This modification makes ImageManage use valid css for alignment.
Also removes padding, border, and other depreciated controls from ImageManager popup.
Also contains the “What you see is what you mean” CSS that makes xinha show you the block-level elements, as well as the proper image floating CSS that updates the image position right in the editor.

This mod only includes the files needed for the update and assumes you aleready have Etomite 1.1 or greater and are using the latest release of Xinha for Etomite.

Download file:
xinha_valid_image_align.zip

To install:
Extract contents of zip file into /manager/media/xinha

To activate:

1. Assuming xinha is already enabled, enable “Stylist” in the main Etomite configuration’s “Interface & editor settings” tab, and change the stylist css file to /manager/media/xinha/xinha.css
2. Save the Etomite config.
3. Next, go back into the Etomite config and turn off stylist. (You need to do this because you don’t want the actual stylist “addon” as it’s worthless, you just want to tell xinha to use the css file in it’s display.)
4. Save the Etomite config again.
5. In your website’s main CSS, you’ll need to add a couple of styles, here’s what I use and recommend:
   img.imgright{float: right; clear: both; margin:0 0 .5em .5em}
img.imgleft{float: left; clear: both; margin:0 .5em .5em 0}

etomite xinha editor imagemanager css xhtml valid modification

Or has it really been solved?

Typekit released a blog post on May 27th introducing their solution which is supposed to revolutionize the way fonts appear online.

Looking at their promo image, I am initially and admittedly thrilled to see the words “Simple, Fast, Bulletproof.” because… if that’s true, then we’re in for a treat. But let’s think about this for a minute. As designers, most of us know how marketing works, and we know not to take it at face value. Upon further inspection, it seems to be without substance.

While most of the reactions I’ve read online have been “Hallelujah!” and “You guys will be rich when this takes off…” I’m glad to see some more intelligent, thoughtful reactions to this. With any vaporware (yes, this is vaporware right now) We shouldn’t buy the hype till it’s working. Making baseless statements like “it will change everything” should be something that people know better not to do by now when it comes to trumpeting software releases on the web.

I see several problems with this, many of which have already been touched on in the last 24 hours. From the description, this obviously has some sort of DRM. That’s not good no matter how you slice it. Just like a certain popular president, He’s saying one thing about DRM and describing the very opposite in the same breath.

“That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.”

They just can’t have it both ways. Don’t be fooled… Digital Rights Management comes into play in the above statement: “a consistent web-only font linking license.”

The problem seen with Typekit’s proposed solution is obvious to folks who don’t jump so quickly onto hype wagons. It’s hard to discern the exact details, but we’re looking at a centralized library of sorts with DRM-enforced font files served up to websites via extra javascript. Is reading a page in a special font so much better than reading it in one of the commonly available ones so much of a benefit that designers and web developers are willing to spend money and add more encumberances to their website? Will the cost be passed on to the site owners? I don’t think that I could sell this “benefit” to the majority of my clients, and I sure wouldn’t use it for my own purposes.

If you must force a certain font on your viewer, making them download a bunch of code or some other encumbrance, and have to pay for it in the process, then you’ve put a speed bump into the simple and clear communication that should be happening online.

And that’s what it’s all about – communication.

commercial_fonts css drm drm_fonts font fonts font_use hype vaporware web_design

While I’m not privvy to the conversations that were had with my various competitors and their clients, I hope the clients aren’t being fooled into thinking that they are buying custom design.

While using a pre-made web design templates is a good idea when the client wants to save money, taking credit for these designs and removing the original credits is usually illegal and unethical, as it can violate the original designer’s terms of use.

Let’s go ahead and review some basic ethics:
When using a ready-made template,

• Notify the client
• Don’t call it custom design
• Pass the savings on to the client
• Don’t claim the design as your own
• Stick to the copyright obligations regarding the display of original design credits

Tags: web_design web_development custom_design design design_fraud ethical ethical_practices ethics fraud template templates copyright

The Vineyard’s website design was one of these satisfying projects. The slate was almost totally blank; and what little restrictions I had were more or less my own; as my wife and I are solely responsible for the branding of all the church’s materials.

Visually, the overall goal was to capture the “coffee house” feel of the Vineyard. This is pretty clear in the use of colors and textures. (My wife really got me into textures last year). The design strives to capture the artistic nature of the church. It’s one of the most artistic churches I have ever personally seen, with regular integration of fine art and multimedia into special events and other programs. I was asked to enlarge the logo, but I resisted.

In order to keep things as usable and as accessible as possible, I opted for good semantic markup and tried-and-true tab navigation for global levels, with sub pages being listed on the side for flexibility. I make no use of flash except for video content, and kept the javascript minimal – using it only to fade in the randomized homepage images and to display flash with swfobject, to get any flash used to validate. The homepage at 150k is a little heavy on the bytes for my taste; but it is a sight better than many new CSS websites I see going up these days. I still believe in being nice to the few folks left on dial-up – perhaps out of sheer habit. The images could use a little less compression, but I’ve reached a nice balance of “looks nice” and “under 200k.”

The site is run by Etomite, one of the best kept secrets in Content Management and best known for it’s extreme flexibility; and is tweaked to be as automated as possible so that the editors only have to worry about their content. Multiple editors each have rights to manage their own sections, and have access to automatic image handling and the ability to add photo galleries and flash content with no knowledge of html. Sermons are handled by a nifty mp3 management snippet, which also generates a podcast feed for those who want to subscribe.

I made use of Google for the events calendar and the maps page… you gotta love Google. Initially I searched about for a good solid open source calendar, but did not find anything that I was comfortable with (if you know of something nice, post a comment and let me know.).

Technorati Tags: Castleton, church_website_design, css, Etomite, Indianapolis, sermon_podcast, vineyard, indy_vineyard, web_design, xhtml

Being no programmer, I am personally unable to shoehorn this editor into my favorite CMS, Etomite. I do know CSS however; and that allowed me to change Xinha’s text edit area to operate in a “what you see is what you mean” mode. This makes an excellent tweak to Etomite, and I am trying to get this added into the official Etomite Xinha editor package.

The ramifications of this really come into play when you deal with the usual markup quirks – extra carriage returns, broken lists, extra empty paragraphs, pasting in from Microsoft Word, and degraded accessibility. Any web developer can attest to this: the content styles get corrupted when the end user pastes in from Word or mangles up their content. This CSS mod goes a little way towards the process of training them to have good clean markup.

You can grab the CSS and all support images Here.

Technorati Tags: text_appearance, cms, etomite, markup, stylesheets, valid_content, valid_text_editor, website_editor, wymeditor, xinha, css, wysiwym

According to the author:

Let’s admit it, we all hate Internet Explorer 6. About 80% of our CSS debug time are spend on IE6. We all know that IE6 is outdated and has horrible CSS rendering engine. However, most average Internet users haven’t realized that yet. Why? Because we put our hard work on it and patch the bugs by various IE hacks. Well, it is time to do something…

While no one disagrees on the faults of IE 6, I cannot find it in me to agree with the solution.

Why we should not trash IE hacks:

• A huge chunk of internet users still use IE 6
• A designer’s #1 job is to communicate
• A designer who can’t build a site that communicates to the target audience won’t be in business long

As a designer, my job is to communicate. If I can’t communicate a client’s brand and message to 40% of their visitors, then should I expect to be hired? No.

Personally, I don’t find it all that hard to design for IE6 – so I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. Sure it’s a little more work, but once you know the issues, you can think about them when the design is still in the photoshop phase. I probably spend all of 15 minutes applying IE hacks to a CSS/XHTML website, it’s just not that hard.

Any professional designer can attest to the fact that they will know and hold all of the issues relating to their design medium in their subconscious while designing.
Technorati Tags: web_design, css, validating, valid_XHTML, ie6, css_hacks

For the sake of this article, I’m going to lump all of the valiant people who get stuck with updating the company’s website into one hypothetical human and call this person Ethel, God bless her heart.

Ethel is a good person who keeps her office running like an Indy Car, she stays on top of those TPS reports, And she watches the front desk – but when she updates the website, she pastes content in from Microsoft Word.

(I could go off at this point on why there isn’t a person dedicated to updating a website – a crucial tool of communication between a business entity and it’s target audience – but that is another topic.)

For the people reading this that doesn’t understand why pasting content into your website’s Content Management System is bad, then let me quickly explain. Copying and pasting test from word processors beings along lots of hidden data that controls how text looks. This is called “inline style” and it’s the bane of a website that has the style controlled globally via Cascading Style Sheets.
These inline styles sneak into your content like mice into barns and before you know it, the website site looks like an insane ransom note. Your global style sheets, which were developed and set up by a professional designer/communicator, can’t override these inline styles.

That’s just one example of how Ethel can unwittingly diminish the communication power of the website.

Web developers are always looking for the best tool to produce good clean content while being easy. Today I ran across one I hadn’t seen before, a great open-source project called WYMeditor. It’s well on it’s way to becoming the neatest document editor I have yet seen.

According to the description on the website:

WYMeditor’s main concept is to leave details of the document’s visual layout, and to concentrate on its structure and meaning, while trying to give the user as much comfort as possible (at least as WYSIWYG editors).

The neat approach WYMeditor takes is to visually display the markup. If you’ve got a paragraph, it’s clearly visible. If you’ve got a heading level 1, it’s obvious. The editor leaves out font size changes, color changes, and all of those old depreciated tools that put inline styles into the document.

The automatic stripping of these inline styles from content pasted from a word processor is not done yet, but it’s on the horizon. At that point I predict this editor will become one of the best available.

It does these things while remaining very simple to use – so Ethel won’t have a bit of trouble with it. These are truly great times we live in.

Technorati Tags: cascading_style_sheets, web_developers, inline_styles, professional_designer, communication_power, content_editor, word_processors, global_style, inline_style