Group items tagged

Google and other members of the IT industry recently joined at Google Data Centre Efficiency Submit at Calif, Mountain View, to discuss best practices for building and measuring data center efficiency. The idea behind this submit is tosave resources such as electricity and water is not just good for the environment, it makes good business sense too. Being "green" reduces operating costs and can keep our industry competitive; it is this economic advantage that makes efficiency truly sustainable.

Analyses any web page for violations of best practices

There are two popular approaches to positioning with CSS: float and absolute positioning. Both approaches have their pros and cons. My teammates and I have developed a new positioning approach that gives us the best of both worlds. After quite a bit of experimenting and testing, it's time to share the technique with the rest of the world and see how we can work together to improve it. I'm calling it "faux absolute positioning" after the faux columns technique that simulates the presence of a column.

We are highly regarded by worldwide and regional organizations alike for our pragmatic approach, best practices, and highly skilled workforce. This balance provides the perfect alternative to address the evolving challenges facing you, today and in the future. More than a trusted advisor, Enterprise Mobility is your trusted doer.

Nowadays, the list of security concerns is getting bigger and bigger. All enterprises have five types of security threats. Here in this tutorial, let's uncover these top five security threats of enterprises.

Optimized dynamic generation of Flash movies bound using javascript to provide rich Font experience regardless of the client. Degrades gracefully. Looks interesting when you just HAVE to have that PERFECT font.

Note that it is NOT intended for full paragraphs or any type of extended passages. Serves a similar function as Text Images.

HTML email newsletters have come a long way in the five years since this article was first published. HTML email is still a very successful communications medium for both publishers and readers. Publishers can track rates for email opens, forwards, and clickthroughs, and thereby can measure reader interest in products and topics; readers are presented with information that's laid out like a web page, in a way that's more visually appealing, and much easier to scan and navigate, than plain text email.

Browser idiosyncracies, spam registers, and various mail clients are just some of the pitfalls that must be faced by email marketers. Make sure your HTML email gets through with Tim's essential how-to.

The Fluid 960 Grid System templates have been built upon the work of Nathan Smith and his 960 Grid System using effects from the Mootools JavaScript library. The idea for building these templates was inspired by Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, who advocates a content-out approach to rapid interactive prototyping, crediting Jason Santa Maria with the grey box method.

Cross-browser compatibility is one of the most time consuming tasks for any web designer. We've seen many different articles over the net describing common problems and fixes. I've collated all the information I could find to create some coding conventions for ensuring that your site will work first time in every browser. There are some things you should consider for Safari and Firefox also, and IE isn't always the culprit for your CSS woes.

I have written previously on the fine art of preloading images without JavaScript using only CSS. These caching techniques have evolved in terms of effectiveness and accuracy, but may be improved further to allow for greater cross-browser functionality. In this post, I share a "CSS-only" preloading method that works better under a broader set of conditions.

My friend/ex-coworker Sam the Wonder Boy used to send me late night AIM messages comprised of only three letters, "M.F.R." This would then send chills up my spine, and I'd curl up on the floor in fetal position and weep nonstop. OK, I'm exaggerating a quite bit, and Sam doesn't do that anymore. "M.F.R." stands for "Monthly Forecast Report." It was one of the many modules of a huge intranet web application we worked on years ago. As the name implies, it was a report. Before arriving to the actual report screen, the user could select some criteria such as date range, products, etc. Depending on the selection, the report can have up to sixty columns and thousands of rows. It was quite a challenge both on the backend and frontend. I initially created it using server side Excel API and dumped it to the frontend as an excel sheet. In version 2 I made it as an HTML table with the Excel export option. In version 3 I ditched HTML and went for Crystal Report, in version 3.5 it became Active Report. In version 4 we rewrote the whole application as a .NET client app, with the report section being Excel again. In version 5, well there wasn't a version 5. The whole project got outsourced to India and the team was disbanded. But that's a blog for another day.

background-image + background-repeat + background-position + 24-bit PNGs for Internet Explorer 6 (...Better late than never!)

In the previous article in this series, we covered the basic concept of progressive enhancement; now, we can begin discussing how to use it. There are many ways to integrate progressive enhancement into your work using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and this article will cover a few of the biggies and get you thinking about other ways to progressively enhance your sites.

For many, designing and coding for emails can become a frustrating task. With so many different types of email clients that each seem to follow distinct standards, many hours can be spent just to figure out what works. Luckily, there are great resources available for reference.

Enforcing a minimum height for block elements in HTML is one of those few CSS tricks that you can't live without. There are still enough folks using IE6, unfortunately, and it doesn't support the min-height or min-width CSS parameters. This has caused the invention of a number of different hacks and browser-conditional style sheets to get the desired effect.

When it comes to planning the layout of your new website there are just three commonly used website layout structures to choose from: Fixed; Fluid & Elastic width layouts. None of these are perfect; each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.

As web designers, we've grown pretty good at understanding how to create a modern, semantic, accessible website using XHTML and CSS. We understand what makes a good website, and how to make it happen. When it comes time to design emails though, do all the same rules apply? Are there things we should be doing specifically for email that don't make sense on a website? In this article we'll discuss the technical, design and information elements that make up a successful HTML email.