Links of Interest

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Photoshop Cryptoquote Challenge

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This has nothing to do with CSS, but I thought it might be a fun little for any Photoshop gurus out there. Someone spraypainted a message on the side of one of my neighbor’s houses. Before I could read what it said, the message was painted over. But you can still sorta read it, so I thought I’d snap a picture and see if I could Photoshop it and make out the message. I think I might have it figured out…but check it out and let me know if anyone else can solve it. You may also need to bust out your Wheel of Fortune skills on it. Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s too racy. Download original here.

 

No div, no float, no clear, no hack

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TJKDesign has an example page up on a CSS layout that uses no divs, no floats, no clears, and no hacks. I take issue with many of the things presented here. For one thing, what’s wrong with div’s? I know people can have problems with divitus (using div’s for everything), but sometimes a div makes perfect semantic sense. Breaking the entire page into a big OL with sub OL’s is hardly semantic. Reminds me of tables within tables. For another thing, I don’t see what’s so wrong with floats. I know about the IE double margin thing. Big deal. Clearing floats can be a little unsemantic but it works and it’s valid and it’s nothing to re-create your entire layout over. For another thing, it says it’s hack free but clearly uses a hack right in it’s own header. You might argue that conditional comments aren’t hacks but I feel they are at least in the same genre. Still, despite all these things, I gotta admit it does a damn good job of what it says it does. The layouts are very solid.

 

reForm: CSS Form Design Template for Any Layout

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Joe Lippeatt has an article up at CSS Zone with code samples of how to make forms fit any layout. The form elements themselves are fluid width, so you can plug them into any size area and they will adjust to make the best use of that space. Wide layouts will benefit from some form elements being along the same horizontal row, while narrower layouts will wrap those form elements down into a single column layout.