i love innovation

I don’t do this too often, but I am going to post some innovative things I’ve seen from the realm of web design. I am a designer for my job and so these things are pretty interesting (and often helpful) to me.

A New Layout Technique

Here’s an article that was posted on A List Apart the other day. It’s a pretty cool way to handle some of the problems that arise when using the modern table-less layout techniques (floats and absolute positioning).

I haven’t had time to try it for myself, yet, but it’s pretty cool.

Tableless Calendar

Now, I was to preface this with saying I don’t have a problem using tables for calendars. Tables are designed for tabular data and calendars are basically tabular. However, semantically, it might make more sense, at times, to present that information in a list. For example, the following is very logical to me:

• Day
  • Event
  • Event
• Day
  • Event
  • Event

Then, furthermore, when you take into consideration that oftentimes the same data is being accessed by multiple types of devices, presenting the information as a list begins to make even more sense.

So, in light of that, here’s a great article about styling CSS lists as calendars.

The styling in the author’s examples is kind of weak, so I’ve tried my own. Check it. I haven’t resolved all the issues in this example, but it works well in the Fox, and Safari. There’s a small spacing issue in Safari. It displays pretty close in IE6, but the numbers from the <ol> don’t show.

That’s all for today, friends. Enjoy.