Blog of Zeke Franco—Quasarkitten.net

I just recently found out about the YUI Theater. It is a collection of videos about the web development world. I’m really enjoying them so far. I have already watched Douglas Crockford: “The JavaScript Programming Language—Part 1”. It was very informative about the history of JavaScript. I look forward to watching all four videos.

Also on my list to watch is Shawn Henry’s “ Web Accessibility Guidelines Update” I enjoyed hearing her speak at An Event Apart Seattle 2007. So I’m excited to watch this presentation.

As of today there are 44 videos in the YUI Channel. I can’t wait to watch them all. Here are some of the ones I’m looking forward to watching.

• An Introduction to Screen Magnification Software
• An Introduction to Screen Readers
• Welcome to Firebug 1.0

Yahoo has even posted twenty-three of it’s video on iTunes as a podcast that you can subscribe to.

On a related topic the recent FLOSS Weekly podcast interviewed Nate Koechley, a Yahoo front-end engineer and designer. They talked about The Yahoo User Interface Library, a collection of open source JavaScript utilities and controls with cross-browser, cross-platform support.

So to wrap this up if your a developer pay attention to what Yahoo is doing because they are bringing out a lot of content, services, and code for us developers.

Labels: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, video

Every year (since 2005) 24ways.org brings you a web design/dev article each day for twenty-four days leading up to X-Mas. The articles are written by "thought leaders" in the web design/dev community. Some of last year's article were written by Jeremy Keith, Dan Cederholm, Andy Budd, Shaun Inman and others. Today (Dec. 1) was the launch of 24ways 2007 so check it out.

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Labels: CSS, HTML, webdesign

I have been using en (–, –) and em (—, —) dashes for a while now. I love HTML entities! I always try to use proper quotations (“, “ and ”, ”) and apostrophes (’, ’ [beware ' doesn't work in IE6]), but I had never heard of figure dashes before. According to Wikipedia “The figure dash is used when a dash must be used within numbers, for example with telephone numbers: 634‒5789.”. I always use decimals to separate phone numbers. i.e. 909.555.7384, I just like the way it looks better so I had never really thought about it before. My guess would have been to use en dashes, but en dashes are suppose to be used to express ranges not separations.

On a side note I know the iPhone is suppose to turn phone numbers into clickable links so you can dial from a webpage. I wonder how it handles different variations such as: 909.555.7384, 9095557384, 909-555-7384, or 909‒555‒7384 (This one uses figure dashes, notices the longer length of the dash and increased readable of the numbers).

Figure dashes don’t have a HTML name like en and em dashes. You’ll have to use the numeric version which is ‒ or ‒. The only caveat is that IE6 doesn’t support this character. I haven’t tested it IE 7 yet, I’ll report back when I do. Also I am going try to do some research into why IE6 doesn’t support the figure dash as well as trying to find a solution(s) to getting it to work in IE6. I’m sure I could write a script that replaces ‒ with a normal hyphen for IE, but that seems a bit over kill unless your site is all about telephone numbers.

Labels: HTML, Typography