Rob Larsen

Archive for the 'standards' Category

JSON Feeds For Fun and Profit Part 3- wherein Eval() kind of bums me out

(and several months later I finish my little JSON series…)

So far my exploration of JSON has been a fun-filled walk in the park. Moonbeams and rainbows. All that.

This last post on the subject is slightly less cool as I get into one of the least attractive components of the whole JSON thing- the use of eval() to transform a text response into a proper JavaScript object. The use of eval() is one of the reasons I originally was a little shy about using JSON. Why? eval() is slow and I try to stay away from slow if at all possible. That and the idea of eval()-ing code from some third party makes me wary.
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I Hate HTML Emails… But I'm Still Responsible for Them, So This Is Cool.

I like the sound of the Email Standards Project

The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.

Our goal is to help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for both designers and readers alike.

I don't do HTML emails very often any more (although they still sneak through,) but we still do a ton of them at Cramer so just for my co-workers' sake I'd love to see email clients come together the same way browser vendors have (finally) come together in order to allow us to code clean, light, standards compliant HTML emails. If I never had to rely again on the dirty tricks we use to get HTML emails to render I would be a happy man. It would also save clients money since the unwieldy beasts we send out are a lot more difficult to maintain and edit than something with nice structure would be.

Did you know- 8 Bit PNG transparency is just like an old school transparent Gif

Don't believe me? Check it out:


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I wish I'd known about this earlier.

CSS Naked Day

Since my site looks good naked.

Well, my main site, looks really good.

The blog doesn't look quite as good, because of the way I smashed together my existing template and worpdress' sidebar. On the blog all of the left-hand sidebar content is up at the top. On my main site, basically the first thing you see is the H1.

my-site-naked.gif

Speaking of stripped down. Have I mentioned that I'm going to, as a sandbox project, make my site mobile friendly? I am. I'll write about my attempts here.

Oh the fun we'll have

With the :hover pseudo class and adjacent sibling selectors.

Okay, maybe I should title it "Oh the fun I'll have."

Whether it's anyone else's definition of "fun" or not, with IE7 released the following CSS now works with at least one definition of "cross-browser"

p + p
{
display: none;
}
p:hover + p
{
display:block;
}