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The WebKit team has been developing some cutting-edge proposals to extend CSS with the ability to do declarative animations and other effects. This ability is key to maintaining the three-fold separation of HTML content, CSS presentation, and JavaScript behavior. Animation effects on the Web today are accomplished with JavaScript code which repeatedly changes an element's style at a certain interval in order to create an animated effect. This practice, however, violates the separation between presentation and behavior because the animation behaviors are directly changing the document's presentation (i.e. modifying the style property). Ideally, all of the animation triggers and presentation states would be declared in CSS. And this is exactly what the WebKit team has proposed in its CSS Transitions specification.

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.

Over the last few months, I've spent more time than I intended on exploring the whole idea of fonts and typography for the Web. (My friend, typography expert Simon Pascal Klein, writes, "The former is a stylized set of glyphs of characters," while "the other [is] the whole art of creating type and setting it into the written word." For more clarification and illumination, consult Jon Tan and Mark Simonson.) In the process, I've been considering the idea of font stacks-using the well-known font-family CSS property-to list as many different fonts as possible in order to optimize the web site experience for a maximum number of users.

Appliance manufacturer Electrolux is heating things up this Valentine's Day - in a virtual oven that is. The brand is using their Facebook application to create a little buzz and do some good in return.

The easy way to use CSS2.1 to solve difficult cross-browser layout issues: CSS tables solve all the problems encountered when using absolute positioning or floats to create multi-column layouts in modern browsers. Specifying the value table for the display property of an element allows you to display the element and its descendants as though they're table elements. The main benefit of CSS table-based layouts is the ability to easily define the boundaries of a cell so that we can add backgrounds and so on to it-without the semantic problems of marking up non-tabular content as a HTML table in the document.

here are many ways to approach Web typography in order to create effective and expressive results. Let's take a closer look at some principles, rules and ideas for approaching Web typography decisions - you can use them as a starting point for learning how to achieve effective type setting on the Web.

This must be the easiest way to get full support for PNG-transparency in Internet Explorer 6. The technique even works for PNG-transparency in CSS backgrounds. Credit goes to Angus Turnbull for creating this workaround. My hat is thoroughly tipped.

Did you like my previous CSS tutorial on how to create gradient text effects? I'm using the same trick to show you how to decorate your images and photo galleries without editing the source images. The trick is very simple. All you need is an extra tag and apply a background image to create the overlaying effect. It is very easy and flexible - see my demos with over 20 styles, from a simple image icon to a rounded corner to a masked layer (both decorative and complex).

Trick to show how to decorate your images and photo galleries without editing the source images.

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.

A good discussion of Web Design in the context of traditional design.

CSS Design Yorkshire is a new collection of web sites created by designers in the Yorkshire region that conform with the W3C standards. Become part of a group of developers that make the web more accessible, better to look at and more fun!

Convert between CSS and HTML instantly, or create new CSS styles with this handy online tool.

Google Noticeboard. It's a Firefox add-on can be used to create a message - including a voice recording and some text - which you can then send to other members, even if the other members doesn't installed Noticeboard you can still as audio as OGG email attachment.

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program, previously General Image Manipulation Program) is a free software, raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs. GIMP can also be used to create basic animated images in GIF format. It is often used as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop, the most widely used bitmap editor in the printing and graphics industries; however, it is not designed to be a Photoshop clone.

The Google Docs developers just added "insert drawing" capability. Drawing can be created easily with pre-determined shapes, colors, text, etc..

Since the launch of the captions features for YouTube videos in last august, YouTube allows user add captions to one of your videos by uploading a closed caption file using the "Captions and Subtitles" menu on the editing page. This feature is used for people using other languages and even who are deaf or hard of hearing.

IxEdit itself is made with JavaScript, and it is an entirely new type of design tool which is to be embedded in the HTML you are editing. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or IE becomes your interaction development environment. The interactions you create will be applied on-the-fly to the web page, so you can edit them while checking how they behave in real time.

Ten steps to create basic logos using Photoshop. Step-by-Step Instructions: 1. Select Elliptical Marquee tool and draw a circle in the center of the canvas and fill it with black color by pressing ctrl+backspace. 2. Keep the selection active and move the selection by pressing right arrow ke