Five Minute Argument

Articles

Editorials about the web, usability, and — primarily — css.

Blog

Regular rants and opinion.

Css one-pagers

A series of ‘one page’ tutorials, designed to teach and showcase various css techniques.

Tweets

1. 1:58 PM Mar 11th

   @zootool 300 (but that's in less than a year of active use) #delicious

2. 1:46 PM Mar 11th

   @deanburge I'm not sure you can GPL 3 bytes, can you? ;-)

3. 5:44 PM Mar 10th

   I wish people would stop using the word "widget" to refer to "something on a web page".

My comments

• Mar 3rd

  px vs em design/the (in)difference

• px vs em design/the (in)difference

• Mar 2nd

  The problem with breadcrumb trails

Delicious

• Mar 9th

  Pure CSS speech bubbles

• Mar 5th

  Type Tips—short, quick tips on all things web typography from Harry ... Excellent summary

• Mar 3rd

  px vs em design/the (in)difference Pixel-based font-sizes must die!

Welcome to ‘five minute argument’, a collection of articles, editorials, and tutorials about css, html, and the World Wide Web.

• Default user-agent font sizes

  19th February: Even the most basic styling can reveal differences in user agent styles

• How to build a scrolling list with jQuery

  7th February: This tutorial explains, step-by-step, how to use CSS and jQuery animations to build a simple ‘auto-scrolling’ vertical list.

• Adding semantics to jquery-ui’s progress bar

  18th January: Or ‘Adding functionality to the CSS progress bar’

• Much more emphasis

  17th January: More fun playing with semantics.

• More about link ‘footprints’

  A bit about link ‘footprints’, ‘block-level’ links, and HTML 5.

• Right-aligned menu

  How to style a right-aligned menu, the easy way.

• Visualising links

  By their nature, links — and, especially, images within them — can display quite unexpectedly.

• BBC self-deprecation?

  22nd October: Something not about web-design for a change.

• Maths is not the bedrock

  27th September: ‘Maths games’ may have an useful function to fulfil, but don’t overestimate their importance.

• URL sitemap predictor

  1st September: A simple demo of a ‘URL predictor’ that makes use of sitemap data.

• dl: what is it good for?

  1st August: After almost a year of fairly sporadic blogging, an argument has finally arisen.

• Fixed position and z-index

  Yes, those fixed-positioned elements are annoying; please bear with me.

• Specificity vs. proximity

  8th July: Specificity rules are simple and robust. Despite this, they sometimes ‘break’ in weird and wonderful ways.

• Implementing a progress bar

  How to implement a basic, gracefully degrading progress bar using HTML and CSS.

• State of the Web: June 1st – 7th, 2009

  7th June: Has the Typekit bubble burst? A cute CMS is launched. And Cameron courts controversy.

• Fixing boagworld’s wobbly menu

  22nd May: Presenting a greasemonkey script to fix the sidebar menu on boagworld.com.

• Universal IE 6 CSS

  22nd May: Take a look at the wonderful world of ‘universal IE6’.

• Layout names considered confusing

  8th May: Terms such as ‘liquid’ and ‘fluid’ may be common amongst web designers, but they’re needlessly confusing for learners.

• Why I won’t use ie6update

  3rd May: IE6 Update is a tempting prospect but, on balance, it’s just not the route I wish to take.

• Accessibility: whose responsibility?

  23rd April: Article previews: whatever next?

• Firefox’s persistent zoom?

  19th April: Simple accessibility enhancements keep on coming: well done, Mozilla.

• Twitter’s use of tinyurl

  19th April: A lot of discussion is taking place about digg, twitter, URL shortening and page-framing. In twitter’s case, the solution seems obvious to me.

• Review: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web

  Mark Boulton’s self-published debut is a great introduction to the world of web design.

• Minimum font size scaling

  A demonstration of minimum font-size scaling using Javascript.