I couldn’t resist the temptation to blatantly quote Howard Stern whack packer Blue Iris, as the phrase describes my recent adventures in web design perfectly. It had been way too long; way too long since I’d put myself back in student mode, way too long since I’d let HTML 5 and CSS 3 take shape without paying too much attention, and way too long since I’d posted here. So without further ado, lets take a look at what’s happened in web design over the past six months:

1. Zeldman released Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition.
2. HTML 5 and CSS 3 support gain traction.
3. WordPress 3 set to drop any day now.
4. The BIG Web Show launched.
5. jQuery still rocks.

Lets take them one at a time:

1. Zeldman has released Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition.

The king is back. And this time he’s got a sidekick. That’s right, Jeffrey Zeldman released the 3rd edition of the book that changed the web industry, and he signed up Ethan Marcotte as his trusty co-author this time around. I just blazed through the book in a week, and I’m gearing up for a second run-through. Needless to say, not only will this book give you a rock-solid foundation for building modern web sites, its been updated with current technologies in mind, including new kids on the block, HTML 5 and CSS 3. Also, a special treat this time around is a companion volume, Developing with Web Standards, released simultaneously. Author John Alsopp picks up where Zeldman leaves off, providing the practical solutions to Zeldman’s powerful theory. I’m giving myself a bit of time to digest Designing with Web Standards prior to diving into Developing, but look for a full review of Designing to come over the next few weeks here at Withinsight. All I can say for now is, bravo.

2. HTML 5 and CSS 3 support gaining traction.

HTML 5 and CSS 3 not only offer all kinds of fun new goodies for web designers and developers alike, they’re now starting to gain real support. In addition to the support already provided for new HTML elements and CSS properties in browsers where you’d expect it like Firefox, Chrome and Safari, it appears that IE9 has completely jumped on the bleeding-edge standards wagon. While the finalized specs are still years off, if all major browsers support them with the release of the next version of IE, we’ll be able to start using them reliably very soon. Actually, you already can, but more on that in bullet 4. If IE9 really does support HTML 5 and CSS 3 as well or better than other modern browsers, this may just be the kick that IT departments and large corporations need to drop their “IE6 fo’ life” mantra. Exciting times indeed.

3. WordPress 3 is set to drop any day now.

WordPress 3 will support multi-site installations, meaning you can install WordPress once and create multiple blogs from the single installation. I’m so happy I think I just made a mess in my pants. This means no more upgrading multiple installations of WordPress with each release, centralized plugin management, and huge swaths of citizens rejoicing in the streets for weeks on end. Well, maybe not that last part, but this one feature alone would be enough for me for one upgrade. I’ve played with the beta 2 release a bit, and its super-simple to setup multiple blogs, and basically acts like WPMU did, where you can select subdomains or subdirectories for all your additional blogs. The potential is making me dizzy. Roo-haa.

4. The BIG Web Show launched.

Zeldman’s The BIG Web Show launched recently, and just concluded its third episode this past Thursday. If you like web design, pay attention. Episode 2 featured Jeremy Keith as a special guest, promoting his latest book, HTML 5 for Web Designers, which is slated to drop in June. Remember when I mentioned using HTML 5 and CSS 3 now above? Good! In The BIG Web Show, episode 2, Keith explains how you can start supporting the semantics of HTML 5 now by using standard class names for your divs that correspond to the HTML 5 elements. Not only does it make transitioning in a future redesign easier, it makes explaining your classes to other designers or developers 100 times easier when you hand off your work because you can just point them to the spec. Fantastic. Also, kind of a sub-bullet here, HTML 5 for Web Designers is the first book from A Book Apart publishing! I’m overjoyed with this new publishing company and will likely gobble up each and every offering they proffer from here until infinity.

5. jQuery still rocks.

I really only started working with jQuery personally about a year ago, and since then the library has really gone full-blown as the hands-down most popular JavaScript library in existence. Not only has it been included in the download of WordPress for a while now, its hosted by Google in its compressed form, which means if you link to the Google version and your site visitors already visited a site that also links to the Google version of jQuery, they don’t have to download it again. In addition, all the JavaScript examples in Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition are in jQuery, because it just makes JavaScript so much more concise and is easy for the uninitiated to pick up, having a syntax very similar to CSS selectors.

So that’s it for now, stay tuned for more frequent updates as I’m completely turned on by the impending release of WordPress 3 and impending web standards developments. This truly is an exciting time to be a web developer. Cheers!

During my recent JavaScript capstone course at Westlake, I got an idea. We were doing an exercise on animation, using things like JavaScript’s setTimeout and adjusting the CSS clip property on a few divs. For some reason one of the blocks reminded me of the animation at the beginning of all Marvel movies, when it looks like someone is flipping rapidly through a bunch of comic pages. I envisioned being able to accomplish this animation using only JavaScript.

Here’s a sample of the original animation, from the Spider-Man intro. I also found a few samples of other obviously homemade versions of the Marvel intro, like this After Effects version.

The below is built using JavaScript only, and relies heavily on jQuery’s animation effects. There’s even a cool soundtrack for those with newer browsers (its embedded using HTML 5’s audio element). The font isn’t exactly the same, and the music is courtesy of Dredg (everyone go out and pick up “The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion” right now), but I think its as close as you can get with JS to the original. Click the play button to check it out.

If you’d like to see a tutorial for how this was accomplished, leave a comment. If I get enough requests, I’ll put together a how-to.

Play

So right about now I’m wishing that if I could be anywhere, it would be at SXSW (South by Southwest).  For those of you who don’t know, its about the coolest festival on the planet.  And I don’t know from experience, just from colleagues and coworkers and podcasts and industry moguls giving me an earful.

In addition to being a hotspot for web design, SXSW boasts an impressive musical lineup each year, and this year I’ll be disappointed that I’ve missed The Everyday Visuals, Madi Diaz, and the undisputable heavyweight of soul, Miss Erykah Badu.

I’ve been hearing about it for weeks, from Paul Boag blabbering about it on his Boagworld podcast, to having to postpone projects with colleagues who are attending, to CSS guru Eric Meyer tweeting, “If you’re not going to SXSW, tweet like you’re there.  Nobody will know the difference.”  Yeah, that almost makes up for not being able to attend.

But alas, I am not one to linger, and the time spent here at home has given me the opportunity to start exploring jQuery, which was recommended to me by Alex King, famed author of the WordPress Popularity Contest plugin, and another item that Paul Boag has been going on endlessly about for months now.  I finally broke down and downloaded the library and started playing with it.

From my first impressions, Paul has reason to be going on endlessly.  It seems that the potential of what a web designer or developer can accomplish with the JavaScript library is in fact endless.  The first item that caught my eye was the fact that on the jQuery homepage they offer the expanded, developer version of the library, along with the compressed, production version.  I was immediately reminded of the hours I’ve spent testing the best method to minify, compress and serve my Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries.  jQuery does this for me?  Fantastic.

Second, I was really impressed with the quality and quantity of documentation.  Compared to Prototype, jQuery blows it out of the water in terms of a working online manual.  I think I’ve officially moved the “Prototype and script.aculo.us” book to the back of my “must read” list.  I’ve actually read the first half of it already, but it was cryptic and would have required re-reading on my part to fully absorb the material.  jQuery is the complete opposite.  There are video tutorials explaning the beginner steps.  Video tutorials.

The last thing about jQuery that really hooked me was the ease with which a web designer can pick up the library.  A lot of the arguments you pass to the library are the same as in CSS.  So if you’re looking for a div with the id of conference, you pass (“#conference”) as the argument.

It seems like its going to be really easy to quickly get up to speed with the library, and that it has a lot of power in terms of what you can do with it.  If you’re interested, check out the jQuery site, the jQuery UI site, as well as some of the video tutorials. Really, really, really cool stuff.