As screen resolutions become denser, websites face the challenge of filling pixels without wasting bandwidth.

The Rise of Responsive Design

One of the more exciting advances in web design these past few years has been the advent and adoption of responsive design. As more modern browsers became prevalent, web designers were able to create layouts that could handle significantly different screen sizes in an elegant manner. Styles can now be defined to be invoked only when certain screen dimensions are present.

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I've been following IE and how it relates to web standards for quite some time now. I haven't been all that vocal over the past two years because, mainly, IE has been moving rapidly and in the right direction. For all the progress made, however, Internet Explorer's detractors - many who are fans of the SCOFF Browsers™ (Safari, Chrome, Opera & Firefox) - are not so much interested in web standards as they are in deriding Microsoft and its products. IE's lack of web standards became a rallying point for them. But times have changed.

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My follow-ups to South By Southwest are getting shorter and shorter each year. Mostly this is because what you read elsewhere would be repeated. The folks are the reason for attending and four days at one conference means many opportunities to meet people informally.

In Six Words

Here are my six-word synopses of the most memorable sessions and events I attended

Design is in the Details: Just throw stuff together; magic happens. Getting Unstuck From Desktop to Device: Still many hairy mobile development challenges. ABX Bowling / Team VCWear: Dollarsign eyes belie Andrew's genuine kindheartedness. General Theory of Creativity: Creative magic in associating two things. Great Design Hurts: Common request - I want a pony. Godbit Dinner: Wonderfully talented folks all around me. Design Eye for South By: Design rationale will follow; trust us. Emotional By Design: Appeal to all your users' senses. 30 ways to delight your users: Users want to rock; be helpful. Designing for Freedom: Every product decision impacts user freedom. Scalability Boot Camp: Add hardware now, software redesign later. WASP Annual Meeting: What should we focus on now? Video Blogging from Iraq: Entire squad watches fellow soldier's surgery.

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Earlier this week Opera Software filed an antitrust suit with the European Union against Microsoft. Opera states that Microsoft is abusing its dominant position and hindering interoperability. In the press release [web archive] Opera states that it is filing the complaint "On behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them." Opera then requests that the EU force Microsoft to

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I'm back to the daily grind after that whirlwind weekend known as South by Southwest Interactive.

I'm a little stunned to read Robert Nyman suggesting that perhaps conferences like SXSW have lost their usefulness. I, for one, don't have to look past my own nose for an example of someone who has directly benefited from the two most recent SXSW conferences. Here's proof:

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For a while now, I've been looking for a Flash application that would perform the ubiquitous photo slideshow that I see on so many of the sites featured at Godbit (godbit.com now defunct).

Then I came across Richard Rutter's CSS Image Fades page last week. Cool, I thought. If I can fade from an image to a background, why stop there? Once a background image is fully visible, I could move it to the image tag, set its opacity to 100 percent, then slide a different image underneath it.

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In the first two installments of this three-part series, I set the goal of producing valid Strict XHTML, then discussed the problems and pitfalls that lead to non-validating websites. I explained that a content repository containing non-valid XHTML is the cause of most non-validating sites. I called out two pathways that allowed non-validating XHTML to enter the repository as the first two enemies of non-validating Strict XHTML.

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In the first part of this three-part series, I outlined the scope of the series. It begins with the goal of valid Strict XHTML and states that the reason so many sites don't produce valid Strict XHTML is because their content repositories are contaminated with non-validating content, generated primarily by end users and content producers.

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Microsoft of late seems to be catching the XHTML validity bug. The marketing buzz surrounding its latest online publishing title, Expression Web, spouts XHTML validity nearly every other sentence. Visual Studio 2005 as well touts XHTML validity as a goal and feature. That's a great start, but neither product is a silver bullet to creating valid Strict XHTML sites. What pitfalls are there that we need to watch out for? What are the enemies of XHTML valid sites?

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I was working on some CSS adjustments at work about a week ago -- in the normal setup: three different browsers open and my text editor squished at the bottom of the screen. One of my coworkers watched as I made CSS adjustments in my text editor, and noticed that my changes were appearing in all three browsers without any intervention on my part.

His first reaction was surprise. Then he realized what I had done. I had temporarily added a meta tag in the xhtml source document, which caused the browsers to refresh themselves automatically. He had never seen this technique used for CSS coding before.

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