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24 ways to impress your friends

2006

In March, the first tweets were tweeted; in August, jQuery 1.0 appeared. In its second year, 24 ways wrote responsible JavaScript and hinted at a mobile web, although mobile phones didn’t yet have proper browsers. Using CSS3 in client work was still a pipedream. And in October, IE7 was officially released by Microsoft — no words.

  1. Gravity-Defying Page Corners

    Dan Cederholm

    Dan Cederholm is a skillful designer who’s attention to pixels could ne’er be finer. He brings technique for good boys and girls of how to create nice graphical curls. So on the night before Christmas all through your house, get your page curling by stirring your mouse.

  2. Cheating Color

    Jason Santa Maria

    Jason Santa Maria continues our mini series looking at colour as he trips the light fantastic with your corporate brand guidelines. When is a colour not a colour? Read on and find out why old Saint Nic’s collars don’t match his cuffs.

  3. Photographic Palettes

    Dave Shea

    Dave Shea casts a critical eye over the process of choosing a colour palette – in particular, techniques for picking tones from a photograph. As Santa found one foggy Christmas eve, choice of colour can be absolutely critical to success.

  4. A Scripting Carol

    Derek Featherstone

    Derek Featherstone contemplates the effects that the lack of CSS or JavaScript may have on your scripts. Let the spirits of Christmas past, present and future guide you so that your scripts needn’t give up the ghost in the face of adversity.

  5. The Mobile Web, Simplified

    Cameron Moll

    Cameron Moll eases us into the idea of developing for the mobile web with four quick tips to get you started. Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? In the lane someone has a mobile device and they’re trying to get to your content. Hark!

  6. Boost Your Hyperlink Power

    Jeremy Keith

    Jeremy Keith appraises the humble hyperlink and highlights some of the more interesting, and perhaps lesser-known attributes that can be used to enrich the semantic value of your links. Consider it something to mull over whilst you polish off that gingerbread.

  7. Knockout Type - Thin Is Always In

    Shaun Inman

    Shaun Inman reveals a powerful method for keeping light-on-dark text looking lean, mean and fighting clean. Stay looking trim this Christmas with tantalising tree-topping typography trick from the internets’ Mr Cool himself.

  8. Fast and Simple Usability Testing

    Natalie Downe

    Natalie Downe describes a simple approach to usability testing for those of us working to tight timescales or budgets. That’d be nearly all of us then. Learn how to make the most of your available user testing time, and perhaps this year you’ll not end up quizzing auntie as she stuffs her face with turkey.

  9. A Message To You, Rudy - CSS Production Notes

    Andy Clarke

    Andrew Clarke details an approach for embedding production notes inside your document – a useful aid to project management and team communications throughout the development phases of any project. Sounds like Santa isn’t the only one who’ll be getting notes this Christmas.

  10. Styling hCards with CSS

    John Allsopp

    John Allsop applies a little bit of style to exhibit how life can be breathed into any instance of the hCard microformat. Like the wrapping on a good gift, add a little sparkle to your pages with this handy step-by-step tutorial.

  11. Revealing Relationships Can Be Good Form

    Ian Lloyd

    Ian Lloyd labels up and ships out a tip for improving the usability of form labels. Whilst checking the labels on the gifts under your tree, why not take some time out to check the labels on your forms and see where it might be appropriate to add some extra touches.

  12. Showing Good Form

    James Edwards

    James Edwards takes the good stuff down off the shelf and illustrates how forms can be built to be both highly stylable and remain accessible to all comers. Good looking and accessible all at once? Surely it can’t be so.

  13. Writing Responsible JavaScript

    Drew McLellan

    Drew McLellan investigates some of the ways JavaScript can be written to help it co-exist responsibly within your pages, and other pages too. We could all do with a little bit more peaceful co-existance over the holidays, couldn’t we auntie. Pass the gravy.

  14. Marking Up a Tag Cloud

    Mark Norman Francis

    Mark Norman Francis looks at the increasingly ubiquitous tag cloud, and specifically how it can be marked up in HTML. It’s evidentially not a clear-cut issue, as everyone does it differently. What we need is some kind of markup junkie to weigh in with his suggested method. Oh, wait…

  15. Random Lines Made With Mesh

    Veerle Pieters

    Veerle Pieters saves us from the code (the incessant code!) with a dazzling design technique using Illustrator’s Mesh feature. Coders take note! You can make something really pretty by just following a few basic steps. Will wonders never cease?

  16. Making XML Beautiful Again: Introducing Client-Side XSL

    Ian Forrester

    Ian Forrester gives an introduction to using XML’s forgotten child, XSL, as a client-side transformation language. Like a warming wooly scarf against the biting winter wind, Ian shows how XSL can be used to take the edge of even the ugliest XML documents to make them beautiful again. Thou shalt find the winter’s rage freeze thy blood less coldly.

  17. Hide And Seek in The Head

    Peter-Paul Koch

    Peter-Paul Koch continues our focus on JavaScript and Accessibility by demonstrating how fall-back HTML elements can be convincingly hidden when their functionality is to be replaced by Ajax. A viable alternative to what could be considered to be flashing your underwear at your users. No one wants that.

  18. Accessible Dynamic Links

    Mike Davies

    Mike Davies kicks off a mini-series on Accessibility and JavaScript by considering a number of techniques for hiding links, yet keeping them accessible. And when I say hiding links, I don’t mean hiding your links to seedy underworld of organised crime, no sir. Moving swiftly along…

  19. Rounded Corner Boxes the CSS3 Way

    Andy Budd

    Andy Budd explores the thorny issue of adding rounded corners to boxes, this time looking at what solutions lie waiting for us with CSS3. Consider it a little like feeling the presents under a Christmas tree … you know what’s there, you just can’t quite have it yet.

  20. Tasty Text Trimmer

    Drew McLellan

    Drew McLellan examines a method of enabling users to control their interface with a dynamic text trimmer, similar to that found in Safari RSS. Feeling bloated? Lose some weight at the touch of a button.