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Hyphenation and justification: It?s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o? JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size. Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It?s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in?but we can?t select the appropriate tool until we?ve figured out the project?s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project?s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we?ve installed and customized the CMS? There's an app for that, and you're the folks who are creating it. But should you design a web-based application, or an iPhone app? Each approach has pluses and minuses?not to mention legions of religiously rabid supporters. Apple promotes both approaches (they even gave the web a year-long head start before beginning to sell apps in the store), and the iPhone's Safari browser supports HTML5 and CSS3 and brags a fast JavaScript engine. Yet many companies and individuals with deep web expertise choose to create iPhone apps instead of web apps that can do the same thing. Explore both approaches and learn just about everything you'll need to know if you choose to create an iPhone app—from the lingo, to the development process, to the tricks that can smooth the path of doing business with Apple. Help content gets no respect. For one thing, it is content, and our horse-before-cart industry is only now beginning to seriously tackle content strategy. For another, we assume that our site is so usable, nobody will ever need the help content anyway. Typically, no one is in charge of the help content and no strategy exists to keep it up to date. On most sites, help content is hard to find, poorly written, blames the user, and turns a mildly frustrating experience into a lousy one. It's time to rethink how we approach this part of our site. Done well, help content offers tremendous potential to earn customer loyalty. By learning to plan for and create useful help content, we can turn frustrated users into our company's biggest fans. Too many kickoff meetings squander the busiest, most expensive people's time reiterating what everyone already knows. If every meeting is an opportunity, why waste your first one? By asking stakeholders tough questions before the kick-off, and using the meeting itself to explore ideas and build relationships, you can turn a room of mutually suspicious turf battlers into an energetic team with shared ownership of the end-product and the kind of bond that can sustain the group through the challenges ahead.
Web design news and notes Digital Web has an interesting article up from yesterday that suggests an alternate method for structuring and organizing your CSS files. Based on the way many of today’s popular web application platforms, the technique steps into a middle man position between global and page-specific stylesheets. The example used in the article is geared toward Ruby [...] A List Apart has just published issue #270. The first article, “Progressive Enhancement with CSS” is the second in a series from Aaron Gustafson. “Working From Home: The Readers Respond“, the second piece is a summary of results targeting those of you lucky enough to work from home. Aaron Gustafson’s second piece in his series [...] The latest version of Firefox is now available for those early adopters out there. This beta release marks the latest big shift in the web browser. Improvements in this release include performance tweaks, new JavaScript engine and increased support for new Web standards. Issue #269 of A List Apart has been published. Aaron Gustafson starts off a new series on progressive enhancement with a nice refresher and primer. In this issue’s second article, Jeffrey Zeldman looks back on the first 10 years of A List Apart. Roger Johansson has a quick intro to what seems like a promising screen reader extension for Firefox. Fire Vox is an open source extension for the web browser that works on Windows, Mac or Linux. Sounds like it’s another great tool in the testing arsenal. You read more about it at Roger’s site or go [...]
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