Jump to main navigation, main content
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.
This post brings to a head a lot of my thoughts and feelings with regard to CSS3 and the way the W3C is developing it. It does not aim to look at specific topics in detail, but to step back and question some fundamental issues that I feel need to be addressed.continue reading
The goal is to produce a standard accordion menu, with the requirement that the parent buttons (the big grey ones) accommodate up to two lines of text, and that text must be aligned vertically to the middle. Button content may be dynamic, and so text-length is unknown: that means no hackery of providing a class for single-line buttons and a class for multi-line buttons.continue reading
Just a small note to anyone that visits here. I hate my website. It is a terrible reflection of my skills, it's unfinished, it's broken, it's three years old, it's out of date in many ways, forms don't work well, the user experience is poor. It embarrasses me, and it's a terrible advertisement for me considering I'm a professional web designer. In short, the site is getting a serious re-factoring over Christmas to bring it in-line with my skills and abilities today. If you're reading any technical articles and thinking my words are at odds with my site - you're right. You'd never know I walk the walk as well as talk the talk by looking at this. Time to kick things into shape.continue reading
YouTube have started including a "brand bar" with search field in their embedded players. That's a bad idea for two reasons; firstly embedded players are in the context of another site, and shoving a YouTube bar in the player quite easily ruins carefully crafted designs: "hey look at the video! Let me grab your attention!". Secondly, this is an embedded player - it's there because the author of the page including the video thinks the content of the video is relevant to their audience. Given that is the only use case for embedding a video, why would anyone want to search youtube for a different video at that point? By all means include this new functionality, but do it after the video has played, you know, when it's relevant. Not before.continue reading
There has recently been quite a bit of attention paid to the idea of using CSS Tables for layout, now that all browsers support display:table; and its associated attributes. Using CSS to force layout in a table-like manner has been written about in books, talked about in blogs, and hailed as a revolution in CSS based design. It's not. It's really bad. Don't do it. I'm writing here to convince you why you shouldn't.continue reading
I've been neglecting the site again, but it's time for a quick catch-up and another batch of photo's. There are shots from a couple of photography sessions with the Bangor Photo Society, a few of the fireworks at Llandudno, and a few from Kath's 21st Birthday.continue reading
Ars Technica have a solid run-down of the UK's latest Orwellian moves to control the people it's supposed to serve. I am sick of hearing "terrorism" as the justification for centralised government spying on its citizens. Go do some detective work and stop sacrificing privacy at the altar of security. A mythical security, from a mythical problem.continue reading
Why the web benefits from larger font sizes than you might typically use for the same thing in print.continue reading
The fear is that Employers will think twice about hiring women of childbearing age. There's a simple solution. Give men equal rights to women; make paternity leave the same as maternity leave. This removes the ability to discriminate from the employer (there will be nothing to discriminate over), and it stops penalising men from enjoying the same family rights as women purely on the basis of gender. It's sexism, it's wrong.continue reading
The news that HTML5 is targeted to be released in 2022 came as the final nail in the coffin of the W3C and the current "Web Standards" movement for me. The W3C is dead, long live the W3C.continue reading
A selection of noteworthy links I've recently discovered…
An absolutely beautiful animation, in a number of ways.
If you’re living in the UK, and you’d rather the government didn’t hold a complete database of every phone call, text message, and website you ever go on, you need to sign this petition.
A spot on assessment of the differences between purists and perfectionists, and why you want to be the later rather than the former.
PHP 4.4.9 was rolled out today, and marks the end of development for PHP4. So everyone jump to PHP5, now. PHP5.3 alpha was released today and includes namespaces; a feature planned for PHP6, but apparently pulled forward.
Cuil is a new search engine with a larger index than Google, built by former Google employees. It’s very interesting. Here are my first impressions:
I’d love to see the numbers behind this, considering their market sector. At last, IE6 is starting to die!
This goes one step further than my usual approach. Normally I include the browser chrome in the graphic, so the design has context. This idea is even better and I can’t believe I’ve not thought of it myself.
The much anticipated release of the third version of the best browser in the world didn’t go particularly smoothly.
I bet they wished they had heard of pressing F11 in Firefox. And then Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs. Would have saved them a whole lot of time.
Just discovered Julia Nunes, who plays great songs on her ukulele, and has a personality I would kill for. I just hope that Brigitte Dale doesn’t find out that I’m two timing my crushes on her.
Built with valid XHTML and CSS, designed with web standards and accessibility in mind. Best viewed in a modern browser [Firefox, Safari, Opera]