Since working on the 3D cube using 2D transforms back in April I’ve experimented with perspective to create something more powerful, playing around with 3D transforms on the iPhone a few times (e.g. this early rotating demo). Now I’ve got something worth sharing.

A 3D cube can be created solely in CSS, with all six faces. Using JavaScript to detect key presses and update inline styles this cube can be intuitively navigated.

Result

A 3D cube that rotates using the Up, Down, Left and Right arrow keys.
Supported browsers: WebKit Nightly r46042+

How To

I’ll start with the markup, because it’s simple. Each of the six cube faces is given a face class and another relating to it’s number. These six faces sit within a cube container, which sits in another wrapper, each is necessary.

<div id="experiment">
	<div id="cube">
		<div class="face one">
			One face
		</div>
		<div class="face two">
			Up, down, left, right
		</div>
		<div class="face three">
			Lorem ipsum.
		</div>
		<div class="face four">
			New forms of navigation are fun.
		</div>
		<div class="face five">
			Rotating 3D cube
		</div>
		<div class="face six">
			More content
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

The outer wrapper serves as a camera, on which you apply some perspective — appropriate 3D transformations are then applied to descendants. -webkit-perspective defines the depth of the Z-plane and relative sizes of elements above and below it, -webkit-perspective-origin specifies the perspective’s origin. View a perspective example (webkit.org)

    #experiment {
      -webkit-perspective: 800;
      -webkit-perspective-origin: 50% 200px;
    }

The second container, the actual cube, has a specified height, margin, position, etc. as usual. The height and width are necessary to create some confines for the cube face transformations — alternatively the width defaults to 100% and the cube’s appearance would vary with window width. -webkit-transition (documentation) defines the animated property, duration and timing-function — we’re animating the 3d transformation (via -webkit-transform) linearly for two seconds. -webkit-transform-style determines whether child elements lie flat against their parent (“flat”) or remain in 3D space (“preserve-3d”).

    #cube {
      position: relative;
      margin: 0 auto;
      height: 400px;
      width: 400px;
      -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 2s linear;
      -webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
    }

Using the .face class common styles are applied to the six sides; coloring, size, padding, etc. Importantly they are each positioned absolutely, relative to the cube container. The background rgba property is included to make the cube look pretty and transparent.

    .face {
      position: absolute;
      height: 360px;
      width: 360px;
      padding: 20px;
      background-color: rgba(50, 50, 50, 0.7);
    }

Each of the faces, one through six, needs to be rotated in 3D space to its correct starting position. Using translateZ the elements are brought 200px (half their width) off the Z-plane. Each of the faces must be at 90 degrees. Rotating solely in the X plane positions the top and bottom faces (one, six), before rotating the last four faces in the Y plane, much like origami. The extra rotate on the sixth face rotates the content in 2D space to correct its orientation.

    #cube .one  {
      -webkit-transform: rotateX(90deg) translateZ(200px);
    }

    #cube .two {
      -webkit-transform: translateZ(200px);
    }

    #cube .three {
      -webkit-transform: rotateY(90deg) translateZ(200px);
    }

    #cube .four {
      -webkit-transform: rotateY(180deg) translateZ(200px);
    }

    #cube .five {
      -webkit-transform: rotateY(-90deg) translateZ(200px);
    }

    #cube .six {
      -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg) translateZ(200px) rotate(180deg);
    }

Our cube is now complete — but it doesn’t move! With a keydown event listener we can increment X and Y angles based on different key presses, before applying them as inline styles on the cube container. In combination with the transition effect on #cube, all six faces rotate in sync from their original position to the newly defined angle, creating a seamless 3D cube interface.

  	var xAngle = 0, yAngle = 0;
	document.addEventListener('keydown', function(e)
	{
		switch(e.keyCode)
		{

			case 37: // left
				yAngle -= 90;
				break;

			case 38: // up
				xAngle += 90;
				break;

			case 39: // right
				yAngle += 90;
				break;

			case 40: // down
				xAngle -= 90;
				break;
		};

		$('cube').style.webkitTransform = "rotateX("+xAngle+"deg) rotateY("+yAngle+"deg)";
	}, false);

Result

CSS3 Accordion
Works in browsers that support the :target pseudo-class, see the Quirks Mode compatibility tables. Animation works in recent WebKit based browsers.

How To

Each part of the accordion has an ID, heading and content region. The header includes a link that matches the section’s ID, whilst the content is wrapped in a container which will control its display.

<div class="accordion">
	<h2>Accordion Demo</h2>
	<div id="one" class="section">
		<h3>
			<a href="#one">Heading 1</a>
		</h3>
		<div>
			<p>Content</p>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div id="two" class="section">
		<h3>
			<a href="#two">Heading 2</a>
		</h3>
		<div>
			<p>Content</p>
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

The CSS then relies on the :target pseudo-class to apply different styles to the chosen section — increasing the height and, in large content cases, altering the overflow behaviour to allow scrolling. To animate the opening and closing of sections the -webkit-transition property is needed (documentation), in this case acting on the height attribute for a duration of 0.3 seconds using the ease-in timing function.

Stripping out the styling, the CSS boils down to:

.accordion h3 + div {
	height: 0;
	overflow: hidden;
	-webkit-transition: height 0.3s ease-in;
}

.accordion :target h3 + div {
	height: 100px;
}

.accordion .section.large:target h3 + div {
	overflow: auto;
}

Critique

Obviously this approach has its limitations. Multiple open accordions on one page wouldn’t be possible — restricted by a URI’s one fragment identifier limit; as one accordion opens the other would lose the target and automatically close. Similarly, pages that use a fragment identifier for everyday use will notice oddities — take for instance when using top links to return to the top of the page, any accordion would, in this case, reset. Other uses include accessibility links and simulated page histories when using Ajax.

To enable IE6 and IE7 support for new HTML5 tags, which are not naturally styled, some JavaScript is necessary. As per the ‘shiv’ article, Remy Sharp has a small script that creates DOM elements, one for each type of new HTML5 tag, the simple act of doing so leads Internet Explorer to apply styles to said tags. I slightly modified the existing script to add the recently proposed hgroup.

(function(){
	if(!/*@cc_on!@*/0) return;
	var e = "abbr,article,aside,audio,bb,canvas,datagrid,datalist,details,dialog,
		eventsource,figure,footer,hgroup,header,mark,menu,meter,nav,output,
		progress,section,time,video".split(','),i=0,length=e.length;
	while(i<length){
		document.createElement(e[i++])
	}
})();

Even though these tags accept style they don’t come with their default renderings. For that we need a bit of CSS to make block elements behave as they should.

article, aside, dialog, footer, header, section, footer, nav, figure {
	display: block;
}

I’ve also updated the Eric Meyer reset script, removing now deprecated HTML 4 tags and applying reset to the new elements, so they do not unexpectedly inherit padding, margin, etc. in the future. These changes are not yet exhaustive.

Moving onto the page’s actual markup, the new DOCTYPE and character encoding settings are remarkably simple. Standards based web development is getting easier. For browsers that do not support HTML5, the new DOCTYPE still triggers standards mode. The xmlns HTML attribute is no longer necessary and the profile attribute has been dropped.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
	<meta charset="UTF-8" />
	<title>FofR Online</title>

The header section has been placed in the appropriate <header> tags, and similarly with the footer. I’d hoped to include the ‘About Me’ section within this, but as part of the specification you cannot include headings within a <footer> element.

Each of the posts comes wrapped in an <article> tag, i.e. an independent element with content that could standalone. Within are the respective <header> (containing title and date) and <footer> (containing meta links) elements. Technically the meta links could be marked as <nav>, but the former is more fitting and still acceptable use.

The date makes use of HTML5’s <time> element, with a datetime attribute that gives the precise posting time, including timezone offset.

The previous and next links that follow the article can comfortably sit within a <nav> tag. Similarly, my sidebar region is predominantly navigation based with lists of archives and categories, it’s been marked as such.

<article id="post-67" class="">
	<header>
		<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="" title="" rel="bookmark">POST TITLE</a></h2>
		<div class="entry-date">
			<time datetime="2009-04-30T15:54:28-07:00" class="published" title="2009-04-30T15:54:28-07:00">April 30, 2009 &#8211; 3:54 pm</time>
		</div>
	</header>
	<div class="entry-content">
		POST
	</div>
	<footer class="entry-meta">
		META LINKS
	</footer>
</article>

<nav id="nav-below" class="navigation clearfix">
	<div class="nav-previous"></div>
	<div class="nav-next"></div>
</nav>

One avenue I should explore is the inclusion of the <section> tag, which I’d like to break up individual posts, probably by splitting the content at level three headings downwards; thereby becoming the header of each new section.

It’ll be a while before the real benefits of HTML5 can be fully appreciated by everyone, but it feels good to make a start, however small that step may be.

The impression of a three dimensional cube can be created using modern CSS techniques, without the need for JavaScript, imagery, canvas or SVG. Using the proprietary transform property to skew and rotate shaded rectangles, individual cube faces can combine to form a 3D object. Currently only supported in recent WebKit and Gecko based browsers, most importantly Firefox 3.5+ -moz-transform (documentation) and Safari 3.2+ -webkit-transform (documentation).

To demonstrate the power of this effect a second experiment with multiple cubes and proprietary WebKit transitions is also available.

Results

A 3D cube created with CSS
Update (June 7th): Altered CSS slightly to use skew(x,y) rather than skewY, the latter of which is not supported in Safari 3 / Chrome.
Supported browsers: Safari 3.2+, Google Chrome, Firefox 3.5+

Experiment with multiple cubes and CSS transitions, still no JavaScript
Supported browsers: Safari 4+, Google Chrome

How To

Similar to my previous experiments, the HTML markup is very simple. Each of the faces has its own DIV, class and content. The top face requires some extra markup to aid the transformation, more on that shortly.

<div class="cube">
	<div class="topFace">
		<div>
			Content
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="leftFace">
		Content
	</div>
	<div class="rightFace">
		Content
	</div>
</div>

A short disclaimer, the geometry in this example is ‘fudged’, in that the values have been adjusted to appear roughly correct. I know that the dimensions are slightly out of whack, this is merely to save my head from mathematics and to get the concept out there quickly for people to see. With that said, let’s crack on with the CSS.

Each of the three rectangles is given a slightly different shade of gray to give the impression of depth, in this example the left face is in shadow. The faces are each positioned absolutely, relative to the cube container. Each face is 200 x 200 pixels, including 10 pixels of padding.

.cube {
	position: relative;
	top: 200px;
}

.rightFace,
.leftFace,
.topFace div {
	padding: 10px;
	width: 180px;
	height: 180px;
}

.rightFace,
.leftFace,
.topFace {
	position: absolute;
}

Now for the fun bit. The left and right rectangles are skewed by ±30˚ along the vertical axis, with the right face shifted left by 200px, cleanly lining up the two edges to create a corner that is center aligned.

.leftFace {
	-webkit-transform: skewY(30deg);
	-moz-transform: skewY(30deg);
	background-color: #ccc;
}

.rightFace {
	-webkit-transform: skewY(-30deg);
	-moz-transform: skewY(-30deg);
	background-color: #ddd;
	left: 200px;
}

The top face proves more problematic; it needs to be skewed, scaled, rotated and positioned. The skew is the same, –30˚ along the vertical axis, this skewed rectangle must then be rotated clockwise by 60˚. Rotating the rectangle itself leads to a change in orientation of its content, a container must be added and then rotated.

A simple way of creating a top face without resorting to maths is to duplicate the left and right rectangles, skew them in the opposite directions (by inverting the sign, e.g. left face is now skewed by –30˚) and position them against the existing faces to create a diamond shape between the two sets. Now use positioning and scaling to fill this diamond and form the top face, deleting the duplicates when finished. My results led to a scaling factor of 1.16 in the Y direction which I have accounted for by reducing the font-size by the same factor.

.topFace div {
	-webkit-transform: skewY(-30deg) scaleY(1.16);
	-moz-transform: skewY(-30deg) scaleY(1.16);
	background-color: #eee;
	font-size: 0.862em;
}

.topFace {
	-webkit-transform: rotate(60deg);
	-moz-transform: rotate(60deg);
	top: -158px;
	left: 100px;
}

The final CSS looks like this:

.cube {
	position: relative;
	top: 200px;
}

.rightFace,
.leftFace,
.topFace div {
	padding: 10px;
	width: 180px;
	height: 180px;
}

.rightFace,
.leftFace,
.topFace {
	position: absolute;
}

.leftFace {
	-webkit-transform: skewY(30deg);
	-moz-transform: skewY(30deg);
	background-color: #ccc;
}

.rightFace {
	-webkit-transform: skewY(-30deg);
	-moz-transform: skewY(-30deg);
	background-color: #ddd;
	left: 200px;
}

.topFace div {
	-webkit-transform: skewY(-30deg) scaleY(1.16);
	-moz-transform: skewY(-30deg) scaleY(1.16);
	background-color: #eee;
	font-size: 0.862em;
}

.topFace {
	-webkit-transform: rotate(60deg);
	-moz-transform: rotate(60deg);
	top: -158px;
	left: 100px;
}

Result

Experiment: Auto-scrolling CSS3 Parallax Effect
Experiment works in Safari 4 Beta and Google Chrome. No JavaScript necessary.

How To

The HTML markup is fairly simple, one DIV for the background and another for the content, the example uses CSS3’s multiple backgrounds, so no need for extra markup to accommodate all those other images:

<div id="background"></div>
<div id="content">
	Content
</div>

For the CSS the background container is set to a fixed position (for convenience more than anything) and spread across the bottom of the page using the top, left, bottom and right properties. The background images are defined using the background shorthand property with multiple declarations being comma delimited, the first being the top-most. Each of the images has a different position defined in percentage, so as the size of the container changes (e.g. on window resize) the images move disproportionately to each other; creating the impressive parallax effect.

#background {
	background: url('../images/foreground.png') 5% 5%,
		url('../images/midground.png') 20% 20%,
		url('../images/background.png') 90% 110%;
}

Ordinarily this effect is only seen when the page is re-sized or JavaScript is used for animation. My first approach to animation via CSS was to apply the transition to the background-positions, with background-position being an animatable property as defined in the proposed specification. However this doesn’t yet work in the latest WebKit nightly build (r42142), it is a known bug.

As an alternate route, albeit a temporary one, I have opted to use transitions to animate the left-most edge of the background container (for instance from 0px to –100px). This gradually alters the overall width of the container causing the backgrounds to shift disproportionately as per their percentages, creating the parallax effect. With a large enough duration and left position the effect appears to be continuous.

#background {
	left: 0;
	-webkit-transition: left 300s linear;
}

#experiment:target #background {
	left: -5000px;
}

To make things a bit more fun I’ve increased the ‘flying speed’ when the mouse hovers over the background area. The final CSS looks like this:

#background {
	background: url('../images/foreground.png') 5% 5%,
		url('../images/midground.png') 20% 20%,
		url('../images/background.png') 90% 110%;
	top: 218px;
	left: 0;
	right: 0;
	bottom: 0;
	position: fixed;
	-webkit-transition: left 300s linear;
}

#experiment:target #background {
	left: -5000px;
}

#experiment:hover #background {
	left: -9999px;
}

This clock experiment does not advocate such use of style sheets, it is instead used to demonstrate the capabilities and possibilities of WebKit’s transform and transition properties. It has inadvertently highlighted the controversial and unexpected nature by which web developers may use them. Should this cross-pollination of behaviour definition become standard? Is it risky? What might the side effects be?

Comments on the Ajaxian post began the discussion, Malic opened the debate (this comment is particularly in reference to ‘transition’ rather than the more widely accepted ‘transform’):

While this [is] interesting and maybe a little bit cool, I think it is inappropriate for Webkit to take CSS (even if only for itself) in this direction. CSS was created to define style. This seems more like a behavior to me and that belongs to the Javascript problem space. Going down the the road that Webkit is going, the question is — where do you stop? Just how much do you extend CSS to be? I think you run the risk of creating solutions for problems that have already been solved.

This yielded some opposition but the majority supported the notion, Travis Almand champions the new transform property but strongly questions its counter-part:

CSS should be a style guide, not a programming language.

Before highlighting that the road to behaviour in CSS has already begun with the much used :hover, accompanied by :active, and :focus — user action pseudo-classes, agents sometimes change the rendering in response to user actions; response being the keyword.

Will Peavy comments that these behaviours wreak reek of IE’s abandoned CSS expressions, and edthered asks:

What happens when your CSS library and your javascript library start trying to do the same thing to the same element, or different things to the same element?

John Dowdell of Adobe has also weighed in with an honest rant that I heartily recommend reading, even if I’m slightly jealous that I cannot articulate my prose as well.

The clock example shows that people will use technologies in unexpected ways. The creators of Usenet did not intend mass advertising. […] Stuffing the genie back inside the bottle is harder than looking carefully at the bottle before opening it.
[…]
We may not be able to persuasively articulate why this will eventually be considered a bad architectural decision. It’s like when vendors of email clients started talking about how wonderful it would be to add hidden graphics and scripting to the emails strangers send to you. Vague warnings of an unsound future are at a disadvantage to self-interested “But I wanna do it!!” evangelists.

It’s hard to persuasively document future risks. But encumbering HTML and CSS like this is not the way to bless your own multimedia engine.

Result

Experiment: CSS Analogue Clock
Experiment works in Safari 4 Beta and Google Chrome. A working clock that optionally resorts to JavaScript to grab the current time (can be achieved by other means).

How To

Before getting into the nitty gritty I created four images, a clock face and three transparent PNG hands (seconds, minutes and hours), ensuring that each of these were the same size so that when overlayed their centres would align. The HTML and CSS to get us going is as follows:

<div id="clock">
	<div id="hour"><img src="images/hourHand.png" /></div>
	<div id="minute"><img src="images/minuteHand.png" /></div>
	<div id="second"><img src="images/secondHand.png" /></div>
</div>

#clock {
position: relative;
width: 378px;
height: 378px;
background-image: url('../images/clockFace.png');
left: 50%;
margin: 5em 0 0 -189px;
}

#clock div {
position: absolute;
}

The magic that rotates the clock’s hands comes via two WebKit specific CSS properties, -webkit-transition (documentation) and -webkit-transform (documentation). The transform property can alter the appearance of an element via a two dimensional transformation, for instance: scaling, rotating and skewing a DIV element. In this case it is used to rotate the clock hands to the correct angles; the CSS below puts the hour hand at 3 o’clock:

#clock img[src*='hour'] {
-webkit-transform: rotate(90deg);
}

The transition property creates an animation of a specified property between two values when triggered, for instance fading the opacity on a DIV element from 1 to 0 — triggered using the :hover pseudo class. Transition duration and the transition timing function (e.g. linear) should also be set, amongst other optional properties. In this example the transition is from one transformation angle to another with durations that match the appropriate clock hand, so the second hand takes 60 seconds to complete a 360 degree rotation. The transition is triggered using the :target pseudo element — if the URI contains the ‘clock’ fragment then the time piece shall start ticking.

#clock img[src*='second'] {
/* -webkit-transition: property duration timing-function */
-webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 60s linear;
}

#clock:target img[src*='second'] {
-webkit-transform: rotate(360deg);
}

The above transition lasts only one rotation but by altering the duration length and degree of rotation in accordance the second hand can keep on going (e.g. 600 seconds and 3600 degrees rotation gives a battery life of 10 minutes), a fairly safe assumption that users will not stay on the page for too long.

#clock img[src*='second'] {
-webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 600000s linear;
}

#clock:target img[src*='second'] {
-webkit-transform: rotate(3600000deg);
}

#clock img[src*='minute'] {
-webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 360000s linear;
}

#clock:target img[src*='minute'] {
-webkit-transform: rotate(36000deg);
}

Grab the current time

Although the animation works beautifully, CSS alone is not capable of obtaining the current time. To start the clock at the correct time a dynamic transformation needs to be applied to the clock hand containers, this is easiest done with inline styles and can be set in any number of ways by the backend when the page loads, thereby eradicating any need for JavaScript.

Alternatively, if you’ve no objections to using JavaScript, I’ve created a small startClock() function to do the job (albeit using Prototype 1.6.0.3 for my own convenience):

function startClock() {
	var angle = 360/60;
	var date = new Date();
	var hour = date.getHours();
	if(hour > 12) {
		hour = hour - 12;
	}
	var minute = date.getMinutes();
	var second = date.getSeconds();
	var hourAngle = (360/12)*hour + (360/(12*60))*minute;
	$('minute').setStyle('-webkit-transform: rotate('+angle*minute+'deg)');
	$('second').setStyle('-webkit-transform: rotate('+angle*second+'deg)');
	$('hour').setStyle('-webkit-transform: rotate('+hourAngle+'deg)');
}

A word of warning — applying the inline style directly to the image will override the transition effects defined in the CSS file.

GA gives the ability to create your own events with a category, action, label and numerical value using the syntax:

_trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)

Hence, on an outbound link click, by calling this JavaScript method you can trigger a tracked event in GA. An obtrusive onclick attribute on every outbound link is both cumbersome to implement and difficult to manage, it also goes against the best practices of progressive enhancement and unobtrusiveness.

The solution is to attach a click event listener to each of the outbound links on the page, and the question becomes how to do that. CSS3 comes with a couple of handy new selectors that we can use in combination with Prototype or jQuery to root out the correct links. The appropriate selectors:

E[foo^=“bar”] an E element whose “foo” attribute value begins exactly with the string “bar“
E[foo*=“bar”] an E element whose “foo” attribute value contains the substring “bar“
E:not(s) an E element that does not match simple selector s

The magic outbound link selector then becomes one of the following, depending on your needs:

/* Any link that does not contain yourdomain.com */
a:not(a[href*="yourdomain.com"])

/* Any link that does not start with yourdomain.com */
a:not(a[href^="yourdomain.com"])

/* Any link that does not start with yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com */
a:not(a[href^="yourdomain.com"]):not(a[href^="www.yourdomain.com"])

/* Any link that starts with http - e.g. any non relative links */
a[href^="http"]

/* Catch all - any link that starts with http but doesn't link to your domain */
a[href^="http"]:not(a[href*="yourdomain.com"])

With an array of all the outbound links at hand, adding a click listener is simple. But we do need to set up the category, action and label. I have opted to create an arbitrary “Outbound Link” category that uses the link’s text (with HTML tags stripped out) as the action and the url as the label:

Event.observe(outboundLink, 'click', function() {
        // category, action, label
        pageTracker._trackEvent('Outbound Link', outboundLink.innerHTML.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/ig,""), outboundLink.href);
}

The complete code

Using Prototype version 1.6 the final code might look like this:

Update: As pointed out in the comments, hard coding a domain into your code isn’t the best idea, window.location.hostname is a good alternative. This may not always work if you do not want to exclude subdomains.

var domainName = "domainname.com";
// Select all outbound links
$$('a[href^="http"]:not(a[href*="'+domainName+'"])').each(function(outboundLink) {
        // Add listener to each of the links
        Event.observe(outboundLink, 'click', function() {
        // category, action, label
        pageTracker._trackEvent('Outbound Link', outboundLink.innerHTML.replace(/(<([^>]+)>)/ig,""), outboundLink.href);
        }
});

Update: I have slightly altered the content’s stack to begin with Apple’s Times font rather than Times New Roman, mainly for the superior glyphs that it offers, take for instance ‘fi’ in this post’s title. I’m attempting to research the differences between Times and Times New Roman beyond a simple comparison though internet sleuthing has not proved fruitful.

I’ve spent a short amount of time researching leading, kerning, the measure, et al to improve the legibility of the content region (e.g. The Design Cubicle). I’ve increased the CSS line-spacing and slightly upped the word-spacing to make the content area more readable. The design’s horizontal dimensions are all defined in ems, so the page scales correctly with changes in font size — always maintaining an appropriate measure in the region of 78 characters, ‘a couple of alphabets’ — a good rule of thumb for legibility. The vertical alignment in the header uses pixels to keep the desired appearance. The header image uses the text-indent text replacement technique and a transparent PNG that uses Helvetica Neue to achieve a consistent branding style across platforms.

Mark Boulton states that the leading should increase proportionately with the measure. I am tempted to create a small JavaScript project for a fluid web layout that dynamically alters the CSS line-spacing of the content based on the width of the window and hence the measure; just to see how things change. I think the first problem may be deciding the scaling factor to apply to the line-spacing.

One of the biggest caveats of creating a design that strongly relies on the beauty of fonts is the difference in Windows and Apple font rendering. Take for instance the screen capture below which compares Windows XP (Left, IE7) with OSX (Right, Firefox 3). My preference is towards Apple’s stylish approach that attempts to match print, versus Microsoft’s pixel jamming but easier to read pragmatic rendering. By using fonts as the predominant styling force on the page it is clear that in this case the Apple approach is superior. Joel on Software has a very nice article that makes a good comparison between the two.

Areas still left to develop include the right hand columns, a proper grid layout and the footer, I have put these aside until next week.

This blog has been devised as a spring board for my ideas whilst serving as a professional outlet for my skills, thoughts and collaborations. If I were to include some buzz words in this opening blurb to describe the content I’ll endeavour to put here I might include; CSS3, HTML5, Information Architecture, User Experience, Unobtrusive JavaScript, Prototype & jQuery libraries, SEO, web analytics, OOCSS, progressive enhancement, accessibility, rapid design prototyping and internet marketing.

As an exciting starting point, rather than build my own Wordpress theme from scratch I have opted to use the excellent Sandbox theme — ‘beautiful on the inside’. With its hugely powerful class-generating functions Sandbox creates clean and accessible markup with a huge array of context sensitive CSS selectors, creating an ‘exceptionally extensible foundation’.

For more information on the Sandbox Wordpress theme I recommend checking out the official Sandbox website hosted at plaintxt or the project home on Google Code.