Unicodes and Footnotes

Some recent articles on footnoting in webpages have sparked interest in the CSS community. John Gruber at Daring Fireball posted this article about the footnoting system on his site. The Brand Spanking New website has posted a method involving Javascript and CSS, and Dave Shea over at Mezzoblue published a great article on Unicode Glyphs and including them in your webpages, which ties in nicely with the Daring Fireball method.

Unicode.Org has a set of downloadable PDF's for referencing the extensive lists of Unicode Characters.

You may also wish to bookmark this amazingly useful article at Evolt.Org which contains a Simple Character Entitiy Chart. Better yet, download it and take it home.

The CSS Playground

In case you haven't noticed, Stu Nicholls has redesigned the CSS Playground and added some new CSS demos to the site. The guy continues to amaze me with his creativity and meticulous, clean designs. Personally I can't choose which demo is the most useful, though I am partial to the "drop-cap", which beats trying to work with the first-letter property.

Minitab Mania

There's been a lot of articles and demos on minitabs recently. Minitabs are a subtle and easy to modify type of navigation list that can either be floated or centered based on your design needs. Web graphics has a great article on Inline Minitabs and a follow up titled Float Minitabs. each article is linked to demo pages for easy reference.

The origin of the mini-tab dates from 2003 and a post by Dan Cedarholm at Simple Bits. Here's a link to his original post and an additional article detailing Mini-Tabs with Background Images.

One problem with the inline non-floated lists is that IE 5 won't show the bottom borders on your links. One possible solution to that is to give your links a height of 1em, though this moves them outside the UL element. I suppose it's possible (or inevitable!) that there are other complications as well...

A more complex example is the Flyout Minitabs from Aplus Moments. Pretty sweet.

Return of Design

I first discovered Return of Design a few weeks ago when I was browsing the CSS Help Pile. Since then the site has expanded a bit and become a showcase of neat CSS design, as well as a resource for the latest CSS design links, articles, and color schemes. The site has also been included in the 9rules Network. This site is highly recommended.

Elastic Design: 456 Berea Street

Re-visiting the old debate of fixed width vs. fluid layouts, Roger Johansson talks about elastic layouts:

"Just in the last few days the old debate about fixed vs. fluid width in website layouts has surfaced again for some reason. I don't think we will ever come to a consensus on the issue, so there isn't much use in sharing my point of view. But a bit of debating can be fun, so I'll do it anyway."

Picture This: A visual guide to image replacement techniques.

CSS Reboot: Official site of the May 2005 CSS Redesign project.

Image Replacement: Again: Revisiting the pros and cons of the various image replacement techniques available for the CSS designer.

Protagonist: CSS/XHTML web design resources. Categories include free templates, articles, and resources for designers.

WASP announces Acid2

The Wasp officially released The Acid2 Test yesterday on their website. Simply put, the Acid2 test is "a test designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards such as HTML, CSS, and PNG." Take a look at how the test page is rendered in different browsers and poke around in the code.

Today's CSS Links:

More Nifty Corners: An update on the no-images rounded corner technique.

Definite Solution to Image Replacement: Uses negative letter-spacing I believe. Interesting, but the site is currently offline.

Doctype Declarations and Content-type Headers: A useful article for those struggling with the differences between XHTML and HTML, and beginners who need a clear explanation of the whole Doctype Zeitgeist.

The Future: HTML or XHTML Is a good follow-up to the above link.

Eric Meyer response to Acid2

Eric Meyer has just posted a critical response to the Acid2 Challenge. Should IE7 be the sole focus of the challenge? Scoble throws in his two cents...

John Oxten talks about the redesign of Joshuaink. Very attractive design in my opinion. I've been waiting for this one for a while now. Make ya feel good...