Toluu : Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

A friend of mine recently asked the question “Why the Hate on Internet Explorer 6?” He explains some very logical reasons why it doesn’t make sense to be so negative about IE6, and as I agree with him on just about all points, I thought I’d give the clearest answer I could.

Simply put, IE6 shouldn’t get any hate. Nor should it receive any love, either.

The best thing the web standards community (and any other smart web folk) can do is stop complaining about an ancient browser whose developer waited too long to replace, and just stop supporting it altogether.

One of the benefits of web standards is that our documents are marked up correctly before we reach the presentational stage. One of the benefits of IE6 (et al) is that we can target specific versions using Conditional Comments. The combination of the two means we can still send our content to old browsers, but not have to bother with the presentation, thus saving ourselves hours of needless headaches and frustrations, while not punishing the users of said old browsers by denying them access to our content.

There’s constant discussion about whether or not to continue support for

Regex Patterns for Single Line CSSAugust 29

There has been plenty of discussion about the pros and cons of single-line style sheets, and I’ve been including them as an option when teaching CSS management and organization in my Web Design World presentations in Chicago, Seattle, and later this year in Las Vegas (at WebBuilder) and Boston.

It’s a matter of preference

As a fellow Sidebar-ian (Sidebarbarian?) Steve has been trying to convince me to use the single-line approach for a while of course, and Bryan and Jon have also become fans of this formatting style for their own work. Although they are enamored with it, I haven’t taken to it yet, still preferring to write my style sheets using the “normal” indented formatting most of us are used to.

Now, before anyone gets their knickers in a twist about why they love, hate, “can’t live without” or “will die before they try” single-line formatting, let’s just take a step back and remember one thing: it isn’t anything special, just an alternate formatting style that doesn’t af

Simple CSS Hover Tab ThingyAugust 19

Ok, so the name won’t win any awards, but let’s be honest: neither will this mini-tutorial, or the idea itself (nothing groundbreaking here, move along…). But after throwing together a quick little (you guessed it) hover/tab/thingy for my previous article, I thought I was fun enough to share, in case you find a need for it someday.

The usual suspects

The “thingy” in question is just a simple unordered list, with each list item containing an anchor and an image—we want the images in this case because I want them to display in my RSS feed and for anyone who can’t (or chooses not to) view the styled version of this site.

Note: Feel free to reference images in the stylesheet rather than inline if that suits your purposes. Because I know you need permission, don’t you.

If you were too lazy to click the link to my previous article above (and who could blame you, really), here’s a quick demo page.

Moving right along…

First, the markup (with URLs truncated to save trees):

1 2 3 4 5 <ul id="hover-tab-thingy"> <li id="one"><a href="...">One <img ... /></a></li> <li id="two"><a href="...">Two &

I Need Some SpacingAugust 19

Way back in June over on Subtraction, Khoi presented a tweaked version of the Gmail interface (and then a follow-up article regarding the feedback on the first), improving spacing and alignment by making a few small but significant changes overall:

“…by normalizing the space between like elements, aligning elements along similar spatial planes, moderately increasing the space between stacked items and paying attention to how elements are framed by negative space, we can get what is, in my opinion, a significantly more attractive Gmail interface.” — Khoi Vinh

This is something I’ve wanted to see for a while in Gmail, and in fact had presented a few examples last year as part of my interview process at Google (I really must write about my series of amazing job interviews last summer, but I’ll leave that for another time). After reading—and commenting—on Khoi’s post, I had intended to publish my variation on Google’s mid-2007 interface, but as the dedication to blogging continues to elude me, this too fell a few pages back in the Moleskine to-do list—until now.

The Setup

I took a slightly different approach than Khoi, though my goals wer

Some Thoughts on Logo DesignJune 20

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of answering a few questions for an article being written by my friend Elliot Jay Stocks for .net Magazine (Practical Web Design here in the States). Elliot quoted me quite nicely in the article, but I thought it would be interesting to publish my complete answers here, along with his questions, and he kindly gave his permission.

Note: The article itself is full of some solid information and quotes some bright minds — well worth picking up if you get the chance (as is the rest of the issue).

EJS: Please could you tell us a bit about yourself and your work with logos so far?

DR: I’ve always loved logos, and some of my earliest experiments with design were logotypes (I tend to prefer type-driven logos with minimal imagery). I don’t get as many opportunities to design logos for clients as I’d like, but I do a fair amount for friends and personal projects, sometimes for imaginary ideas just as an excuse to design a logo or logotype.

EJS: Which logo (that you’ve designed) are you most proud of and why?

DR: I’m torn between the current logo for SuperfluousBanter and a logo I did a few years ago for a real estate company that by brother was starting. I put most of the work I do int