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Personal Homepage of Matthew Wilcox

Matt is an English web designer based in Great Britain.

Those of you who don’t know me allow me to say hi, shake your hand (gents), give you a welcoming hug (ladies) and guide you to the about section.

Most recent enteries

Why CSS needs to borrow from programming languages

Exerpt / Summary

The job of CSS is to provide control over how the content of a document is displayed. Anything that falls under the remit of 'controlling the display of content' should fall under the abilities of CSS. Yet CSS often lacks capabilities to allow flexible design, requiring layer upon layer of 'tricks' to accomplish certain objectives, requiring content to be structured 'just so' to achieve a display objective, or in the case of some designs proving instead to be completely incapable. Part of the trouble with CSS is the perception that it should be 'simple', as though visual design and layout is a skill-set roughly equivalent to joining-the-dots and colouring in with a crayon. Yes, the syntax should be simple, but the capabilities of CSS should not. We as a community need to decide what CSS should be able to do, and petition the engineers to make it happen. Which itself would seem to require altering preconceptions of what 'display' and 'design' means on the web. A lot of people seem to be under a misconception that CSS should not have any ability to perform calculations, use variables, or perform logic tasks. That to do so would make it a programming language, and that CSS should not be a programming language (presumably because they feel a programming language is too complicated). But CSS most certainly should have these things, and without them it is destined to forever be a cludge, requiring cludges to wrangle the visual results we want.continue reading

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Posted:
Thu, 24th Apr 2008 at 12:31 UTC
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URL design - hackable URLs and search engine optimisation

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As part of this website's long overdue redesign, where nothing is being left unscrutinised, I have been thinking about my URL structure. I want a solution that treats the URL as a command line (so it's hackable), but I also want it to be well optimised for search engines. Here's my thinking on the design of the URL structure I'm likely to use.continue reading

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Posted:
Sun, 20th Apr 2008 at 19:56 UTC
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Social websites and voting systems: ditch the down-vote

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We're all familiar with websites that offer the user a chance to vote on an article, comment, or link. The idea is that if you like it you vote up, and if you dislike it you vote down. It seems perfectly reasonable, but there's a flaw in this idea. If you want a happy community with an emphasis on helpful comments then you need to ditch that ability to down-vote. Either vote up, or don't vote at all. As your mother may once have told you; if you've not got something nice to say, don't say anything.continue reading

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Posted:
Sun, 13th Apr 2008 at 18:49 UTC
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UK ISPs seek to charge BBC for iPlayer. UK ISPs run by morons.

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ISPs are annoyed because modern internet use has a lot of applications that use the bandwidth that ISPs sell to customers. Applications like the BBC's iPlayer (a TV on demand service) stream a lot of data over the internet, via your ISP. ISPs now want the BBC to pay for some of that bandwidth, because it costs ISPs money. Well, tough cookie ISPs, maybe you should have factored that in to your business plan. It's no surprise that it's Tiscali making such noises either, a company with terrible customer service and a general air of incompetence. UK ISPs need a good harsh talking to by some regulators for mis-advertising their service and for gross incompetence in running their businesses.continue reading

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Posted:
Wed, 9th Apr 2008 at 09:11 UTC
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A guided tour of Llandudno as seen from the Great Orme

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A tour of Llandudno as seen from the Great Orme. Llandudno is a town on the north coast of Wales, in the UK. Llandudno has two beaches, a lot of shops, some spectacular views, a lot of sheep, some mountain goats, spectacular views, sheep, and old people. The old people are there mainly because it's so flat in town and they can whiz around in their electric scooters terrorising teenagers and listening to the latest phat beats loudly enough to cause a general nuisance. The goats are here because they were imported from India many decades ago. The sheep are here because otherwise it wouldn't be Wales. Though I have sometimes wondered whether Wales is a misnomer, I'd find the place more entertaining if it were dotted with families of whales about the place as opposed to festooned with sheep. Perhaps 'Sheep' was not surreal enough to name a country after.continue reading

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Posted:
Tue, 8th Apr 2008 at 12:41 UTC
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Why are the Government so inept when it comes to the internet?

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First a good bit of news: Carphone Warehouse say they will not cut internet access for alleged music sharers as "it's not our job to police the internet". Bravo! Indeed it isn't, and expecting an ISP to do so is stupid and naive. They are a service provider (like your telephone supplier), not law enforcement. Now some bad news: The Government is claiming to ban sex offenders from social networks by providing social networks with offenders e-mail address. I'm sorry, but who thinks up these policies? And have they ever actually been on a computer, because it sounds like they are as qualified for the job as I am for bomb disposal (I once watched a Bruce Willis movie).continue reading

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Posted:
Fri, 4th Apr 2008 at 09:05 UTC
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Photography bits and bobs from the last month or two

Exerpt / Summary

Since vowing to use my Fujifilm compact camera as originally intended (to help me spot photographic opportunities in day to day life) I've done pretty well at it. Here are some shots taken over the last month or so, all with the little compact camera. A couple are just snapshots, but most have had some thought put into them.continue reading

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Posted:
Fri, 28th Mar 2008 at 19:10 UTC
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A family visit, and Granddad's birthday party

Exerpt / Summary

First things first, if you're not family you will more than likely not be interested in this post or the photos/videos. Just letting you know. :) I'm very late in getting this entry up, but my excuse is that I've been busy, and was hoping to get the video and photos uploaded through my control panel once I finished it. I've not finished it. So they are all being attached the old fashioned way, which takes hours. Anyway...continue reading

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Posted:
Fri, 28th Mar 2008 at 18:37 UTC
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Edge to edge alignment with CSS

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A tricky issue with CSS is trying to get a row of floated objects to line up with your page properly, edge-to-edge. For example, getting the first element on a row to line up with the left edge of your website, and the right element to line up with the right edge of the website. Well, getting edge-to-edge alignment on floated objects is actually very easy; here's now.continue reading

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Posted:
Sun, 23rd Mar 2008 at 12:40 UTC
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The trouble I have with Apple

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Goes beyond my iTunes rant. The problem is that Apple are every bit as bad as Microsoft in terms of attitude and business practice. They always have been.continue reading

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Posted:
Fri, 21st Mar 2008 at 22:11 UTC
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External links

Of The Moment

A selection of noteworthy links I've recently discovered…

Webkit bring new toys to CSS

For the first time in a long time, something about CSS’s future has me excited and hopeful instead of pessimistic and glum. Rather than faffing about forever over ill advised modules like the W3C are, the Webkit team have implemented some useful and very cool features. I can not wait to take advantage of these.

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Calculating Hours - the Client Factors

Designers, avoid making pricing mistakes: Andy Rutledge talks about the importance of pricing for services, how to do it, what to think about, and how this simple part of the job has knock-on effects for every other element of the process.

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Pixel prostitution

The relationship between designer and client isn’t always easy. Part of the job a good designer has is to educate the client. Sometimes though, there are simply clients that are not compatible, and it’s essential to exit gracefully from the relationship.

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Passionless pre-professionals

Surviving the education system and retaining your passion when you come out the other side to get a job isn’t easy.

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5 reasons I won't be getting on the open id train

Kyle Neath gives five reasons why the implementation of OpenID isn’t delivering what it ought to.

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Firefox 3 beta 5 is out

And it’s a complete dog. Where b4 was solid as a rock, b5 has frozen four times and crashed three times in the space of two and a half hours. Awful.

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Amazon.co.uk gets a new User Interface

I don’t know when this went live, but it’s a welcome modification. The old site was really showing its age in design terms, it was a mess.

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Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, bye-bye Vista?

The long-standing bug that made booting Linux impossible on my laptop (Samsung Q45) has been fixed in the Ubuntu 8.04 beta. So at long last I can now run it on my laptop. Colour me very impressed indeed with it. It’s looking and feeling so much more professional since I last booted up an Ubuntu (6.10 I think).

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British law allows you to film and photograph in any public space

But it’s not a fact known to some ‘enforcement officers’. If anyone asks you to stop filming or photographing in a public space, they have no legal rights to do so.

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Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox 3, Safari 3.1 is out, and so is Vista SP1

Wow but today has been a busy day for getting updates and shiny new toys!

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