links for 2009-07-14

Harry Potter Years 1-5 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth movie in the series, opens in theaters tonight, and I'm embarking on the proverbial marathon to watch the first five so everything will be fresh in my mind for #6. I have to say, though, that the thought of sitting through the first one again (I've seen it a few times) is probably the least-appealing part of the journey. So that brings up the natural question: Which movies were the best? Unlike my colleague, Jordan, who will posting more on Potter soon, I don't live and breathe the books so I'm just ranking these on a sheer movie-entertainment scale. How would you rank them? (Beware of spoilers, obviously, and find all the movies and more in our Harry Potter store.) –David

Christian Gifts & Jewelry is a result of a call from our Lord to service the Christian community. This call started out with helping a friend publish his monthly Christian newsletter, The Independent Evangelist, on the internet. Once his newsletter was up and running, I felt that the Lord wanted yet more from me. After much prayer, discussion and thought, I discerned that His call could best be answered by starting this e-store. As I was beginning to work on Christian Gifts & Jewelry, I made a promise to the Lord that all of the profits would be tithed to serve the church and benefit charities. So with the Lord’s call and a sincere promise in my heart, I welcome you.

SlickMap CSS is a simple stylesheet for displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation. It’s suitable for most web sites – accommodating up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links – and can easily be customized to meet your own individual needs, branding, or style preferences. The general idea of SlickMap CSS is to streamline the web design process by automating the illustration of sitemaps while at the same time allowing for the predevelopment of functional HTML navigation. Features and Benefits * Eliminates the need for additional software * Easily revised with clients on-the-fly * Clickable anchors with visible URLs * Design process results in working HTML code

Lately I have been very interested in how far we can take Typography only using CSS. Sure you can use images or sIFR to produce some very beautiful typography, but there is something unique and special about using only CSS. It is incredibly useful too, if you know the extent you can take CSS you end up with much more flexible websites— especially ones driven by a CMS. Think about how difficult sIFR or images get when you want to replicate that typography or typeface over 100 pages powered by a CMS. If you can get beautiful type via CSS it makes this situation very easy and with out compromise. There are a lot of great sites out there that have beautiful Typography using only CSS, however simply looking at them is only half of the picture. We want to know what did they do, and how/why does it result in beautiful type?

Wow! Where did that come from? It sounds so dramatic. And, yet, it so well defines our relationship with heading elements. Of course not everyone will feel this way. I, for one, recall a time when headings where something I avoided using. I mean, really, they’re so big and black and ugly. That was early-on in my foray into the craft, though, when paragraphs — or pseudographs as I like to call them now — were made by placing two break elements between two blocks of text. I didn’t know better. I didn’t realize the power I had at hand via my style sheet. I learned. Selecting Headings Before we get high on Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) magic, we need to first figure out what headings to use. There are, after all, six to choose from: h1 through h6, largest through smallest, respectively — most to least important, consequently. Generally the h1 will be used once (that is my recommendation) and it will either define the site, the page content, or both.

Many of web standards rookies feel that passing validation is good enough to call their work web standards compliant. Those who are more involved in web standards know that there's more than that. Use of headings is a good example. While validator will not show any warnings or errors for headings, you can't say that your page is valid if your heading structure fails. Meaning of headings Some say that the largest role of headings are their SEO meaning. I am not going into that. They maybe right, but I say (since I am not a SEO expert but a web standards enthusiast) that their importance lies in semantics. What are headings anyway? Headings are elements that describe the content that follows and also define a document's structure. Similar to large headings and subheadings in printed newspapers, html headings should briefly describe what the page or sections are about, making it clear to the reader (human or non-human) what to expect if he continues to read.