Dave Shea's Font Size: No Happy Medium (and its follow-up, Font Size Redux) suggests a limited liability for designers in matters of font accessibility and readability. Are users with special needs responsible for their own browsing experience now that accessible alternatives, like the Mozilla family of browsers, provide extended control over font sizing? We'll chime in when we abandon absolute font sizes.
Unrelated
Dan Vine's iCapture eases the uncertainty of not knowing how this (or any) site looks "through the eye of a Mac browser." Good to know.
Side-scrollers aren't the only thing over which the CSS Zen Garden has us ignominiously fawning. Our interest in shadows as a subtle, powerful site enhancement has been wholly renewed thanks to designs like Radu Darvas's Zunflower.
Our recent obsession led to several CSS shadow how-tos, including Ian Andolina's excellent demonstration of the subject; Web Style Sheets CSS tips & tricks at the W3C; Simple CSS drop shadows at evolt.org; Mike Golding's dynamic example; Chris Hester's more-recent demo; Drop Shadow CSS by Lim Chee Aun; The XML Standards Project's fine tutorial; and finally, Dunstan Orchard's Easy CSS drop shadows.
Mark Pilgrim's latest sermon more cynically and eloquently echoes our recent thoughts on stopping comment spam. Here's a few exceptional quotes.
They're rich:
You will be attacked by professionals who have more money than you, more resources than you, better programmers than you, and no scruples at all.
They're big and fast:
[Spammers are] bigger and smarter and faster than you. It's an arms race, and you'll lose, and along the way there will be casualties, massive casualties as innocent bystanders start getting blacklisted.
They're smart and determined:
[Stopping spam is] a full-time job, and everyone will hate you, and it still won't work. Spammers are smart and determined, and people are numerous and stupid, and spam pays. You can't make it not pay.
They're up for a fight:
If you're up for that fight, then take them on, Godspeed. But prepare yourself for the worst, and then imagine something worse than that, and then accept that your imagination is too limited, because it will be so much worse than that.
Our past thoughts:
There certainly exists a point at which spammers will no longer see benefit in jumping the hurdles webloggers erect. But, let's face it, webloggers are in danger of reaching a similar point. How many hurdles will we watch the spammers leap before we lose heart? ... Time will reveal who gives up first.
Update: And now this from Matt Haughey:
Four to five years ago, I used to spend quite a bit of energy on combating spam. I read anti-spammer email lists and newsgroups, I used a spamcop account, and I sent messages daily to every abuse@hostingprovider address I could track down that hosted these bastards. I watched hundreds of other vigilante spam fighters do the same and as we shut down site after site and got person after person cut off from their service, I noticed they kept coming back, only multiplied. Eventually I grew weary of the work I put out that didn't seem to have much impact on the problem and started filtering my spam instead.
Conventional wisdom on side-scrollers: users think they're hard to use; designers think they're ugly. But thanks in part to a few great designs at the CSS Zen Garden, side-scrollers are getting their due. Here are a few of the nicer ones we've seen lately:
Know of a good-looking side-scroller we missed? Let us know.
Clay Shirky's recent bashing of the Semantic Web has generated a lot of comments, several from defenders of this planned utopia. Kevin A. Burton, one such supporter, writes the following as a postscript to a rant on Clay's piece (via Internet Alchemy):
I used tinyurl.com for the URL to shirky's article so it wouldn't be included in pagerank, daypop, etc. I'm going to start doing this to articles I find suboptimal. Consider it a negative cert (or lack of approval).
Using TinyURL, a URL-shortening service primarily useful for creating manageable pointers to replace long URLs in e-mail messages, to reduce the visibility of Clay's article ignores the not-so-startling truth: weblog indexes help us find popular articles, not popular ideas. Daypop, for example, is worthwhile because it shows us not only what the Web likes, but often, what it dislikes.
Kevin's disservice is not only to the articles he non-links, but also himself, since he's rendering his own site unreachable via services like Technorati, which link back to comments on popular articles.
It's unavoidable: articles important enough for comments are important enough for links. Hiding your link doesn't make a site any less popular; it only makes it harder for the rest of us to know it.
Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated.
...
You can move to a new host, find a new ISP, or sign up for a different affiliate plan. The end result will be the same. Each time you rise out of the muck we will strike you down and send you back to the hole you crawled out of.
In September we wrote about problems with then recently proposed solutions for stopping comment spam. Adam Kalsey wrote yesterday about getting spammer's accounts cancelled. Add this to the list of pain-in-the-ass solutions. We can delete comments, ban IPs, and report abusers, but there will always be new comments, new IPs, and new abusers. There currently exists no accessible and consistent automated solution.
Adam's manifesto is optimistic. But will we prevail? There certainly exists a point at which spammers will no longer see benefit in jumping the hurdles webloggers erect. But, let's face it, webloggers are in danger of reaching a similar point. How many hurdles will we watch the spammers leap before we lose heart? Adam's manifesto is a positive indication of the community's resolve. Time will reveal who gives up first.
Dave Shea, Ethan Marcotte, Web-Graphics, Matt Haughey, Aaron Schutzengel, and Markku Seguerra report Joe Maddalone's discovery that it's possible to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one Windows computer. This is great news for conscientious developers who strive for cross-browser compatibility.
Bonus Items: Ryan Parman provides all necessary files in convenient .zip format; Luke Redpath offers simple, attractive, color-coded icons for recent versions of IE.
We've updated What You Should Know about XHTML 1.1 to correct a few broken links and add pointers to (1) Anne van Kesteren's notes on extending XHTML and (2) Simon Jessey's method for serving XHTML properly with PHP. We'd appreciate hearing about any other articles that should be referenced.
Update: Patrick Griffiths points us to Declarations, his notes on defining valid XHTML documents. We should have pointed to his site -- htmldog.com -- sooner. It's a fine resource.