Jeffrey Wave post an article in which he gave answers on following five CSS questions:

• I have a floated element inside of a div. The problem is that the div is not containing the floated element. As a result, my layout is screwed up. How can I fix this?

• What is the difference between relative and absolute positioning?

• How can I style external links differently from site links without adding classes?

• I have set the margins on my container div to "auto" but the div still isn't centered in IE6 and below. How come?

• Do I have to create new divisions every time I want a page to have a different number of columns?

Source: Detached Designs.

Paul O'Brien pos an intresting article in he show how to center the contents vertically with CSS. He writes:

Brett Birke collected a large collection of links on various sites with free icon sets, which can be use in your web-projects.

Source: WebTecker.

Martin Brown tells about following ten good XML habits in his new article on the IBM developerWork site:

• Define your XML and encoding

• Use a DTD or XSD

• Remember to validate

• Validation isn't always the answer

• XML structure versus attributes

• Use XPath to find information

• You don't always need a parser to extract information

• When to use SAX over DOM parsing

• When to DOM over SAX parsing

• Use a good XML editor

You can read the full version of this article on the IBM developerWorks site.

Robert Nyman writes about using the DOMAssistant library in the AJAX project to make the development project more easy. He write:

«The idea behind DOMAssistant is to provide a lightweight JavaScript library, to help you out with your everyday scripting tasks. One of its strongest parts is having the fastest and most consistently accurate CSS selectors out there, which is the common starting ground for almost every scripting task there is in today's modern world of element referencing.

Just like the Safari web browser and its continuous gained success, we believe that there is a great interest for having something perform as fast as possible, and having a small yet rock solid and easy-to-use features. For those needing to extend on that, DOMAssistant has a very powerful yet simple plugin mechanism to add the specific functionality you need.»

Source: DZone

Brett Birke post a very intresting article in which he collected a lot of site with various web design tutorials. For example you can find there a lot of useful Photoshop tutorials. Brett write:

«Let’s Face It, web design trends and fads come and go as fast as you can say the word “Trends”. Staying on top of web design trends can be difficult and time consuming, but it is extremely important to not be left behind. One of the best things any web designer can do is to learn the newest trends or fads and put your own spin to them. To stay on top of web design trends you must visit websites, blogs, read books and magazines, which are sometimes difficult to find. The links below are will guide to stay on top of the latest trends in web design. »

Source: WebTecker.

Oliver Steel post an intresting article in his blog about his expirience working with GIT. He writes the following:

«Git‘s great! But it’s difficult to learn (it was for me, anyway) — especially the index, which unlike the power-user features, comes up in day-to-day operation.

Here’s my path to enlightment, and how I ended up using the index in my particular workflow. There are other workflows, but this one is mine.

What this isn’t: a Git tutorial. It doesn’t tell you how to set up git, or use it. I don’t cover branches, or merging, or tags, or blobs. There are dozens of really great articles about Git on the web; here are some. What’s here are just some pictures that aren’t about branches or blobs, that I wished I’d been able to look at six months ago when I was trying to figure this stuff out; I still haven’t seen them elsewhere, so here they are now.»

You can read the full version of this article in the Oliver Steele blog.

Rob Glazerbrook post an intresting article about creating drop-down menus with CSS: He writes:

«Attractive dropdown menus have long been the realm of Flash developers and advanced JavaScript gurus. But that needn’t be the case. This tutorial will walk you through developing a clean, semantic dropdown menu using XHTML and CSS that works in all modern browsers!

Let’s start with the XHTML first and foremost. It’s surprisingly simple:

<ul id="navbar">

<li><a href="#">Item One</a><ul>

<li><a href="#">Subitem One</a></li>

<li><a href="#">Second Subitem</a></li>

<li><a href="#">Numero Tres</a></li></ul>

</li>

<!-- ... and so on ... -->

</ul>

As you can see, our navigation bar consists of nested unordered lists and anchor tags. The key to this working correctly is to properly nest your unordered lists, wrapping the list item around the unordered list that is nested under it (for more on that topic, see this article on styling nested lists). The main list items will be our main navigation bar, while the nested unordered lists will become our subnavigation elements. The navigation bar also works without submenus, so you can mix and match as needs be. Also note that, other than an ID on our primary containing unordered list, there are no additional classes or IDs required!»

Source: CSSNewbies.

Kilian Valkhof post the second article from hisseries about positioning in CSS. This time he telling about float concepts. He writes:

«In essence, floating allows you to place a block element to the left or right border of its containing element and let the rest of the content flow around it. A floated element automatically becomes a block element so you can add a width and height to it. Between the two, always make sure that you specify a width, because without it the rendering can be unpredictable. »

You can read the full version of this article on the Kilian Valkhov's website.

There is a intresting article about working with fonts using the CSS posted on the Web Design Marketing blog. Here's the small excerpt from this article:

«CSS has brought us many capabilities in terms of typography and the web, but we always seem to be limited to the same 4-5 typefaces over and over again. There is an inherant problem, if the font you specify isn’t on the viewers computer it won’t render in that font. So as designers and developers we end up selecting the ones that we can safely assume is available on most computers today. So most pages use Arial, Helvetica, or Georgia as their typefaces… and the world of the web remains slightly more bland.

But there are quite a few high quality typefaces that are available on most new computer systems and you can always fall back on the common ones. Of course there are options like creating images, dynamic headlines, and siFR… but all of these techniques increase load time and development time. There are plenty of good reasons to be strategic in the font choices rather than using additional technology. I am shocked at how rarely I see anyone taking advantage of these type options, so here is a quick and dirty list of fonts you should and could use in your desgns and stylesheets.»

Source: Web Marketing blog.

The Noupe site post one more collection of links on various intresting artilces about Javascript programming techniques and gadgets.

Source:Noupe.

Javascript

Reading EXIF data with Javascript

.NET

Peer Networking Series - A Closer Look at PNRP vs. Bonjour/ZeroConf

XML

Using XQuery and VoiceXML

Various

Great Resources Elsewhere: May 02 to May 09

Circular Menus and Usability

Links for Wed 7 May 2008

Eclipse

Integrate external tools and builders in Eclipse

Java

Bending Java: More readable code with methods that do nothing?

There is an intresting article about using the collections and dictionaries in C#.posted on the Switch on The Code site. Here's the small excerpt from this artivle:

«A dictionary is actually just another collection of Key/Value pairs, just like a HashTable, except that you declare a type for the Key and Value. These are any type you want. The Key or Value can be a primitive, array, enum, or even a struture. This can open the door for some pretty crazy code. An example of a useful and simple Dictionary would be something like:

Dictionary<int, string> newDict =

new Dictionary<int,string>();»

Source: Switch on The Code

The Noupe site post a review of more than 30 AJAX/JavaScript techniques for creatiug sliders , scrollers and scroll bars.. You can read this review on the Noupe site.

The Smahing Magazine post a review of most popular source code editors. Here's the ecerpt fromm beginning of this article:

«To edit HTML- and CSS-code you only need a simple plaintext-editor — the rest depends on your skills and your creativity. However, to make your life a little bit easier, you can use some more comfortable source-code editors with advanced editing features. These features can effectively support you during coding, debugging and testing. Powerful modern editors provide developers with syntax highlighting, diff, macros, plugins, code-snippets, preview-option and an integrated FTP-management tool. Some editors go even further and offer a complete integrated development environment with numerous features and functions.

In the list below we present an overview of 35 established or rather unknown — but useful source code-editors; you’ll probably find “usual suspects” — your favourite editor or the editor you’ve once been working with. But you’ll also find some rather unknown alternatives which are definitely worth considering when choosing an optimal source code editor.»

Source: Smashing Magazine.