delicious web vitamins
There’s a new web design-related blog/magazine site on the interwebs, simply titled Vitamin, which has completely won me over after just a couple of articles.
One glance at the Advisory Board column on their homepage is enough to convince you of the weight of professionalism here: Dan Cederholm, Molly Holzschlag, Dave Shea, Eric Meyer, Shaun Inman … good grief.
It’s only just launched in the last handful of weeks, but already it’s filled with some truly substantial articles on the challenges of web design and development, the newest of which is Dave Shea’s challenging article on the risks of continued use of CSS hacks in the wake of the coming debut of Internet Explorer 7. Because Windows auto-update will begin to pester all registered Windows users to upgrade to IE7 when it ships (as well as being bundled with Windows Vista) it’s going to be well worth everyone’s while to make sure their public designs don’t split asunder when IE7 comes knocking at their doors. Dave emphasizes that the more hacks you have in your CSS, and the more you rely upon them, the more perilous and tenuous your designs will become as IE7, and other upgrades, spill into the market. IE7 is a big change in the landscape, long coming, but Dave argues that we will likely begin to see an acceleration of upgrades for most or all browsers; in other words, that the years of sterility and motionlessness are coming to an end, and the evolution could begin to bring growing pains.
The design of the site itself is, as might be expected, fresh and modern, and a relatively sophisticated deployment of CSS layout techniques. It has a very conservative min- and max-width, and uses a certain number of nested divs — all floated — to pretty good effect, isolating groups of content markup (like uls and the like) into logical blocks, bringing the divs as close to semantic concurrence as you can reasonably expect to get.
All of these chunks reside within the relatively conventional main and sidebar divs, floated in opposition to each other, widths defined in percentages, and no margins, which allow you to steer clear of older browser pitfalls quite smoothly.
This lame blog you’re reading now uses the same trick for basic content, except that I took the somewhat questionable route of making my sidebar fixed-width. But unlike this lame blog, Vitamin has executed a design which arranges far, far more content in a far, far clearer manner.
It’s well worth a read, but then once you’ve read the articles I would suggest a peek beneath the hood, and see what’s running the site. It’s a good ‘un.
Technorati Tags: web design, thinkvitamin.com, CSS, Dave Shea, IE7
[…] Vitamin was covered on several blogs and websites (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7…) as the »new place«, and the »natural place« for webdesigners, developers and entrepreneurs, to expand their knowledge and insight in the business - »Nourishment to help the web grow«. […]
May 9th, 2006 at 1:02 am