CSS Mania is hosting the first annual CSS World Awards, to recognize the work of developers who build web sites using CSS. Unlike the Bloggies, this isn't a popularity contest; a panel of experts (including Molly Holzschlag, Roger Johansson, Andy Budd, and others) will serve as the judges. The nominees come from sites listed on CSS Mania over the past year. Awards will be given in ten categories:

1. Site of the Year
2. Associations
3. Blogging
4. Business
5. Entertainment
6. Institutions
7. Media
8. Portal
9. Web Design (Companies and Portfolios)
10. Web Tools

The winners will be announced in early July, so stay tuned!

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So-called "skip links" are a well-known accessibility feature, allowing users to skip a page's navigation and any other structural elements and go straight to the content. They have the added bonus of being very handy to users of handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. I'd even go so far as to say they might actually benefit mobile users more than users of assistive technologies. But either way, no one can deny that skip links are a highly useful feature.

So, that being said, should skip links be hidden or visible? Mike Cherim and Gez Lemon dish it out on Accessites.org. Both make compelling points, and I can't say my mind has been made up one way or the other after reading this article - but it is certainly an excellent starting point for design and accessibility discussions.

What are your thoughts about skip links? Do they warrant screen real estate or not?

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The seminal web magazine, A List Apart, is looking for one good intern. The full details are available at Jeffrey Zeldman's web site. There's no money involved, but you'll get plenty of geek street cred, and that's arguably much more valuable in the long run. So, if any of you are looking for your big break (or at the very least, your 15 minutes of fame) this could be your chance. Prepare your application, and make sure you are prepared to discuss the relative merits and faults of the em dash and en dash.

Update: They have all the applicants they can handle! Thanks from Zeldman to everyone who applied.

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I know I used the "Now Hiring" image in the previous post, but what can I say - when it rains, it pours! Weblogs, Inc. - the company that handles the nuts and bolts behind this and many other fine blogs - is looking for two full-time standards-happy web designers. (Don't worry if you don't live in New York City; this is a work-from-home position.) The complete job description is posted at Brian Alvey's blog; if you're interested, you can contact him via his comments.

May the best two web geeks win!

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Are you ever bugged by superscript elements messing with the line height of your text? No? Well, honestly, it's not really the kind of thing one would spend a lot of time thinking about - that is, until one encounters the problem oneself.

It's an arguably minor problem that can cause major headaches, especially when a client or designer is resolute about having the entire page, text included, look exactly like the mock-up. But fortunately, there is a fix! Mzajac of Wikipedia explains how to force the element down ever so slightly, using relative positioning and the oft-overlooked vertical-align: baseline.

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Lynda.com has released a new video-based tutorial, CSS for Designers, led by Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke. This is an important tutorial, because it focuses on CSS from a designer's point of view rather than a developer's.

Molly and Andy work well together and play off each other's specialties. They don't waste a lot of time with introductory material, but get to the meat of the standards-oriented design issue right away. At the same time, they explain things in a clear and easy to understand manner. And, personally, I like that Molly covers the history of the web in the first chapter; this is very important information that is, more often than not, left out of web design and development tutorials.

The first chapter of CSS for Designers is available as a free preview in Quicktime format. The full tutorial is accessible with a Lynda.com premium membership, or available for purchase on a CD-ROM.

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Tom Lee has a rather hairy - but workable - solution for mimicking max-width in IE. It involves the use of Microsoft's Dynamic Properties.

The first time I tried this, it crashed my browser. A friend had the same result. Next time I tried it, all was well - but I still feel like I must tread lightly with this code, and routinely whisper sweet nothings in its ear.

While reading the MSDN page about Dynamic Properties, I had to wonder... why did they bother with all that nonsense, when they could've just followed the CSS spec?

Of course, with IE 7, that's exactly what they've done (to a point), so this proprietary hodgepodge will soon be moot. But in the meantime - and for several years to come, because let's be honest, few sites are going to cut off support for IE 6 right away - this is your solution. That is, unless it crashes your browser.

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If you live in or near Sydney, Australia, try to take advantage of the Billy Blue CSS Workshops (presented by maxdesign) being offered there. These are 2-day workshops that cover CSS in-depth, from the fundamentals straight through to creating complex layouts and dealing with browser bugs.

Not sure if it's for you? Attend one of the free info nights and learn more. The next info night will be next Tuesday, July 4th. And they provide caffeinated beverages.

Now, I just have to figure out a way to justify a trip to Australia to my employer...

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Check out the latest edition of A List Apart, featuring a fascinating article on automatic magazine layout of images. The technique?utilizes server-side technology to calculate where the images should be placed, but of course, CSS had to be used for positioning within the rendered page. The potential for IE-related problems seemed to loom hugely on the horizon as I read the article, but once I got to the section that explained the CSS, I saw that Harvey Kane's solution is beautifully simple and effective.

Oh, and while you're at A List Apart? Bid a fond farewell to the element.

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A few weeks ago, I mentioned the nominees and categories for the CSS World Awards, presented by CSS Mania. Well, the winners have been announced! They were selected by a panel of judges made up of industry experts such as Molly Holzschlag and Andy Budd; so you can bet these web sites are truly the cream of this year's CSS crop.

You can view the full list of winners at the CSS World Awards site, but a few noteworthy selections include:

• Site of the Year, 3rd place and Media, 3rd place: Vitamin. This new resource for developers combines information about web development, graphic design, server-side programming, and more into one tasty info-morsel. It's been around for only a few months, but I've already consulted it more times than I can count. (Not surprisingly, I think it should've won 1st place, but...)
• Blogging, 1st place and Web Design (Companies and Portfolios), 1st place: Simplebits. The list of Dan Cederholm's contributions to the web design and development community just keeps getting longer (and his blog has been a mainstay in my RSS reader for a long time). This award is well-deserved.
• Portal, 1st place: CSS Beauty. Finally, a site that centralizes job openings for CSS geeks! Oh, but that's not all they've got. Here's a tip: whenever things get slow 'round here, head over to CSS Beauty for a while. You won't be disappointed.

Now it's time for everyone to get cracking on their best CSS kung-fu, in preparation for next year's awards.

Got opinions about the outcome of the 1st annual CSS World Awards? Share 'em here!

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Designers love to "ooo" and "aahh" at fresh designs that seem to sprout up daily.? How can one keep track of the oh-so-many repositories that are out there?? CSS Galleries, that's how.? As your one-stop shop to CSS nirvana, CSS Galleries indexes 22 galleries and displays the most recent additions on their front page.? You can even filter out sites that appear in 2-3 galleries or 4+ galleries to help you avoid duplicates.? An RSS feed is also available.

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Analytic services provide valuable stats to web site owners and can be the only way of determining if a design is really working or not with real users. ClickTale hopes to up the ante by recording user actions so you can see every mouse movement, every click, and every scroll. Then the service lets you, the owner, see exactly what the user did. Perfect for testing usability. Currently ClickTale is a closed beta but you can sign up for updates by email. A web 2.0 site that is plum purple? I like it.

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WebdesignFromScratch.com recently gave sunhome.biz a slick re-design and they documented there thoughts and motivations so everyone can learn. The original design was drab with a large white space in the middle of the page. Also, the original design doesn't consider the needs of its target audience, senior citizens. The new design is much easier to follow and more pleasing to the eye. Give the article a read to learn the specifics of what they changed and why they did what they did, which is the best way to learn good design.

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In his article "HTML's a Tag Too," Bryan Veloso discusses the benefits of applying styles to the element. He argues that by making more effective use of , developers could eliminate the need for a wrapper div. Everything would effectively be "moved up" a level - apply global styles to instead of , and then can serve the same purpose as the wrapper div would have. Bryan points out that this can be particularly handy in XHTML 1.1, in which the no longer stretches the entire length of the page.

It's a neat idea, but for many developers - particularly those of us who work on large, enterprise-level sites - it is simply impractical. On large sites, rarely would you want to declare a global background image, for example. Or, you may not be able to access certain elements of a page at all, due to CMS limitations or other restrictions. However, for a small-scale site, styling could be a good way to reduce divitis, as long as you're mindful of scalability issues.

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Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 has been announced and is now available for download. Features include tabbed browsing, RSS integration, multiple search engines via the built-in search box, and more. Sure, these are all features that Firefox, Safari, etc. have had for a quite some time, but as the old saying goes, better late than pregnant. There are no new CSS features, however; Microsoft has stayed true to their promise that, for better or for worse, as of this March IE 7 was "layout complete."

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Check out this Slashdot interview with H?kon Wium Lie, the originator of the CSS idea. (Can you believe it's been over 10 years since CSS was proposed? Time flies when you're coding with tables!) Lie currently serves as CTO of Opera Software.

In the interview, Lie suggests that before releasing IE 7, Microsoft should ensure that the browser passes the Acid2 test and supports TrueType downloadable fonts. He also discusses XML, microformats, Ajax, and (of course) the future of CSS. Read the interview and watch him effortlessly knock down all suggestions that CSS is somehow lacking in capabilities.

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While we're on the subject of new browsers...

• Firefox 2 beta 1 is now available as a developer preview, for testing purposes only. (I guess that's a little redundant, isn't it?) Its features include: support for Javacsript 1.7; inline spell checking in text boxes; and the ability to reopen accidentally-closed tabs (I definitely need that one, with my command-W-happy fingers).
• Opera 9 has been released, with a lot of cool new features. To name just a few, it boasts built-in BitTorrent, thumbnail site preview, and one-click ad blocking. And there's more, so much more!
• All the cool kids are talking about Flock, with its built-in blog integration and photobar. If that doesn't have "Web 2.0" written all over it, I don't know what does.

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Love him or hate him, John C. Dvorak has written an article concerning the topic of this blog. John is bugged by CSS. The idea is great, it just falls apart in practice noting how Firefox displays CSS differently from Internet Explorer, which displays it differently from Opera he says.

"Everyone loses here, from users who can't under?stand why things look screwy, to developers who can't get CSS to do the job right, to baffled content providers.And what's being done about it? Nothing! Another fine mess from the standards bodies."

If we could get atleast two of the popular browsers on the same page, than we would be set. Imagine if IE and Firefox rendered code the same way. Every other browser would be forced to follow or die a slow and miserable death.

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First of all, I’m back! The move went well. However, it’s a bit chaotic here. A lot of boxes still need to be unpacked. I tell ya this takes more then a Spring cleaning :) I’ve gathered too much stuff over the past 12 years. Oh well, at least I am connected already :) I thought this was a good moment to share a small but useful EE tip. Before ExpressionEngine version 1.5 there was this problem when people didn’t enter the full URL of an article page, EE loaded a rather messy page. Since 1.5 it’s easy to make sure all broken URLs don’t get a 404 error page or a messy page.

This problem often occurred when people clicked on a very long link from the e-mail you receive when you are subscribed to the comments of an article. If the URL is very long chances are that the link is broken because it's broken into 2 lines. By adding the require_entry="yes" parameter in all the necessary exp tags of the article template page we can warn the user that the URL is incomplete or that the requested URL can't be found.

How to use of Expression Engine's require_entry parameter

This parameter tells the weblog tag that the URL should contain a valid URL title or ID. If this is not the case and the URL is broken the weblog tag won't show any data. In this situation we can use the "if no_results" conditional to show the user a message to inform what is happening and maybe refer to the archive page.

Make sure you add this parameter in all necessary exp tags of the template. For example also in the "exp:comment:entries" tag. This way no content will be shown. The only exp tag I left out is the "exp:comment:form" tag. It is not needed in this tag.

Hope this short EE tip is a useful one.

Today’s topic has been on my mind on several occasions but I always postponed writing about it. Something that happened on Saturday triggered this again. It’s an example out of the real world. One of those things that is on our to-do list is some new office/house furniture. So we visited a design shop and after some looking around we kinda found some great ideas. Before making a final decision we thought it would be a great idea to have some interior advice to see if all fits well in the available space.

Services

The services include a measurement at your place, color advice, ground layout with the furniture placed etc. So if this was similar to the world I work in, in most cases they would be required to do this free of charge. Guess what, they charge you for it. Which is only fair, it takes effort and time. If you buy a certain amount of furniture the amount gets deducted from the total invoice.

Our world has a different set of rules

What is so different between an interior design proposal and a website/cms proposal? It's simple in our world a vision, ideas, advice and even design mockups in most situations are free. These practices are most often used in bidding for a larger project. Almost always it is in black and white mentioned in the RFP that we can't charge one Euro for it unless we get the job. Yeah right that brings bread on the table. Promises, promises...

We get them all the time but recently we had the pleasure to receive an RFP from a city at our coast that spans the crown. That particular city wasn't content with a design mockup alone oh no they even had the audacity to state that the design revisions to that mockup had to be free too. You only got to have the nerve to think that's normal. This pisses me off and I have one clear message to all those freeloaders "stick it where the sun doesn't shine"! I don't work for free! Somebody has to say it out-loud.

Time to put a stop to it

The purpose of creative pitches are to give clients a better understanding of the creative capacity of the selected agencies. To me it is a lame excuse to not browse around in the portfolios and let someone else do the work for free. I wonder what goes on in the mind of the people who write that stuff down, do they expect the freebies in everything else also? From what understand it is not only a Belgian problem but an international one.

So when was the last time that somebody did a day of work for free for you? Think about, let a painter do a few rooms as a proposal and maybe you'll order the rest later. Good luck in finding one that will do so. Those RPF's are 8 to 10 pages if you are lucky and doing everything to the letter it will cost at least a day of work. A day that you don't earn anything, how uneconomic is that and not to mention unfair. Bigger agencies even employ someone just to handle those. No wonder that studies prove that it costs agencies approximately 11% of their gross income.

There are other ways

As agencies we need to start to show clients that there is another way too. What about reputation, a credentials presentation and chemistry? Looking at someone's portfolio is how I choose my freelancers. I don't demand free work from them to prove themselves.

Luckily not all clients/brands are like that. Those earn my upmost respect and I can only hope that others will become as wise. I know it's utopia to think this will change something but I want the world to know that I had enough and I hope other colleagues will think in a similar way.