It is amazing how the same idea seems to grip multiple developers at the same time. While the heydays of yet another image replacement technique seems to be over, flexible multicolumn CSS frameworks are the new sliced bread.

Thierry of TJK Design shows his One clean HTML markup, many layouts, Mike Stenhouse offers a CSS framework and Dirk Jesse brings Yet another multicolumn layout (in German).

If that is not enough, Alex Robinson gave me his impressive monster of an article + generator “one true layout” (to be released on P.I.E. soon) for review.

Update Stop the Press: The article is now live and can be read and enjoyed: In search of the One True Layout

A lot to read and skim through, and very great ideas, too. My concern is that it seems that everything generic tends to become a bit bloated and cryptic over time (DHTML libraries anyone?) and we’ll need to see how we can chop the ideas down into digestible chunks.

A lot of extra code has to be added to support outdated browsers, for example, and it would be cool to have these extras in an extra style sheet, for those who want to say “to hell with bad browsers” instead and keep their sheets clean and maintainable.

Sorry if that is already the case in some of those, I am also busy reviewing the AJAX/XML chapters for the upcoming JavaScript Reference for O’Reilly and prepare my webcast for the world usability day.

Read the linked bits now, you know it is good for you!

Specificity is not only the aspect of CSS that will make any fluent presentation stop in its tracks (or am I the only one who has problems pronouncing it?), it is also a very important part of CSS design. Basically it allows to override settings defined earlier in a stylesheet by adding other element, class or ID names.

h1{color:#fff;background:#369;}
will not apply any longer when you add another id of an element the h1 resides in:
#home h1{color:#000;background:#f8f8f8;}

While it is easy to trial and error initially, the more you mix and match elements, IDs and classes the harder it can get to predict the outcome.

Andy couldn’t stop his nerdy alter ego and came up with a star wars based, wonderful cheatsheet on the subject which initially had some errors that Molly rectified.

Wonderful stuff and something to hang up in the office.

I’ve been too busy this week to actually read the new webdesign magazine released by the folks at particletree. The first issue of Treehouse can be downloaded for free and you have a special offer of the next few issues for 15 dollars.

From a first glance I like what I see, although I am not too good with reading PDFs on this work machine (Thinkpad T40). For some reason I’d prefer a one column version, which could also be great for handhelds.

The content is a good mix of coding tips, best of the web links and interviews with some faces of web design / development. I am not too much of a fan of interviews that are not related to a product release or change, but focused on the person itself. We are web developers, not pop stars or big brother participants. Bad enough that every news agent is stacked with celebrity magazines.

I will buy the issues and see how it goes. A general “thumbs up” to particletree for taking the leap into developing this – it is a lot more work than it looks.

I don’t know why this comes up now (after being a craze in July), but both Jens Grochdreis and Roger Johannson published posts about footnotes today.

While Roger’s post deals with Daring Fireball’s implementation, Jens points to an implementation at brandspankingnew. Joe Clark had a few well chosen words to say about footnotes and I tend to agree with him. There is no such thing as a footnote on the web, as this is actually what links are for – may they be page internal or to an external source.

I was really miffed by the implementation at brandspankingnew, as it is a perfect example of how not to create a sexy effect. Designers, hailing from a print background are always on the lookout for stuff like that and then they find JavaScript that turns spans into clickable elements (which are not keyboard accessible) and writes out HTML via innerHTML, thus making maintenance a nightmare.

So, from my point of view: Go NUTS on finding and trying out stuff like that, but when you do:

• Make sure the final result is usable regardless of input device
• Make sure the maintenance is easy – HTML should be in the HTML and not in a JavaScript variable
• If you need HTML that only makes sense with JavaScript, then create it via JavaScript and the DOM - thus leaving a clear path of objects that makes it easy to change and remove the elements later on

It is pretty easy to preach web standards as a contractor or a freelancer with 10 page web sites as projects. It is also pretty easy to keep our blogs clean and advertise best practise web design and information architecture with them.

It is pretty darn impossible to get the same ideas implemented in huge projects, and the more people involved, the more will be cut on best practice ideas. Many a time I delivered clean, valid and flexible templates to see months later down the line that they have been butchered.

Robert Nyman wonders about this issue in his post Why do we have to fight and in the best manner of remote commenting some good ideas have been expressed about it over at Roger Johansson’s.

Off to yet another round in the ring…