By popular demand Typetester now has an option to set preview pane’s base font-size.

Remember, em units act like multipliers for a given base size. In short, the base size of 12px and the font size of 1.2em will result in 14.4px which is rather nasty number. Just keep it in mind when applying to your layout…

The four things baton has been most gently passed by Cody as a therapy session. Cody kindly offered to pay this time and I’m not rejecting a free session. No way!

All things are listed chronologically (well… more or less). Here it goes… Continue reading ›

All righty. I’m very lazy lately. I read less and less. However, if a book pulls me in, I’m well prepared to discard all the other forms of relaxation and swallow it all at once. Yes, this was the case with the DOM scripting.

What’s so great about it? First off, the book is not boring programming reference listing mambo-jumbo or whatever… It tells a story. What is the Designing with web standards (by Zeldman) for CSS, that is the DOM scripting for DOM/JavaScript. Continue reading ›

In the previous article about the annoying outline, I introduced you the JavaScript based solution. After a few days, Nathan Smith came with the much more elegant outline: none; trick. The question remains, how should we apply it in a way not to confuse a user browsing with a keyboard? Continue reading ›

This is the most complete list of pros and cons for vertical scrollers. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to discuss that on our next meeting with a client.

Reasons why news scrollers are bad:

• They are tacky, and reek of end 90ies web design
• They are annoying attention seekers
• They lure designers into thinking they can define the size of the screen, they don’t, the visitors do, each of them for themselves.
• They lure editors into adding far too much content to the page - hidden is not gone, think of the screen reader and text browser visitors.
• Considering “banner blindness", they might be useless
• They might cause memory leaks and slow browsing in some browsers on low spec machines
• They might confuse visitors with attention deficits or other disorders.

Reasons why news scrollers are good:

• Clients love them
• That other site has them (you know, that really cool, bleeding edge one, the… what? Bankrupt? Well, it was a cool site though!)

– source

Ran to it this morning, when I was searching for as painless as possible (standards-wise, at least) solution for an information slaughter.

What I like about the DomNews is that there’s a stop function. Every accesibility savvy developer is a star.

Now, if I could just find a way to explain how those Add to Favorites and Make this page my Homepage links shouldn’t go into main navigation area.

As promissed, here’s a multi-color sIFR… Feel free to send your kind words of gratitude over to Pepa. And BTW, have a nice day!

As a result of your persistent requests, here’s the 2 color sIFR demo and a 2 color sIFR development kit. In case you were wondering, a multi color version is almost done in Pepa’s pot.

Enjoy and please, do keep reporting bugs!

We’ve been interviewed by Marko from mcville. The interview is far from serious, close to funny. Or not. Anyway, have fun!

I received the following message this morning. It could be that there was similar list for the 2005. but nevertheless…

You know you are living in 2006. if:

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave
2. You haven’t been playing Solitaire with a real cards in years
3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3
4. You are sending an e-mail to a person sitting next desk to you
5. Your main reason for not staying in touch with your family and friends is that they don’t have e-mail addresses
6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries
7. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen
8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.
10. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee
11. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )
12. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing
13. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message
14. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list
15. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on this list
16. Now you’re laughing at yourself : )

Web.burza hype

In April 2005. we launched a new agency site, which picked up a couple of web standards awards and mentions:

• FWA Site Of The Day
• Styleboost
• Unmatched Style
• Stylegala All Stars
• WSA Winner

Enormous amount of traffic and inquiries we receive will keep us busy for some time… So, thanks to everyone who thought so high about us

Typetester on the 2005 top lists

Several people think Typestester was notable application introduced in 2005. The application was supposed to help web designers in testing type for their projects, but I never knew it’s going to be so popular. A big thank you to all of you who supported the project, either via generous donations or by great suggestions and/or bug reports!

• Bookmark: my Top 20 of 2005 (also in Italian)
• 25 Sites You Shouldn’t Have Missed in 2005

Popular articles on maratz.com

There are a few popular articles/tutorials that were linked all over the web. In case you missed some, here they are:

• Faux borders and pseudo table effect
• Two color sIFR
• New window link & flexible layout demo
• Essentials of CSS Hacking For Internet Explorer
• Backup2Mail
• The ways to style visited links