Great Resources Elsewhere: June 27 to July 10

Nathan Ford of Unit Interactive has written a great article on the proper utilization of “font stacks,” i.e. the order in which your arrange your font preferences in CSS. He gives some practical general advice on developing font stacks, such as how to move from your ideal choice to the generic option, and what should go in between. However, he also has constructed a list of fonts that work well stacked together, and has even provided a PDF download of the typefaces so you can see how they compare.

Speaking of typography (and I sure do that a lot, don’t I?), have you ever stopped to wonder about the people behind the typefaces we use every day? Well, The Man In Blue seems to have, because he has an entire article dedicated to looking at some popular typefaces… and the handwriting of the people who created it. It’s pretty interesting stuff, really. Some typographers have handwriting worse than my own, while others have handwriting that outshines many of the typefaces out there.

The modern web designer works in XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and often at least one or two flavors of framework for each. Each language (and framework) has a different way of doing things… sometimes they’re similar, but other times they’re not. And that’s a lot to have to remember. Which is why the Good Lord invented cheating. Six Revisions has put together a roundup of 20-something cheat sheets for XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a few frameworks to make your life easier. If you find yourself spending more time with your nose in a reference manual than doing actual coding, you should head this way.

SEO Blog reminds us of a very important point that many web designers tend to forget: you can have the coolest, web 2.0-iest, standards-based website in the world… but if nobody can find anything on your site, all your work will have been for naught. The author walks us through ten of the bigger crimes against findability, from using overly “cool” (i.e., meaningless) title text, to styling headlines using CSS while ignoring heading tags (h1-h6), rendering them invisible to search engines.

The idea of CSS “specificity” (which rules take precedence over others) is a difficult concept to nail down when you’re starting out working with CSS. However, this article might just help you along the road to comprehension. Here, Jeffrey Jordan Way of Detached Designs walks us through the concepts behind specificity and the hypothetical point system that determines which rules get applied and which get ignored when two or more rules fight over the same elements.