Nimbupani Designs

I wrote about the great debate on @font-face, and was pleasantly surprised when Peter Bilak of Typotheque invited me to beta-test their webfont service.

The primary advantages of Typotheque’s service is ease of use and faster load times (as compared to others). It only uses CSS (not javascript) to generate the font stack. By using font subsetting, the service generates smaller font files.

So, you are a web designer going about your daily life, struggling with IE 6, huffing about CSS 3/HTML 5, berating your designers for not using web-safe fonts, and there comes a brick hurling towards you named @font-face. You are dumbstruck. You have no idea what hit you. Everyone is asking about it, and you pretend to know about it. Then you quickly google for it and are hit with even more bricks. I was one such web designer and I spent 4 days in agony, learning about @font-face. I wrote this down, so that no other web designer has to face this torture anymore.

I recently started using SASS for my CSS development (thanks to Deepak). SASS is a meta-language that makes developing CSS really easy - provided you master the syntax. There is a very good textmate bundle which makes it really simple to use on a mac. I will write more about how it has proven useful, but this post is to resolve a problem of developing CSS with SASS.

XHTML - A New Hope!

I started developing websites in 2003. At that time, XHTML was the flavour of the season (or rather the official W3C recommendation to move forward from HTML 4.x) and Deepak introduced me to the world of web design with XHTML and CSS. It was even written about favourably by the Godfather of Web Design. The reasons that were given to adopt XHTML were these:

I knew I had to declare a Doctype but just didn’t know why. I recently had to work with html files without Doctype and didn’t even realise that the IE errors I was coming across was because of the triggering of quirks mode. Today I read in depth about Doctypes and I burn in shame to know how many bugs could simply be resolved by declaring a Doctype. So, here is what I found out about the Damned Doctypes.