Visual28-Personal Blog of Mark Aplet - Design, web, and other topics

As if we don't already live in a environment that is filled with enough distractions, that we need yet more things to waste our time. However sometimes on those rare occasions, a need arises and we need to disconnect - unplug from our daily grind and clear our minds. Maybe you have time to kill and want to goof around for a bit. This is not a luxury I personally get to enjoy all that often. I would like to believe that someday I will have more time to goof around. In the meantime I will continue ro bookmark pages so that when that day does comes, I will have plenty of options. Below are 10 sites that you can waste your time with starting today if you like.

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CSS3 brings some cool new features to the web. Some features are highly discussed like rounded corners, borders, and layout control. I am really looking forward to these items becoming standard in the near future. However, I am happy that my two favorite browsers Firefox and Safari already support many of the CSS3 specs. This gives me the ability to use some lesser known items without killing my design for IE. I enjoy some of the simpler things, like the ability to change the text color and background color when text is selected on the page. IE does not currently support this but thats ok… I don't care that much for IE anyway.

Want to add this effect to your site? It's simple. Add this code to your css stylesheet.

*::-moz-selection { background:#FFFFCC; } /* FOR MOZILLA */
*::selection { background:#FFFFCC; } /* FOR SAFARI */

If you want to know more about this tag check out quirksmode.org for additional info and examples. A word of caution must be noted here, If you must validate for css level  2.1 then you will want to forgo this trick as it's not CSS2 compliant.

Recently Mike Robinson of www.akamike.net posted a response to another article on noupe.com asking for opinions on using list with forms. I'm not trying to single anyone person out. Mike is not alone in his thoughts, and I am simply using his post Form Mark-Up: Are Lists Appropriate? as a "for example" on the kinds of articles that I am reading more frequently on various blogs. I'm not trying to pick on Mike but rather raise awareness to an increasing problem that I see.

One of the trends that I see more frequently, is to place all your content in a list. Ordered Lists, Unordered Lists, and Definition Lists. It doesn't seem to matter anymore. This "all inclusive tag" is being packaged and sold as semantic markup. Frankly I feel it's just bad marketing. Yes it does validate. So does a table. Validating is not a true measure of semantics. A list of any kind is meant for one thing. Listing content. It's not semantic to use a list for layout. This is still bending the rules for layout purposes. In fact I would say it's worse in some cases, and less semantic than using a table. I'm not saying "use tables" I am merely saying it's not any better. Lets take a look at the two practices and compare them to plain old HTML. I have laid out three forms below with the same elements. One is in an ordered list, the other uses a table, and the last one is plain old html.

See how these three choices stack up against one another.

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