Tag Archives: CSS

Change is in the air… CS4 soon to be released…

Seems like everything is changing right now. The economy, the presidency, how business is performed, new trends in technology. This morning I watched the Web broadcast of the Launch of Adobe CS4. I must say, it looks like a very exciting software package. I’m excited to see the new functionality of Dreamweaver. It sounds like they focused more on CSS, which I always thought was one of Dreamweaver’s weaknesses. I’m also very excited about the new Flash 10. They promised it was much easier to animate in, and requires much less programming than the older version. They also incorporated inverse kinematics to do the animation. I’m familiar with inverse kinematics from using 3DS Max for animation. No word on making the new Flash compatible with the iPhone however. I won’t let this deter my excitement from using it. I put in a request this morning to preorder the upgrade at work.

Another thing that there is much buzz about is the new Google phone. I haven’t had a chance to see anything about it. I’m surprised, because most of the buzz has been word of mouth. It seems like I saw a lot more marketing for the iPhone when it was coming out than the Google phone. Of course this could just be because I havne’t been watching much television lately. I seem to be in a vacuum where I haven’t had time to update my blog, watch tv, or update my website, but I couldn’t exactly tell you where the time has gone.

Tomorrow evening I plan on attending the new Refresh Miami at Yahoo Latin America. Last month I gave a speech on Human Factors, this month they have:

– Alexandra Leite is going to describe what it’s like to work in global virtual teams; – Jeffrey Sass of Myxer will talk about dealing with the complexities of mobile content;

– Jose from the Knight Foundation will present the Knight News Challenge Garage and give information on how you might win part of $5 million!

Should be some exciting stuff. It will be good to get out of the house for a bit.

Cascading style sheets

So the whole content management part didn’t end up working for my site that I’ve been working on, but I did learn how to make a website using more than 1 cascading style sheet to alternate looks. Because of the variety of ages of my target users for my website, I wanted to provide text large enough for older users, but I didn’t want to design the entire site that way. I wanted to allow the user to easily change the font size of the text on the page for easier readability.

I tried a few techniques before I found one that I settled on. I was very surprised when I researched the subject matter how many people were of the very strict opinion that text size should only be modified through the browser. This does not seem like a very good solution for people who either do not have a mouse with a scroll button (ie, using the ctrl-scroll method of changing font size) or for people who are not very computer savvy. I have witnessed first-hand geriatric computer users who can barely operate a computer mouse at all.

But I digress. I found an excellent article on switching out style sheets for websites to create different looks. This of course could be used for changing font sizes, and I found the solution to be EXTREMELY easy to implement. I have to admit, I was a bit intimidated at first, but after the encouragement of one of my fellow web developers I successfully pulled it off. Here is the article I used to do this technique.
Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets by Paul Sowden