CSSnewbie

John Boardley has posted a great, accessible article on the art of typography on the web. If you’re new to writing for the web, this article is a good place to start your research. Instead of focusing on font selection, John highlights the concepts of size, contrast, space and hierarchy, and explains why all of them should be considered a major part of your design, regardless of what typeface you settle with.

Here’s a great example by Mike Cherim of what can be accomplished in the realm of navigation using pure CSS. This example doesn’t use any images whatsoever — yet looks better than some image-based nav bars out there. Mike’s excellent use of the :active pseudo-class (activates when the link is clicked) makes this example really stand out. If you were to combine this with my Intelligent Navigation system, you’d really have a system to reckon with.

CSSVista is a fantastic and free application for testing your CSS in Firefox and Internet Explorer simultaneously. The program behaves mostly like a web browser — except you can edit your CSS on live websites at the click of a button, and then see the results instantly in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. When I downloaded it to test it out, I discovered a bug in CSSnewbie’s sidebar in IE6 that I was able to quickly diagnose and repair.