After a good deal of consideration over the last year or so, I’ve finally decided to take a measurable step toward an IE6 free lifestyle. I’ve been waiting for, and trying to anticipate, the “right time” to stop designing for IE6 as part of my normal process. I think that time is finally here (for me anyway) with last week’s release of IE8. This step away from IE6 is a little complicated from a business perspective because several of my clients require support for IE6. Even though I don’t like it (and in some ways don’t understand it), I do acknowledge that the need for IE6 support is real and important to these clients as well as their customers/users and that it cannot realistically be ignored. Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a compromise, doesn’t it? I thought so too. The compromise is this: new clients will continue to be offered support for IE6, but at an additional cost. Existing clients will continue to enjoy IE6 support (as per norm) until such time as their website realizes a major redesign, at which point IE6 support will require additional cost. I feel like this is a reasonable way forward that will help smooth the transition away from IE6 and toward arguably better browsers while rewarding existing clients for their loyalty over the years and providing them with options for consideration as their websites continue to grow and evolve.

Getting my head wrapped around the idea that Digital Web Magazine will not be publishing in the way we’ve become so accustomed to has been a struggle. I keep thinking they’re just on holiday and things will get back to normal soon – wishful thinking. It’s been a regular read and resource for me for a long time and although I understand the situation, I’m sorry to see the change. Thankfully, the site will be alive, accessible and curated for the foreseeable future. Nice to know we’ll have it around to refer to and remember the good ‘ol days.

In the spirit passing along some of the web design and development tools that I just couldn’t live without, I wanted to mention another plugin that works great with Firefox that is created by Chris Pederick – The Web Developer Toolbar. This is another one of those amazing little gems that has been around for quite a while and has proven to be invaluable to me for both getting work done on a daily basis and learning from time to time. The toolbar has a ton of useful features that can be life savers during the design process. There are options which allow you to, among other things, very quickly enable or disable images, css, and javascript, precisely resize the browser window, quickly validate code (HTML and CSS), and even outline various elements right in the browser window to graphically see how a document is built. (more…)

Needless to say, Firebug is not new news these days. It’s been around, widely used, and in my opinion, very excellent for quite some time now. Occasionally, I have found Firebug to be a handy tool for deconstructing and understanding Web pages that have been mysterious to me in terms of their functionality or design. Historically, Firebug has not been a primary tool in my daily workflow, but rather a little gem that I employ every now and again when I need it (kinda like decaf coffee – admit it – you know what I mean). (more…)

This may be old news to some of you, but I thought it worth a mention nonetheless. I found an excellent online reference for standards aware designers. Sitepoint has published nicely organized HTML and CSS references worthy of bookmarking. If I understand correctly, they will be bringing developers into the fold before too long with a Javascript reference as well (at the time of this writing the Javascript reference is not yet published but I believe I have the url correct). I am finding that an online reference is much less disruptive to my workflow than a trusty reference book. Its lighter too carry too! Hope this benefits somebody out there.

The folks over at Panic have done it again with their new–ish web design and development application called Coda (for Mac OSX only – sorry Windows users). Coda is really sort of like a swiss army knife in that it has a number of slick little tools built in and they all work pretty well. (more…)

I am so happy to relay the totally excellent news that Molly Holzschlag will be returning to Honolulu this summer and leading a workshop Aug 25–26 entitled “Hot ‘n Spicy Style with CSS” at Pacific New Media. Molly is such a tremendous web standards evangelist, speaker, and educator, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the workshop books up fast so… heads up. In my opinion this gathering is not to be missed and the $250 price tag for the 2 day event is an absolute bargain. See you there!

I am very, very pleased to relay the good news that one of the premiere conferences focused on the topic(s) of standards based web design, @media 2007, is going to get about as close as it could possibly get to Hawaii this year without actually being here. It’ll be in San Francisco on May 24th-25th, 2007 and wild horses couldn’t keep me away (well, OK - maybe a herd of Clydesdales might have a fighting chance at making me a few minutes late)! (more…)

Last month I made a post titled Getting CSS Backgrounds To Behave In IE6/Win and wanted to follow up with a simple method for achieving the same results in IE7/Win. The following is a very similar example except this time we will correct the rendering issue in IE7/Win specifically. The goal here is to apply a background image (16×16_pink_circle.gif) to each of the three list items in an unordered list, demonstrate how the unordered list is intended to render, demonstrate how it renders incorrectly in IE7/Win, and finally show a quick and easy patch to correct the rendering in IE7/Win. (more…)

If you’ve ever noticed (or been annoyed) that IE/Win sometimes seems to do undesirable things to the positioning of background images, you are not alone. I often use background images to help spice up the appearance of an unordered list or to draw attention to it, and am constantly reminded of the fact that sometimes IE/Win just doesn’t play nice. Thankfully, it turns out that there is a really easy workaround. In the following example we’ll apply a background image (16×16_pink_circle.gif) to each of the three list items in an unordered list. (more…)