Archive for November, 2009

Apo­lo­gies to David McComb. For those who do not fol­low my twit­ter feed, I will tell you what happened over the past few days.

I was rid­ing to work on Fri­day morn­ing, when I star­ted hav­ing a pain in the chest …

RGBa is the new black, with sup­port in most mod­ern Safari 3, Fire­fox 3 and Opera 10, you can have semi trans­par­ent ele­ments. Only there is no sup­port cur­rently in IE for RGBa.

How­ever, you can eas­ily fake it for back­grounds of block ele­ments in IE with
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=1, StartColorStr='#aaRRBBGG', EndColorStr='#aaRRBBGG);
The fil­ter gradi­ent places a alpha chan­nel col­our gradi­ent over the back­ground. So as long the back­ground is trans­par­ent, the start and end col­ours the same and the alpha (aa) chan­nel a value greater than 0 (fully trans­par­ent) and FF (fully opaque), you get a block ele­ment in IE with a RGBa back­ground. You can see an example of RGBa in action in IE …

For those who have not seen my Edge of the Web CSS3 demon­stra­tion I used the CSS Zen Garden HTML. Why, because I wanted to use some­body else’s HTML, mainly because I wanted to show it works with any HTML and that most people would be famil­iar with the site.

I will not sub­mit it, because Dave has not accep­ted any new sub­mis­sions almost two year, my demo is far from the visual stand­ard of most other design and I broke one major rule the CSS does not validate.

I really enjoyed devel­op­ing my present­a­tion for Edge of the Web. The research and exper­i­ment­a­tion was a lot of fun. Explore the demo using CSS Zen Garden HTML and ser­i­ously try it in IE6, the Web­Jam present­a­tion with some even more out­rageous trans­itions needs Safari4 or FF3.7 and a little explor­ing with a mouse.

What I learnt is enough from prob­ably a dozen blog posts, so hope­fully I will be writ­ing lot in the next few weeks.