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Spreading the word about a worthy initiative: The new WIPA site was launched today. The recently established Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA) aims to foster the development of the Web Industry in Australia and provide forums where people who work in all the different facets of the industry can come together and ...

Sergio Villarreal has written an article on an improved technique for creating drop shadows using CSS. To quote: The most complained-about shortcoming of the technique turned out to be the sharp top and left edges of the shadow, which, although generally acceptable, are unlike what an image editing program would ...

David F. Miller has written an article on how to easily create zebra tables (tables where the rows have alternating colours) using CSS. To quote: Ever since CSS hit the big time, the table has become increasingly rare. Semantic markup and CSS have replaced tables as layout tools. Tables are ...

Russ Weakley has written another practical tutorial on building full CSS layouts. To quote: How do you go about building a full CSS layout? Is there an overall method that can be used for any layout? This article explains one method of building a full CSS layout from start to finish. ...

Andrew Fernandez has published a site that provides an excellent set of links to CSS and web standards resources. To quote: Here you'll find a whole bunch of links to some of the vast resources out there. These are places I've have gone to and still visit for help and ...

Max Design has published another excellent tutorial, this time on CSS selectors. To quote: Selectors are one of the most important aspects of CSS as they are used to "select" elements on an HTML page so that they can be styled. Find out more about selectors including the structure of rules, ...

John and Holly Bergevin have written an article on flowing and positioning in CSS. To quote: In doing web design work, it is likely you have heard terms such as "Normal flow" and "CSS Positioning." However, if you are accustomed to using tables for controlling the placement of page ...

A technique has just been discovered that allows multiple copies of IE to be run on a single machine. Why is this interesting? Well, it allows sites to be easily tested for compatibility with earlier versions of Internet Explorer, without having to resort to some sort of "virtual PC" ...

Peter-Paul Koch has published a website on workarounds for browser incompatibilities. To quote: QuirksMode.org is the personal and professional site of Peter-Paul Koch, freelance web developer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It contains more than 150 pages with CSS and JavaScript tips and tricks, and is one of the best sources ...

Russ Weakley has published another excellent CSS tutorial, this one on learning to use floats. To quote: Floatutorial takes you through the basics of floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts. [Thanks to Simon Willison.]

Russ Weakley has written an excellent tutorial on using CSS for lists. To quote: Listutorial takes you through the basics of building CSS lists with "background images for bullets" and "simple rollovers" with a few variations along the way.

There have been some good improvements to the W3C Markup Validator. To quote: The big news in this version is internal support for custom and customizeable error explanations. This means an end to digging all over the net drying to figure out what an error message means; just ...

WebMonkey has published an up-to-date chart of Windows web browser capabilities. To quote: One of the biggest pains about making Web pages is having to keep track of which browsers support what features. Wouldn't it be nice if there were some way to keep track of it all? Well, we've ...

Oskar van Rijswijk writes about using CSS to create tabs (such as the ones on Amazon). He also points to a site by Joshua Kaufman called the CSS Tabs project. All good stuff...

Tristan Nitot has written an article summarising the business benefits of web standards. To quote: "More with less" seems to be the mission impossible for web designers: Addressing more customers, a broader audience, more diversity in terms of browsers, more accessibility, users asking for more speed, while spending less to ...

Simon Willison has pointed to a number of web screen-scraping tools in his weblog. These are useful for two reasons: they can be used to automate web activities that the websites themselves don't easily support; they can also be used as a testing bench for web development. It's the ...

Search Engine World has released a simple website size checker. Put in your website URL, and it will tell you: Total web page size Visible text size Size of HTML tags Text to HTML ratio Number of images Largest image size Size of all images

Consumers International has released a report on web credibility, which looked at key health, financial and price-comparison sites. The results are worrying: 49 percent of health and financial sites failed to give warnings about the appropriate use of their information. For example, they did not warn consumers searching for health ...

Peter Merholz has written an article outlining eight steps to get your Web site moving again. In it, he discusses reasons that websites grind to a halt, and how to reinvigorate them: Build an Independent Web Team Get Your Organization Involved Study Your Customers Assess What You Have to Offer Develop a Flexible Structure Design ...

Ptricia Daukantas summarises a discussion at the recent US FedWeb 2000 conference on how to market government websites. In all, they came up with 93 individual suggestions about how to bring greater traffic to public sites, many of them building on the not-for-profit status of the organisations.

Jeffrey Zeldman writes eloquently in his weblog on why accessbility doesn't mean ugly.

Martijn van Welie has published a site listing Interaction design patterns. These are his take on interface creation, from the perspective of object-oriented design. The principle is that the major archetypes are specified, thereby standardising the elements that make up a user interface. It's a good idea, even if it ...

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) is in the news again. I love these guys, and I've been a quiet supporter since their establishment in 1998. This is something that I'm passionate about: getting support for web standards in all commercial browsers. This will save users grief, developers a lot of ...