#21653
Cascading Style Sheets: HTML and CSS
In many ways, the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification represents a unique development in the history of the World Wide Web. In its inherent ability to allow richly styled structural documents, CSS is both a step forward and a step backward--but it's a good step backward, and a needed one. To see what is meant by this, it is first necessary to understand how the Web got to the point of desperately needing something like CSS, and how CSS makes the web a better place for both page authors and web surfers.
Meyer, Eric. O'Reilly and Associates (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS
#25748
Supply two color values in either hex, short hex, RGB percentages, or RGB decimals and get as many as ten colors shades between the two you supplied. Great for finding a color halfway between two shades you like, or mixing two colors together in various proportions.
#13542
One of the wonderful things about CSS is that it allows authors to create media-specific styles for a single document. We’re pretty used to styling for the screen, but thinking about other media isn’t a habit yet. And as all the “printer-friendly” links attest, our thinking about the print medium has been limited to recreating a document in a different way. Why bother, when the power to offer your readers a better view of your material in print is no further away than a well-structured document and a media-specific style sheet?
Meyer, Eric. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design
#25749
S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
A simple slide show system that uses one (X)HTML file, some CSS, and a bit of JavaScript. You can have your presentation slides and printed handouts generated from the same file.
#32438
I fully acknowledge that a whole lot of very clever thinking went into the construction of Acid3 (as was true of Acid2), and that a lot of very smart people have worked very hard to pass it. Congratulations all around, really. I just can’t help feeling like some broader and more important point has been missed.
Meyer, Eric. MeyerWeb (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Assessment
#32444
From Switches to Targets: A Standardista's Journey
Version targeting allows browsers to much more easily develop new features and fix bugs and shortcomings in existing features, which has the potential to speed up the evolution of web design and development. That alone is reason enough to give it a chance.
Meyer, Eric. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Personalization
#32498
Explains some of the technical reasons for form controls being so hard to style consistently across platforms with CSS. Also asks a lot of good questions related to how various CSS properties should affect form controls if browsers would let them.
Meyer, Eric. MeyerWeb (2007). Articles>Web Design>Forms>CSS
#33123
Five Ways To Make Sure That Users Abandon Your Forms
What do you really need to know in your form process? Be brutal. Don't include stuff that your sales team would like. Completing a form is rarely (if ever) the goal in and of itself. The goal is to entice the user into a deeper relationship (of some sort) with your web site. Notice that I didn't say that the goal was to complete a transaction or make a sale. That is evidence of the deeper relationship, not the vehicle by which you persuade your users.
Meyer, Eric. Improving Customer Experience (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Forms
