Category: Typography

Useful links: Bookmarklet, Toolbar, Sans-Serif

Web Evaluation Tools Bookmarklet comes from NCSU. Here’s the description of this very useful tool:

This tool will visually show you any headings, ARIA landmarks, internal links, and tabindex attributes present on a page. This information is useful for examining the structure of a page as a screen reader user would experience it, without having to actually start up a screen reader to test it.

Speaking useful of accessibility tools, the wonderful WAVE tool now has a Firefox WAVE Toolbar. The tool works completely within Firefox so can be used for “intranet, password-protected, dynamically generated, or sensitive web pages. Also, because the WAVE toolbar evaluates the rendered version of your page, locally displayed styles and dynamically-generated content from scripts or AJAX can be evaluated.”

A new study looked at sans-serif typefaces and tested how they performed in different situations where speed was important – such as reading screens while driving. Here’s what they learned. How Sans-Serif Typefaces Affect Readability.

Useful links: Decent Men, Google Fonts, Building Responsive Layouts

A Call to Arms for Decent Men by Ernest Adams is at idga.org. It’s a great post, very long, very well-written. Here are a couple of quotes:

Guys, we have a problem. We are letting way too many boys get into adulthood without actually becoming men. We’re seeing more and more adult males around who are not men. They’re as old as men, but they have the mentality of nine-year-old boys. They’re causing a lot of trouble, both in general and for the game industry specifically. We need to deal with this.

. . .

Use your heavy man’s hand in the online spaces where you go – and especially the ones you control – to demand courtesy and punish abuse. Don’t just mute them. Report them, block them, ban them, use every weapon you have. (They may try to report us in return. That won’t work. If you always behave with integrity, it will be clear who’s in the right.)

Let’s stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the women we love, and work with, and game with, and say, “We’re with you. And we’re going to win.” 

A very nice resource indeed: Google Fonts Reference Posters.

The exceedingly awesome Zoe Gillenwater released her slides from a Building Responsive Layouts talk. You can find them on slideshare, and see them here:

Deborah Edwards-Onoro was present at Zoe’s presentation and created a Storify version of it with tweets and images as well as the presentation.

Review: HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World


HTML5 & CSS3 For The Real World, written by Alexis Goldstein, Louis Lazaris and Estelle Weyl, is from Sitepoint (2011). This book takes on several topics that could fill an entire book individually, yet manages to serve each topic well. As you can tell from the title, the book talks about HTML5 and CSS3, but it also goes into complementary JavaScript/API topics like geolocation, offline web apps, web storage, Canvas, SVG, drag and drop.

 The authors specifically point to the growing mobile market, and that focus is reflected in the chapters included in the book. They say,
Mobile Safari on iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, as well as the Android operating system’s web browser all provide strong levels of HTML5 and CSS3 support. New features and technologies supported by some of those browser include CSS3 colors and opacity, the Canvas API, Web Storage, SVG, CSS3 rounded corners, Offline Web Apps, and more.

The authors made a strong effort to be as up to date as one can possibly be in a hardcopy format. They mentioned very recent changes in HTML5. They knew what future versions of browsers were likely to support, and therefore, what vendor specific prefixes were no longer needed, or soon would not be needed.

The downloadable site adds valuable practical and hands-on experience with the examples in the book that many learners will appreciate. It gives you something concrete to grapple with in addition to the theoretical information behind what’s going on in a browser or other device. Since I tend to look at everything from an educator’s point of view, I think the downloadable files would be a real asset if this book was used to teach either HTML5 or CSS3 or both.

It’s a lot for one book, but it’s all handled well. Which makes this book a decent choice for someone who wants a single resource to guide them through the new technologies and tools that are available in and around HTML5 and CSS3. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone who didn’t already understand HTML and CSS, but it is certainly a valuable book for learning the latest information in those fields.

Summary: An all-inclusive resource for learning HTML5 and CSS3.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of HTML5 & CSS3 for the Real World (rating: 5 stars)

Useful Links: Google Fonts, Scientific wow, Teach with Twitter, Rap

Google Web Fonts, V2. Now out. I tried out one the of fantasy fonts called Swanky on vdebolt.com.

Scientific American has 60 new blogs under its umbrella.

28 Creative Ways Teachers are Using Twitter. Some of them are indeed creative.

Hat tip to Spydergrrl for finding this climate change rap.

Useful links: Bones, App Press, web fonts

This looks interesting. A WordPress theme developer that is meant to be customized. It’s called Bones and uses HTML5 Boilerplate, CSS3 and the 960 Grid system.

App Press is a tool that helps you build apps for iOS.

Web font hosting services – an overview is a huge grid showing just about everything you might want to know about web font hosting services.