Mike Davidson (almost) takes the covers off his eagerly awaited new venture. Newsvine promises to be a community driven news site with articles culled from everywhere….from major news outlets to the individual blogger and everything in between. Can’t wait to see how this grows!

Mike Stenhouse articulates very well the kind of CSS management strategy that I have been using intuitively over the past couple of years and will continue to use in the future as the teams I am working with become larger and larger. I have learned along the way that sandboxing CSS rules is a good way to paint yourself into a corner if you’re not careful. I am increasingly trying to avoid being overly specific while maintaining the benefits of specificity. It’s a fine line.

My plan was simply to work on the primary navigation tab set. I also needed to do some prep for the weekly Web standards workshop today. But you know me…once I get started, it’s hard to stop. I just couldn’t help myself. I took a break on Saturday to help my brother move some furniture around for Mom. Other than that, I was immersed in code.

Check out the before and after.

Not a bad start. Using WebSiteOptimization.com to compare the two versions side-by-side, you can see that the total size of the optimized version (44 KB) is around 30% of the original (120 KB). The mark-up alone has been cut from 37 KB down to 9 KB. The CSS from 63 KB to 9 KB.

Ahhh….that feels good. Just put one foot in front of the other. With a little luck and a lotta faith, this thing (either in part or in whole) may see the light of day sometime before the end of the year. Until then, there is much to do. I want the layout to be flexible of course, so a strategy will need to be developed that allows for that, and at the same time ensures visual consistency with the legacy content. And I still think we can squeeze some more bytes out of this thing. Oh yeah….it looks great on the phone.

Update:

Just fixed some positioning issues with the tab set in Safari 1.3, Netscape 6.2 and Firefox 1.5b. We’re good to go except for Mac IE 5.2 and again, just some positioning issues with the tab set.

Disclaimer: While I am an eBay employee, these opinions are my own.

Molly has come up with a set of Web Design and Development Personality Indicators.

I’d say I’m a SASS/SACE hybrid with one foot in the real world and the idealistic belief that comprimises never have to come at the expense of the user. Anyone who has worked with me would probably agree.

Markus Mielke issues a Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages.

Time to get busy. Start moving all those IE specific hacks into conditional comments.

Update

There certainly isn’t any reason to panic right now. While conditional comments are a great way to segregate IE specific CSS, it’s not an emergency situation. Eric Meyer laughs it off and offers sage advice.

Derek Featherstone has created a great resource called Simply Accesible which is based on his recent presentation at Web Essentials 05, in Sydney, Australia.

Derek has some great new thoughts on the design and authoring of accessible forms. I’m particularly excited about the idea of grouping all required form fields in their own “required” fieldset, while creating an “optional” fieldset for the rest of the fields. This is a fresh idea that warrants further exlporation. Thanks, Derek!

Andy Clarke breaks down CSS specificity for the Star Wars kid in all of us. Molly provides clarification and points out the differences between CSS 2 and CSS 2.1 specificity.

If fully realized, this device will truly change the world.

Great article on Disc Golf in the New York Times today by Tim Sultan.

I’ve been a Microsoft Money user for over 10 years now. Upgrading religiously every year. This year, I had the misfortune to have to use Intuit’s Quicken 2005 to manage my parent’s finances due to the illness and subsequent death of my father. I’ve been using it at least twice a week for the past 9 months. I can honestly say that Money is hands down the better personal finance software. And it’s not because there are any great features Money has that Quicken doesn’t. They are pretty much equally matched as far as feature set goes. It’s actually the little things that make all the difference in the world to me. For instance, you cannot cut text from some external program and simply paste it into the register. And CTRL+V inexplicably voids the transaction you are working on! What the…!? Another thing that bothers me is the auto-completion when entering in a payee. It has to do with capitization. If you type a “w” into the field and the match is “WALGREENS” and you select it, it will actually write “wALGREENS” into the field and save it as a seperate entry! It’s minor, but like I said, it’s the little things.