 Minutes?
Posted: November 20, 2007 at 7:52 AM by Ben Nadel
I just got this fun little link off of Michael Porter's ColdFusion and Flex Blog . I was able to name 56 HTML elements, but more shockingly, I couldn't remember 35 elements! Of the 35 that I couldn't name, I don't even know what some of them are; I guess it's time to hit the books again. You should check it out, it's a fun game . ... read more »
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CSS Background Images Using Percentage Positioning
Posted: October 15, 2007 at 7:20 AM by Ben Nadel
One of the techniques that Dan Cederholm uses widely in Bulletproof Web Design is the positioning of background images using percentages. Up until now, I have only ever used either pixel placement or keyword placement using TOP or LEFT to position background images. As such, I was a bit confused as to how the percentage positioning even worked. To... read more »
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Bulletproof Web Design By Dan Cederholm (Thanks Javier Julio!)
Posted: October 15, 2007 at 7:00 AM by Ben Nadel
On the enthusiastic recommendation by Javier Julio , I read and just finished the book Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS. This book is awesome and a must-read for everyone in the web development industry. It has completely changed the way I think about building web site fr... read more »
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Images Can Have CSS Padding - Crazy! (Saucy)
Posted: October 1, 2007 at 8:03 AM by Ben Nadel
I was sitting in Union Square Sunday morning, reading through Bulletproof Web Design (as recommended by Javier Julio ) when I came across an example that used padding on an image element. I had never seen this before, and frankly, it does not seem intuitive at all. I can't even believe that it works. Images seem like the basic building blocks o... read more »
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IE Has Correct Box Model In Standards Compliant Mode
Posted: September 14, 2007 at 10:24 AM by Ben Nadel
Internet Explorer (IE) has had a different CSS box model than the Mozilla based browsers for a long time - or so I thought. As a hold-over from the "browser wars", I have come up with techniques to deal with the fact that CSS padding gets added to Mozilla's explicitly defined box widths, while in IE padding gets absorbed by the width of the box mo... read more »
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