position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

Ever since the releases of the Web Developer and Firebug extensions in Firefox, things in the world of CSS and HTML work have become a lot easier. Sadly, a lot of what will work in almost all browsers still massively messes up in Internet Explorer. Knowing a few things about IE like hasLayout helps a lot, but sometimes even those fixes don’t work and you’re left trying out every conceivable hack known to man. Wouldn’t it be great to have something like Firebug in IE? Apparently Jean-Fabrice Rabaute thought so too, so he’s releasing DebugBar 5. Someone give this man a cigar.

I guess it’s no longer news that Safari 3.0 will run on Windows as well as the Mac, as Steve Jobs announced on this year’s WWDC Keynote. The bit that’s really going to be interesting for web developers, however, is that Safari will come along with a new version of Web Inspector, which is basically the Safari counterpart to Firefox’s excellent Web Developer and Firebug extensions. This is great, as Windows users will now have a reliable tool to bugfix CSS/XHTML for Safari. Going by the screenshot, it looks dead sexy, too. Now if someone would come up with something comparable for IE, that would be great (sorry, neither this nor this comes close).

Whenever I consider learning some AJAX, I find it frustrating trying to figure out which AJAX framework to use. In the article “AJAX: Selecting the Framework that Fits“, Dr. Dobb’s Portal reviews five popular AJAX frameworks, going by the criteria of widget availability, ease of maintenance, download size to client and available documentation. The reviewed frameworks are Dojo, Prototype with Scriptaculous, Direct Web Reporting, Yahoo! User Interface Library and Google Web Toolkit. If you want to skip reading the article: the Yahoo! User Interface Library wins, though your mileage may vary depending on your projects and criteria.

John Faulds of Tyssendesign has written up a comprehensive summary of CSS-based drop down menus. What makes this one stand out from regular link lists is that he provides all the pros and cons that come with each solution, so you can pick out what is best for your needs and know the limitations and the alternatives to each method from the start.

Last year’s webdeveloper advent calender “24 Ways” (we reported) is at it again, offering even more ways to impress all your geek friends. One new tutorial per day, up until Christmas. You’ll find last year’s archive here.

My net has been down yet again, so sorry for the lacking updates yet again. I’ve written a rant about my ISP over at the e-commerce-blog (in German), for those interested. Anyways, to make up for it, I’ve got some Awesome Stuff for you. Paul Armstrong has written some awesome scripts, among others a Lightbox variant, but done with Yahoo! UI and animated much slicker than the regular ones. Anyways, just have a look, you might find something awesome you can use.

Yeah, you read that right. uselesspickles.com has figured out a way to render real-time 3D using just CSS and Javascript. The magic behind the polygons lies in the CSS border attribute. This ingenious little trick abolishes the need for hundreds of little divs, sparing your CPU loads of cycles. The rotation of the 3-dimensional object can actually be controlled via keyboard commands. Not sure if there are any practical uses for this but cool stuff anyways.

Smashing Magazine has an extensive round-up of cheat sheets worth bookmarking.

Whether you’ve forgotten the name of a function or the property of a cascading style sheet – handy cheat sheets deliver the information you are looking for – immediately. Most cheat sheets are available as .pdf or .png-files, so you can print them and use them every day for whatever projects you’re currently working on.

Clicky.

Jack Slocum has developed an interesting new kind of comment system. Instead of commenting below an entry as you are used to, you can add comments to individual segments of a post. The Block Comment system has an intuitive user interface and is full of AJAX goodness. I’m interested in seeing the derivatives that will probably come out of this.

Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street has created a nice little script for automatic pullquotes. It’s incredibly simple to implement and uses unobtrusive JavaScript which means there are no accessibility issues. What is also nice about it is that the text is not duplicated in your html, and when you no longer want pullquotes, just turn off the script… so you don’t have to edit your old posts.

Update: A quick google search brought up this 2 year old article. So it’s been done before, however Roger’s script is a bit more advanced.