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Work related reading assignments
The future of HTML, Part 1: WHATWG
The future of HTML, Part 2: XHTML 2.0
Google's Web Authoring Statistics "In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata."
CSS Cheat Sheet Dashboard Widget
No more Papyrus!
Everyone with a keyboard and an application that has a font list, listen up.
Please, please stop the madness.
It's everywhere, on every banner at every craft show, on every jewelry store awning, on every menu that wants a rustic feel, on every holistic healing professional's business card, on every bead store's price list, even on the titles of a documentary about the French and Indian War. It needs to stop, right now.
I'm not the first one to say this. Especially among the militant anti- Comic Sans/Arial/Verdana factions out there. But for some reason everyone from 7th graders doing reports on the pyramids, to Kinko Designers to PBS (and History Channel) production people insist on plastering it everywhere.
Stuff i found on the web
27 Unknown Creatures Found in California Cave
Pre-Law Wastelands: Abandoned Mine Lands of Southern Illinois "In the 1940s, no environmental laws protected Southern Illinois from coal miners who cleared forests, dug up the earth and changed the entire landscape without regard to the impact on water, air or life. The Pre-Law Wastelands panoramas focus on these historic strip-mine lands and the scars that remain. "
Last three links from Incoming Signals
Plep is another good weblog I've been stealing links from lately
Maps
Google Earth is finally available for the Mac! Some people may complain about the interface, but for a first release beta it's good enough for more than just playing. Learn some Google Earth Basics.
As Jason has pointed out, the target on top of the Target may be effective for advertising on Google maps, but it's been there for the passing airplanes years before satellite photos on Google or even MS Terraserver were available.
Integrating Google Maps into Your Web Applications.
American Museum Congo Expedition 1909-1915 online exhibit has a nice collection of historical African maps. "The maps in this gallery reflect the development of European knowledge of African geography from 1562 through 1940."
And last but not least - The Beer Mapping Project
CSS stuff
A few weeks ago, over Mai Tais at the know closed Trader Vic's, Brian asked me about my recommendations for CSS tutorial sites. Then he reminded me in an email that I should do a post on it for all to have as a resource. Whether it was the Mai Tai haze I've been in for weeks, or maybe the holiday, I've finally gotten around to joting down some links.
I'd start with the Bare Bones, No Crap, CSS Text Control Primer. Exactly what it says it is. Wow this stuff is easy isn't it?
Brainjar's Using Style Sheets gets a little more into it, explaining all the stuff you need to know before you can really mess with designing with CSS. Rules, selectors, attributes, inheritance, classes, IDs etc.
Once you've learned how to style things with CSS, you'll be moving on to making layouts with CSS, so read CSS Positioning to learn about padding and margins, relative and fixed postions and floats.
Hopefully, you'll build your web page, and everything will work fine. You'll be able to stop here and go on with your life.
Chances are you'll want to build something a little more complex than one or two boxes with styled text in them and you'll need to really understand some postioning techniques, so read the Selectutorial and Floatutorial.
OK, you probably tried to do something that would look nice and things got out of place. Read Containing Floats, because they don't act they way you want sometimes.
You went and tried to build something really fancy, didn't you? You better read Common Coding Problems with HTML and CSS, because you'll have them.
If you got this far, you're in too deep, you'll need to not only learn how to swim, but how to deep sea dive. If you haven't heard of the Box Model Problem, you better learn.
If you've gotten this far without retreating back to FrontPage, you might as well read everything at Position is Everything.
Then read everything linked on the CSS guide for the unglued.
Spend a few minutes and memorize all the CSS Bugs and Workaround tables.
Then read all 194 manually selected Style Sheet Resources.
If you got through all that, you should be able to hang with people like Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, Dave Shea, Eric Meyer, and Molly Holzschlag.
Then give me a call, I need some help with this stuff.