The Science of Web Art, Design and Development

Among the almost infinite list of HTML entities, the non-breaking space ( ) is one of the most popular but very little understood.

The correct place for a   is, for instance, in “Mr. Smith”. The   will avoid a line break between Mr. and Smith, while leaving a space between them.

The non-breaking space earned its fame because in the dark days of the table layouts people needed to put content on certain elements without visual rendering.

As the normal space is discarded by the browser in most situations an entity like the non-braking space, which is always considered and yet has no shape was very welcome to leave a gutter.

Yet, the   should not be used to leave gutters. While it is quick and easy to put them, is really a nightmare to upgrade, because markup and presentation are all mixed. The role of the non-breaking space is actually to bind things together and not so separate them.

Have you seen Jamie Oliver’s shows on the “telly”? Sure you did.

Put the flour on the table, open a hole, pour water, add yeast, oops… spilled on the floor. No problem, let’s put it away and make some more.

…for this dish, let’s put this on a big pan, while we cook that on the small one. Chop this, chop that, use your hands, wonderful!

read full post…

Apparently there is a new law in Italy that demands a Blogger or web publisher to be registered with the government and pay a fee, even if your blog doesn’t have anything to do with making money, that applies to a teenager writing on his/her hobby as much as a problogger.

read full post…

In april, A List Apart launched a survey as a promise to be the biggest survey among web professionals. This week, after a whole six months of crunching results, the digest was published.

On this field that is so young, yet so important, with a future that is up to us to build, a survey like this is really something to analyze carefully, among the enormous amount of useful data you’ll find, for instance, the better paid web related professions and age and gender distributions of professionals.

Everyday we buy things that we don’t need or we only need for limited time. Sometimes, we don’t know that until we have them. Yet, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any use for anyone.

Throwing away things perfectly working things we don’t use is not a good option, we are creating mountains of garbage, donating them to charity is a nice option but sometimes is hard to chose the one that needs more that particular thing.

If you give to charity just about everything you don’t want, you increase the work they have to chose the things they need and you charge them with the duty to get rid of the things you had to.

In honor of Blog Action Day, today’s post will discuss what social web can do for our functional garbage.

read full post…

Gmail says “Search, don’t Sort” and by all means this is a good idea and they also tell you not to ever delete a message again, which is interesting, at least for the messages that have any value.

But if you do this you probably have copious amounts of email in a single archive and while sorting is not the solution, Labels and Filters can give you a hand with all this.

If you Manage all your emails accounts in Gmail then for sure you need further help by now to manage you gather-all Gmail account.

In either case, you might find useful to use Labels to organize them as or need a second Gmail account as .

This post will explain

1. Why search is better than sort
2. How to set labels
3. How to use filters
4. How to use Filters to set Labels as suggested by Peter Cruickshank (See comment)
5. How to use handle multiple Gmails accounts as suggested by Pramod (see his comment)
6. As a bonus I even tell you how to deal with server backups sent by mail to you

read full post…

On most serious websites guidelines to make passwords include not to use pet names, birth dates, wedding dates and words on dictionaries because they are too easy to guess and can be easily cracked to get access to your account.

Snapshot of security question asked by Facebook

What really amazes me is that after you pick a (hopefully) hard to guess password and possibly not easy to remember the very system asks you for a “security question” to help you case you forget your hard-to-guess password and these questions are ofter as stupid as your pet name, which is precisely the kind of thing that you should avoid as password.

read full post…

There has been a great fuzz lately about the Nofollow attribute on links and I think every publisher of new media (bloggers and alike) should take a stand either against or in favor of this discussion.

I took mine and I have disabled nofollow on this blog, but before I get on the discussion, let me first overview what the nofollow atribute is.

read full post…

At the same time minimalism is in fashion out there, there is so much content to put on a single web page that too often we see cluttered layouts around the web.

Space to breath, also called White Space or Negative Space is a very delicate part of design and is directly responsible for the state of mind the reader of the reader.

read full post…

I have just finished reading Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke, one of the best readings I had so far on Web-related matters.

The book does assume you know a good amount of CSS, not a single paragraph is spent explaining how selectors and rules work, so it is not suitable for beginners keen to wet their feet on the waters of CSS. Yet, as the most part of the book is not quite technical, it also doesn’t requires you to be a CSS wizard.

Transcending CSS, as the title properly says, is not about CSS, it is about going beyond, it is about Web Design, a term that is in everybody’s mouth, but not necessarily in a meaningful way. It is about getting to the end of the road and start paving where Web Design will follow in the future.

read full post…