Archive

It’s been a crazy and hard few weeks. Between work, film projects, family coming into town (and crashing on our floor) and the passing of my Grandmother, my mentor and my closest friend, I’ve hardly been keeping my head above water. But this week ushers in an event we have all been looking forward to all year. Yes, it’s that time again. An Event Apart 2008, sails in to San Francisco Monday.

This years line up is chalked full of interesting topics and top notch speakers. In particular, I’m looking forward to Better User Experience Through Microformats, by Tantek Çelik, who is one of the founders of microformats.org. Tantek will discuss “proper use of microformats (in addition to those Elements of Meaningful HTML that you know by heart) [and how this] can improve the usability of several common interactive design scenarios.”

In addition, there is an entire arsenal of compelling sessions, including presentations by Luke Wroblewski, Jeff Veen and Kelly Goto.

I look forward to seeing everyone there.

It’s not too late, you can still get tickets.

It’s the end of a long day, but a gratifying one none-the-less. If there ever was an excuse for neglecting one’s blog, this is most definitely it. For the past weeks (maybe even months) I’ve been working on redesigning the Object Adjective website. After many hours, many delays and many other responsibilities, I am very happy to say we have finally launched the new site.

I’ll keep this brief, as I am obligated to go celebrate, but I did feel this monumental (or so it feels) moment could not go without mention.

I am understandably exhausted, as today was the big day. Forgive me if I’ve overlooked anything. We are sure to tighten up any loose ends in the days to come.

If you are interested, I went into some detail about the how and why decisions that went into this redesign, so feel free to continue reading.

* html body {display: none;} … I haven’t figured out why some think this hack is discriminatingGeorg

position: relativity

Ever wonder why applying a position: relative to an element in Internet Explorer can fix bizarre rendering problems? The standing theory, which is also a highly technical one, is that sometimes you just need to remind IE that things need to flow in their natural order. As logical as that may sound, the problem really has to do with a little thing called hasLayout.

display: none inline-block

This is not a new cat, nor a new bag, for that matter. Web designers have long been plagued with the rendering inconsistencies offered up by Internet Explorer, such as the peek-a-boo bug. Each of us, individually and as a community, have mapped these inconsistencies out and made record of them in our own bag of CSS tricks. None-the-less, IE still proves to be the most loathsome part of the job for many.

Though IE7 has made some pleasing improvements over it’s predecessors, it’s still a pitch or seven away from being adequate. So, I was very excited when I found On Having Layout, an on going project focussed on understanding IE’s proprietary “Layout” property and how it is messing up our world.

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