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Link	rowid ▼	title	contents	year	author	author_slug	published	url	topic
9	9	How to Write a Book	Were you recently inspired to write a book after reading Owen Gregory’s compendium of author insights? Maybe so inspired to strike out on your own and self-publish? Based on personal experience, writing a book is hard. It requires a great deal of research, experience, and patience. To be able to consolidate your thoughts and what you’ve learned into a sensible and readable tome is an admirable feat. To decide to self-publish and take on yourself all of the design, printing, distribution, and so much more is tantamount to insanity. Again, based on personal experience. So, why might you want to self-publish? If you’ve spent many a late night doing cross-browser testing just to know that your site works flawlessly in twenty-four different browsers — including Mosaic, of course — then maybe you’ll understand the fun that comes from doing it all. Working with a publisher, you’re left to focus on one core thing: writing. That’s a good thing. A good publisher has the right resources to help you get your idea polished and the distribution network to get your book on store shelves around the world. It’s a very proud moment to be able to walk into a book store and see your book sitting there on the shelf. Self-publishing can also be a wonderful process as you get to own it from beginning to end. Every decision is yours and if you’re a control freak like me, this can be a very rewarding experience. While there are many aspects to self-publishing, I’m going to speak to just one of them: creating an ebook. Formats In creating an ebook, you first need to decide what formats you wish to support. There are three main formats, each with their own pros and cons: PDF EPUB MOBI PDFs are supported on almost every device (Windows, Mac, Kindle, iPad, Android, etc.) and can even be a stepping stone to creating a print version of your book. PDFs allow for full typographic and design control, but at the cost of needing to fit things into a predefined page layout. Is it US Letter or A4? Or is it a format that isn’t easily…	2013	Jonathan Snook	jonathansnook	2013-12-19T00:00:00+00:00	https://24ways.org/2013/how-to-write-a-book/	content
64	64	Being Responsive to the Small Things	It’s that time of the year again to trim the tree with decorations. Or maybe a DOM tree? Any web page is made of HTML elements that lay themselves out in a tree structure. We start at the top and then have multiple branches with branches that branch out from there. To decorate our tree, we use CSS to specify which branches should receive the tinsel we wish to adorn upon it. It’s all so lovely. In years past, this was rather straightforward. But these days, our trees need to be versatile. They need to be responsive! Responsive web design is pretty wonderful, isn’t it? Based on our viewport, we can decide how elements on the page should change their appearance to accommodate various constraints using media queries. Clearleft have a delightfully clean and responsive site Alas, it’s not all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. With complex layouts, we may have design chunks — let’s call them components — that appear in different contexts. Each context may end up providing its own constraints on the design, both in its default state and in its possibly various responsive states. Media queries, however, limit us to the context of the entire viewport, not individual containers on the page. For every container our component lives in, we need to specify how to rearrange things in that context. The more complex the system, the more contexts we need to write code for. @media (min-width: 800px) { .features > .component { } .sidebar > .component {} .grid > .component {} } Each new component and each new breakpoint just makes the entire system that much more difficult to maintain. @media (min-width: 600px) { .features > .component { } .grid > .component {} } @media (min-width: 800px) { .features > .component { } .sidebar > .component {} .grid > .component {} } @media (min-width: 1024px) { .features > .component { } } Enter container queries Container queries, also known as element queries, allow you to specify conditional CSS based on the width (or maybe height) of the container that an element lives in.…	2015	Jonathan Snook	jonathansnook	2015-12-19T00:00:00+00:00	https://24ways.org/2015/being-responsive-to-the-small-things/	code
147	147	Christmas Is In The AIR	That’s right, Christmas is coming up fast and there’s plenty of things to do. Get the tree and lights up, get the turkey, buy presents and who know what else. And what about Santa? He’s got a list. I’m pretty sure he’s checking it twice. Sure, we could use an existing list making web site or even a desktop widget. But we’re geeks! What’s the fun in that? Let’s build our own to-do list application and do it with Adobe AIR! What’s Adobe AIR? Adobe AIR, formerly codenamed Apollo, is a runtime environment that runs on both Windows and OSX (with Linux support to follow). This runtime environment lets you build desktop applications using Adobe technologies like Flash and Flex. Oh, and HTML. That’s right, you web standards lovin’ maniac. You can build desktop applications that can run cross-platform using the trio of technologies, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. If you’ve tried developing with AIR before, you’ll need to get re-familiarized with the latest beta release as many things have changed since the last one (such as the API and restrictions within the sandbox.) To get started To get started in building an AIR application, you’ll need two basic things: The AIR runtime. The runtime is needed to run any AIR-based application. The SDK. The software development kit gives you all the pieces to test your application. Unzip the SDK into any folder you wish. You’ll also want to get your hands on the JavaScript API documentation which you’ll no doubt find yourself getting into before too long. (You can download it, too.) Also of interest, some development environments have support for AIR built right in. Aptana doesn’t have support for beta 3 yet but I suspect it’ll be available shortly. Within the SDK, there are two main tools that we’ll use: one to test the application (ADL) and another to build a distributable package of our application (ADT). I’ll get into this some more when we get to that stage of development. Building our To-do list application The first step to building an application within AIR is to cre…	2007	Jonathan Snook	jonathansnook	2007-12-19T00:00:00+00:00	https://24ways.org/2007/christmas-is-in-the-air/	code
184	184	Spruce It Up	The landscape of web typography is changing quickly these days. We’ve gone from the wild west days of sIFR to Cufón to finally seeing font embedding seeing wide spread adoption by browser developers (and soon web designers) with @font-face. For those who’ve felt limited by the typographic possibilities before, this has been a good year. As Mark Boulton has so eloquently elucidated, @font-face embedding doesn’t come without its drawbacks. Font files can be quite large and FOUT—that nasty flash of unstyled text—can be a distraction for users. Data URIs We can battle FOUT by using Data URIs. A Data URI allows the font to be encoded right into the CSS file. When the font comes with the CSS, the flash of unstyled text is mitigated. No extra HTTP requests are required. Don’t be a grinch, though. Sending hundreds of kilobytes down the pipe still isn’t great. Sometimes, all we want to do is spruce up our site with a little typographic sugar. Be Selective Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits is an attractive site. Take a look at the ampersand within the header of his site. It’s the lovely (and free) Goudy Bookletter 1911 available from The League of Movable Type. The Opentype format is a respectable 28KB. Nothing too crazy but hold on here. Mr. Cederholm is only using the ampersand! Ouch. That’s a lot of bandwidth just for one character. Can we optimize a font like we can an image? Yes. Image optimization essentially works by removing unnecessary image data such as colour data, hidden comments or using compression algorithms. How do you remove unnecessary information from a font? Subsetting. If you’re the adventurous type, grab a copy of FontForge, which is an open source font editing tool. You can open the font, view and edit any of the glyphs and then re-generate the font. The interface is a little clunky but you’ll be able to select any character you don’t want and then cut the glyphs. Re-generate your font and you’ve now got a smaller file. There are certainly more optimizations that can also be made such as …	2009	Jonathan Snook	jonathansnook	2009-12-19T00:00:00+00:00	https://24ways.org/2009/spruce-it-up/	code
278	278	Going Both Ways	It’s that time of the year again: Santa is getting ready to travel the world. Up until now, girls and boys from all over have sent in letters asking for what they want. I hope that Santa and his elves have—unlike me—learned more than just English. On the Internet, those girls and boys want to participate in sharing their stories and videos of opening presents and of being with friends and family. Ah, yes, the wonders of user generated content. But more than that, people also want to be able to use sites in the language they know. While you and I might expect the text to read from left to right, not all languages do. Some go from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew. (Some also go from top to bottom, but for now, let’s just worry about those first two directions!) If we were building a site for girls and boys to send their letters to Santa, we need to consider having the interface in the language and direction that they prefer. On the elves’ side, they may be viewing the site in one direction but reading the user generated content in the other direction. We need to build a site that supports bidirectional (or bidi) text. Let’s take a look at some things to be aware of when it comes to building bidi interfaces. Setting the direction of the interface Right off the bat, we need to tell the browser what direction the text should be going in. To do this, we add the dir attribute to an HTML element and set it to either LTR (for left to right) or RTL (for right to left). <body dir="rtl"> You can add the dir attribute to any element and it will set or change the direction for the content within that element. <body dir="ltr"> Here is English Content. <div dir="rtl">الموضوع</div> </body> You can also set the direction via CSS. .rtl { direction: rtl; } It’s generally recommended that you don’t use CSS to set the direction of the text. Text direction is an important part of the content that should be retained even in environments where the CSS may not be available or fails to load. How things c…	2011	Jonathan Snook	jonathansnook	2011-12-19T00:00:00+00:00	https://24ways.org/2011/going-both-ways/	ux
321	321	Tables with Style	It might not seem like it but styling tabular data can be a lot of fun. From a semantic point of view, there are plenty of elements to tie some style into. You have cells, rows, row groups and, of course, the table element itself. Adding CSS to a paragraph just isn’t as exciting. Where do I start? First, if you have some tabular data (you know, like a spreadsheet with rows and columns) that you’d like to spiffy up, pop it into a table — it’s rightful place! To add more semantics to your table — and coincidentally to add more hooks for CSS — break up your table into row groups. There are three types of row groups: the header (thead), the body (tbody) and the footer (tfoot). You can only have one header and one footer but you can have as many table bodies as is appropriate. Sample table example Inspiration Table Striping To improve scanning information within a table, a common technique is to style alternating rows. Also known as zebra tables. Whether you apply it using a class on every other row or turn to JavaScript to accomplish the task, a handy-dandy trick is to use a semi-transparent PNG as your background image. This is especially useful over patterned backgrounds. tbody tr.odd td { background:transparent url(background.png) repeat top left; } * html tbody tr.odd td { background:#C00; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader( src='background.png', sizingMethod='scale'); } We turn off the default background and apply our PNG hack to have this work in Internet Explorer. Styling Columns Did you know you could style a column? That’s right. You can add special column (col) or column group (colgroup) elements. With that you can add border or background styles to the column. <table> <col id="ingredients"> <col id="serve12"> <col id="serve24"> ... Check out the example. Fun with Backgrounds Pop in a tiled background to give your table some character! Internet Explorer’s PNG hack unfortunately only works well when applied to a cell. To f…	2005	Jonathan Snook	jonathansnook	2005-12-19T00:00:00+00:00	https://24ways.org/2005/tables-with-style/	code

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