Written by Ethan Gardner Web Design
Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a powerful technology often treated like a misfit by the design community. The fact is XSL isn’t that difficult to learn, makes websites faster, offers many ways to format content, and makes working with XML data easy.
Many XSL tutorials are either too technical, make too many assumptions about prior knowledge of the technology, or don’t have an obvious practical application. In this introduction, I hope to change that by presenting a plain-language overview of XSL, how it differs from CSS, and lay the groundwork for a 3-part tutorial where we’ll use XSL in a real-world situation.
Read more: Using XSLT in Web Design: A Plain-Language Overview
Written by Ethan Gardner Web Design
To keep creative work from becoming homogenized, it is important to have discovery and research as part of the design process for each project. Generating fresh ideas can be challenging when you design all day, but as designers, we need to keep innovating to overcome the client’s marketing challenges.
For many people the first and only stop for design ideas are CSS galleries, but stepping outside the norm can deliver unique and original design results. In this post, we’ll look at how art and life experience can be adapted to produce two unique web design elements with a nature theme.
Written by Ethan Gardner Web Design
With Twitter, Google Wave, and Opera Unite, there has been a lot of recent talk regarding the future of the web. You may have also heard of Wolfram Alpha, a non-traditional search engine capable of complex calculations and conversions, as part of the “future” discussion.
With all the hype, I decided to check Wolfram Alpha out myself. Initially, I struggled to find a use for the data, but as I spent more time exploring the possibilities, I came across some useful ways it can be used for producing web sites and general business purposes.
Written by Ethan Gardner Web Design
If you have been following the best practices for website optimization published by Yahoo’s Exceptional Performance team, you know the importance that using gzip to compress files and making fewer HTTP requests can have on website speed.
In my article, How to Plan for a Website Redesign, I mentioned I was hoping to make further performance optimizations to my site. While doing some research, I came across a number of powerful techniques that uses PHP to optimize CSS files. By combining these techniques, I was able to achieve some impressive enhancements resulting in a 71% reduction in the size of my CSS files.
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