Here's this weeks links:

http://www.myinkblog.com/2009/05/16/a-showcase-of-popular-web-design-trends/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/21/web-design-industry-jargon-glossary-and-resources

If Street Fighter 2 was released in 1981 - http://vimeo.com/4504861

I was very privileged in being able to attend this year’s Future of Web Design Conference in London hosted by Carsonified. Whilst primarily aimed at web designers, there were quite a few talks which interested me as a front end developer and that the topics would provoke ideas which I could bring back and discuss for Creative Jar.

Some highly renowned names were amongst the speakers, including Meagan Fisher from Simplebits, who discussed the level of support for Mobile Interfaces. Do we make our websites viewable to suit the ever increasing number of mobile web users by just making sure it works, or do we offer them something special – a layout and application specifically built for their mobile?

Robin Christopherson from AbilityNet gave a demonstration on how unusable popular websites such as Youtube, Google and New Scientist are from the perspective of a blind user. Also giving us some tips as to what can help us make our websites a bit more accessible.

Sabrina Dent demonstrated what happens when you throw client collaboration out of the window. A very nice method of thinking, but not too sure how much clients would appreciate just being told “No!”

Molly Holzschlag informed us on the future of web standards and whether there is one. CSS3 is looming just around the corner, even though there is a lot of scepticism of whether we should start implementing it. The support of IE6 was also mentioned; be careful with it. Rather than just throwing it in the bin as we would with any other trash, we should still cater for it. Offer a milder user experience, whilst at least there is a new push of upgrading browsers coming shortly. Overall, the talk proved to be very informative talk on how best handle our code and move forward with our standards.

And these were just a selection of the many great speakers that I was able to watch! To make it even better, I was able to attend 2 workshops the following day on Accessibility and Javascript! Both being such an eye opener of what can be achieved; one with the problems which disabled users face on day to day websites and how we can use ‘Personas’ to create the best user experience for our audience even if they are disabled through vision or movement; and the other demonstrating what can now be achieved through the many Javascript libraries which are at our finger tips and help solve some of our common problems such as dynamic graphs.

At the end of the 2 days I felt that I had never laughed so much, debated so much amongst like-minded designers/developers and met so many interesting people. Definitely worth the visit and looking forward to the next!

It's about that time to share a few Friday links with you all!

Maximize the use of hovers

15 Excellent jquery navigation techniques and solutions

20 Excellent javascript navigation techniques and examples

Simplifying website usability the 3 step approach

While working on a few websites this week I came across two really useful techniques.

Two Column Float Variable Widths

The first was a simple two column layout using float left on both div's without any width set. This proved a bit of a challenge for both div's wanted to sit underneath eachother or the second column would wrap under neath the first div.

Our solution was to use float left on the first div with the second div set with no float but but using display:table instead. This worked perfectly for firefox and other browsers apart from IE... For IE we just had to add the float:left property in a conditional css hack i.e. * html #div { float:left }. This allowed us to achive two columns with flexible widths, see the image below.

Backslash IE hack

The second little niffty css hack I came across was similar to the underscore IE hack i.e. _height:100px;

Using two backslashes (//) instead of the underscore works across all IE's.
IE ignores the two backslashes as where all other browsers see this as comments. Genius!!