As the summer draws to a close, minds turn to completing projects and starting up new ones, so this month our blog round-up, apart from maintaining its watching brief, also includes some links to developing resources you might find useful. 

Highlight spotted this month - details of sIFR a new Flash replacement technique.

Hot Topics from the Blogs is a monthly peer into the blogs of Web development movers and shakers, with the focus on highlighting recent postings that will stimulate and educate.

Hot Topics from the Blogs: September 2004

Welcome to September's edition of Hot Topics from the blogs, this month it seems we've picked up on a number of thoughts on CSS and some resources you may be interested in.

Probably the most important posts I've seen this month refer to sIFR – the latest Flash replacement strategy – so that's what I'm starting with.

Custom Typography

Typography has been the subject of a new series of articles by Linda Goin here on DMXzone, so I was intrigued to come across a piece (on the Web Standards site) alluding to AT&T's standards makeover of their homepage and indicating they would be moving on to use sIFR.

sIFR I thought – what's that?

sIFR stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, and as detailed on Mike Davidson's site, is "a standards-compliant way to deliver rich typographical text in a flexible manner to over 90% of web users".

I won't regurgitate Mike's description here, suffice to say that this technique is just going to be a huge and incredibly useful way of delivering custom graphics to people's browsers, while staying within an accessible framework. How big is it going to be? Well as this second post points out, at one point the original announcement of sIFR was the 13^th most popular page in the entire world!

This is very much a work in progress with improvements being made all the time.

Reworking, Revisiting, Resizing Pt.II

Last month I mentioned that Douglas Bowman at Stopdesign had used a redesign of the Microsoft site to exemplify how useful CSS could be in delivering leaner, more efficient code (see Throwing Tables Out the Window).

Well no sooner had I published August's blog round-up, than I find this posting from Molly Holzschlag pointing out a Microsoft redesign and major code clean-up.

CSS Problems and Experimentation

I seemed to come across a number of articles this month all looking at various bits and pieces of CSS.

First off Michael Koch has come up against an issue in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which causes freezing and crashing on encountering certain CSS combinations. His concerns were somewhat assuaged by a post from Eric Meyer, in which Eric details a problem with a float : left declaration that suddenly threw his site into confusion. Initially fingers were pointed at XP SP2, but that was quickly deduced to not be the culprit. If you want to have a go at playing detective, Eric's provided a test file detailed here.

As always, there's been a lot of good stuff on Eric's blog – this month he ran a series of articles on the use of tables, finishing by neatly summarising his thoughts on the pros and cons of using tables as a means to achieve page layout.

If you really want to start stretching your mind on presentational matters, how about considering taking out the default browser styles and seeing what happens to your web page.

Over at Mezzoblue Dave Shea has been figuring out how to code some CSS to force a block of content to have a specific height. Using the min-height propertyshould be the way forward and workarounds can be used for the non min-height supporting IE, but Safari still used to cause problems. Not any more thanks to Mr. Shea.

Further on this line of CSS layout heroics, Paul Bellows has posted a method of balancing column heights without any HTML/CSS hacks or tables, but by using JavaScript. A view on the possible issues and alternatives was provided on the Web Standards Project site.

Editorial Corner

The people from 37 Signals wrote up their notes from a trip to a talk on presenting data and information – interesting thoughts on how to make your wonderful content really shine.

Jumping back to Mezzoblue, in response to an amusing aside about unhelpful critical comments, there are (IMHO) some little nuggets in the comments  – Robert Hahn suggests presenting designs (where appropriate) in black and white with placeholder graphics to avoid distraction. The follow up post and subsequent comments are also thought provoking – and fun – would you pick a colour by typing your date of birth into a hex colour field?

Plagiarism is always a problem when producing content or ideas – sometimes you won't realise you're being ripped off, and sometimes, as a publisher you won't necessarily know when you're actually doing the ripping off!

Here's a cautionary tale about a small company that outsourced some work, and ended up in a whole heap of trouble when their new website turned out to look a lot like somebody else's. Painfully that other website happened to be quite well known. From working in publishing I know what I've caught on occasion, but you can't check every line of every chapter/website/article etc. Memo to self – must stay vigilant.

Accessibility and Web Design

Whether you explicitly embrace it or not, accessibility and web standards complaint programming is having an increasing impact on web design. Even if you just want to throw pictures up of your cats to show the family, building your site using out of date approaches won't impress anyone.

So here are some thoughts from Anne Van Kesteren (and his – yes the his is correct – readers) about the nastiness of opening new browser windows from links. The Dive Into Accessibility article referenced reinforces the argument.

Further on the subject of accessibility, Andy Clarke has noted some thoughts about the use of alt text and longdesc.