Academic Web Blog

Khoi Vinh's new book, Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design, has just been released. It's a great addition to the web design literature.

Theweb is a publishing and marketing medium unlike any that has existedbefore. I would think this would go without saying, except for theattitudes and behaviors we see all the time, which reveal that manysite owners don't really get it.

Videois becoming more and more popular as an element of web pages. With thefragmented technology standards, providing video that plays everywherecan be tricky. Fortunately, there's an assortment of solutions availablethat package up all the complexity and provide a single, integratesolution for video that just works.

Back in July, I wrote about how to choose an email marketing service provider.At the time, there were two companies that looked promisingfor designers who want to resell email marketing services: Campaign Monitor and CakeMail. Both had some serious limitations, but in the last month or so, both have made dramatic improvements.

In my previous post on using real fonts on the web,I highlighted a few web font service bureaus. These services seem to beproliferating like rabbits, and in this post I'll mention a few more.

In my previous post,I explained how CSS's @font-face tag enables designers to use a widerrange of fonts without resorting to font replacement hacks. In thispost, I'll explain the actual code and explore some of the services that make iteasy to expand your web font repertoire.

Typographyon the web has long suffered in comparison to print.The biggest limitation has been the limited number of fonts that a designer can use. It's still messy, but it is now possible to use a much wider range of fonts.

HTML5includes a handful of new structural elements that are designed to makemarkup more meaningful. You can use these elements today; they don'treally do much, so browsers don't need to explicitly support them. Andit takes only a little trickery to make them work even in IE.

At its purest, the HTML5 video tag is a very simple. To deliver video that plays in Firefox and Safari, however, requires two different video formats, and you still need Flash for IE. Here's the code to make it happen.

Video on the web is a mess. Webstandards have never fully embraced video. Until HTML5, there was novideo element, so the only way to play video was to depend onplatform-specific software. HTML5 provides a video element, but you're going to need to provide video in multiple formats.