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Friday Feast #14: CSS, Design, Typography, Unicode, Usability
08:55 AM - Jun 21, 2002

Today’s Friday Feast has links about typography, including CSS, design and unicode, and also has some links on usability and design. Some are new articles and some aren’t, but they’re all worth a look.

CSS and Typography

• Banking on CSS Inheritance
  Helpful explanation of how CSS inheritance works, using analogies, diagrams, and real world examples of using CSS inheritance. Also mentions Netscape 4 bugs. By Dave Sawyer McFarland, creativepro.com contributing editor.
• Style Sheets Known Issues
  Netscape 4’s developer section with listing of version 4 CSS bugs.
• Understanding Typography Controls with CSS
  Well written article about many typography capabilities of CSS. As the article states, it’s taken 5 years or so for browsers to catch up and finally support many of these CSS typography features. Written by G. H. Cloutier for “Inside Web Design”, Element K Journals April, 2002 (reprinted at creativepro.com).

Creativity, Design, and Web Typography

• Design in the Age of Digital Media
  “The 'Dream Team' of designers Roger Black, David Carson, and Clement Mok ponders the state of print design, the influence of Web engineers, and why we should be chanting 'embedded fonts.'”
  Insightful comments via notes from the closing keynote speeches at Seybold, Boston, April 2001 by Luke Farrell, creativepro.com staff writer.

Design and Usability

• Best of chi-web & sigia-l
  Tremendously valuable resource of CHIWEB and SIGIA-L summaries from their discussion lists. Packed with helpful information and resources for web usability, design, and information architecture.
• The Truth About Download Time
  Interesting insight about how visitors perceive a site to be either fast or slow in its page load time. These findings may surprise you. Article based on user study with 10 websites. By Christine Perfetti for the January 2001 UIEtips e-mail newsletter.

Unicode, i18n, ISO, and International Standards

• Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0
  W3C’s Working Draft (April 2002), with the intent to provide a common reference for interoperable text manipulation for the Web. Includes encoding identification, URI conventions, building on the Universal Character Set defined jointly by Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646, and more.
• i18n overview: Character encodings
  From W3C’s Internationalization/Localization section. Information about client and server encoding, browsers, and how to include character encodings in your HTML or XML documents. Links to more information on unicode, UTF-8, character sets supported by various countries, and more. Helpful page.
• i18n overview: Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646. From W3C’s Internationalization/Localization section. Explains the roles of Unicode, ISO, and the IETF; the Universal Character Set (UCS); UTF-8; and more.
• I18n Quickstart
  by Alan J. Flavell. Explains the principles of the internationalizationn of character encoding in HTML as it relates to the Internet, and provides his recommendations for character encodings, browser issues, and more.
• i18nGurus.com
  Open directory of links to internationalization (i18n) resources, including character sets, communities, fonts, glossaries, languages, organizations, research, publications, standards, tools, and much more. Great resource here.
• Unicode Code Charts
  Charts of official unicode characters that are part of the Unicode Standard.
• Unicode and Multilingual Web Browsers
  Listing of browsers that support unicode with instructions and accompanying screenshots explaining how to set the unicode fonts for each browser. Part of Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources.
• Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages
  W3C’s Unicode Technical Report containing information and specifications, such as a chart with characters suitable for use with markup, deprecated formatting characters, and more.

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