Dave Shea, a web designer and creator of CSS Zen Garden, writes about CSS, design, and web practice.
Commenters regard Dave Shea as an inspiration to CSS enthusiasts, and link the Zen Garden designs and his icon library.
> IE6 has been a source of pain for… I'd say four years.
We're in late 2011 right? That puts Paul's "IE6 being a pain" in late 2007, right after the original iPhone was released.
By that time, Firefox 2 was a year old, Firebug was 18 months old, and Safari 3 (the first version with acceptable Javascript support) had just been released, making Drosera (which would morph into the Webkit Developer Tools the next year) available.
Hell, by late 2007 IE7 was a year old already. And a significant reason why the IE project was restarted (and IE7 produced) is developers getting fed up with IE6, its bugs, its antiquated tools and its lack of progress, and Firefox had been getting more and more traction since its 1.0 release in late 2004.
IE6 has been a pain for at least 6 years now. 2005 was Firefox 1.5, the announce for the IE project restart and the grand opening of On Having Layout [0], the tail end of the long, slow and painful discovery of IE6's innumerable rendering bugs, DOM and javascript limitations (anybody else remembers Drip and Joel Webber's "DHTML leaks like a sieve"? That's January 2005), painfully slow runtime & al.
Of course it makes sense that 2005 would have been such a sticking point: the web community had been playing around with CSS since ~2003 (CSS Zen Garden released that year) and was wrapping up the IE6 CSS bugs compendium (see above-mentioned On Having Layout, pretty much the culmination of the effort).
Late 2004 and (especially) 2005 it started to…
> for what I'm doing (a pretty complex web app with an almost desktop-style GUI with a bunch of buttons, text inputs and checkboxes everywhere)
Right. There's different contexts between an application an a (hyper)text document.
What's good semantic markup for one, will generally be bad for the other.
It's admirable (and desirable) to strive for adaptive layout and accessibility in applications - but they need a different type of framework than documents made for browsers. The browsers straddle this divide rather uncomfortably - being in part hypertext document browsers, and in part virtual machines for running general applications.
Approaches like web components[1] might help us move toward a standardised reality for "applications that happen to run in the browser", while css and html are still (more and more anachronistically) (hypertext) document markup and layout tools.
If you want to make a Web page/site (like alistapart.com) that's great. Swim with the current and draw inspiration from stuff like css zen garden[2]. With flex box, you can burn[4] most of the old complicated grid layout stuff, and comparatively easily make great sites.
That doesn't really help if you're a "front-end developer" making "apps" though. Even the few that make an effort to color within the lines are still fighting the browsers and the standard, trying to fit a code-on-demand app into a REST shoe[3].
[1] https://www.webcomponents.org/
[2]…
Ah! Dave Shea[1] is awesome. I'm a big fan. I once asked him if he would do a site design for me. Unfortunately, he was busy. He was super polite and humble.
Mezzoblue[2] was one of those source of inspiration to CSS enthusiasts.
1. http://daveshea.com/
2. http://www.mezzoblue.com/
Isn't one of the reasons why bitmaps are used that icons should actually vary from a standard vector image when shown at very small sizes to remain clear and readable?
This icon library shows some good examples.
http://mezzoblue.com/icons/chalkwork/
Nice review of gamma issues, particularly I hadn't realised the problems with Safari (oops). But doesn't mention the problems with IE8 and opacity (eg http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2010/05/20/ie8_still_fa/).
i recommend
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/
http://psdtuts.com
http://www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/
for more inspirations