[d] enclosed in brackets

E-books aren’t going to replace books. E-books are books, merely with a different form. More and more often, that form is ePub, a format powered by standard XHTML. As such, ePub can benefit from our nearly ten years’ experience building standards-compliant websites. That's great news for publishers and standards-aware web designers. Great news for readers, too. Our favorite genius, Joe Clark, explains the simple why and how.

You’ve probably heard that Apple recently announced the iPad. The absence of Flash Player on the device seems to have awakened the HTML5 vs. Flash debate. Apparently, it’s the final nail in the coffin for Flash. Either that, or the HTML5 community is overhyping its still nascent markup language update. The arguments run wide, strong, and legitimate on both sides. Yet both sides might also be wrong. Designer/developer Dan Mall is equally adept at web standards and Flash; what matters, he says, isn't technology, but people.

Another generation of technology has passed and Unicode support is almost everywhere. The next step is to write software that is not just “internationalized” but truly multilingual. In this article we will skip through a bit of history and theory, then illustrate a neat hack called accent-folding. Accent-folding has its limitations but it can help make some important yet overlooked user interactions work better.

Whether it’s in front of a huge audience or a handful of executives, smooth public speaking is essential to a successful web design career. Yet most of us are more afraid of speaking in public than we are of death. In a lively give-and-take, Liz Danzico interviews Scott Berkun, author of Confessions of a Public Speaker, for tips on how to prepare for public speaking, how to perfect your timing, and what to do when bad things happen.

Does anyone else have “The Final Countdown” stuck in their head? I do. (duhna-do-doo, duhna-do-do-doo…)

It’s snowing, snowing, snowing… and all I want is to start seeing some green outside. Ooh, deja vu - I say the same thing every year.

seeing Avatar with my bro in IMAX 3D… of course. Starts in a few minutes, yay for late movies.

When someone consults a website, there is a precious opportunity not only to provide useful information but also to influence their decision. To make the most of this opportune moment, we must ensure that the site says or does precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. Understanding the rhetorical concept of kairos can help us craft a context for the opportune moment and hit the mark with appropriately zingy text.

Abandoning password masking as Jakob Nielsen suggests could present serious problems, including undermining a user’s trust by failing to meet a basic expectation. But with design patterns gleaned from offline applications, plus a dash of JavaScript, we can provide feedback and reduce password errors without compromising the basic user experience or losing our visitors’ trust.

In Part II, dig deeper into the technology behind using SVG for your site design. Explore how to incorporate SVG in a cross-browser friendly manner, including using SVGWeb to ensure that the SVG shows in Internet Explorer. And discover the unique characteristic that makes SVG ideal for page backgrounds: scalability.

Many of us think of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as an also-ran: fine for charts and tables, but not much else. Yet SVG can actually enhance a site’s overall design, and can be made to work in even the most stubborn browser. In Part I of a two-part series, Shelley Powers covers important basics of working with SVG, including browser support and accessibility.

For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more.

Because clients expect everything to be faster, better, and simpler, web professionals must take an instant, foolproof, paperless, modern approach to how clients approve proposals and sign contracts. Implementing an instantaneous contract agreement helps to get projects off the ground, attract clients on tight timelines, and prevent potential delays. All it takes is a little PHP and some PDF magic.

As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences—particularly when we approach content. Erin Scime shows us how.

All the planning was worth it.

It was a beautiful afternoon, we were surrounded by friends and family, and everyone had a great time.

We've all heard about how a man sees his soon-to-be wife in her wedding dress and can't believe how great she looks... I was wondering if that was true for a long time. I see her every day, I know what she looks like. I've seen her dressed up before too, and yes, she's beautiful.

When she started walking and I saw her... that was it. There was nothing to compare to it...

It took a little while for me to get signed up (I procrastinated), then found out that there were a lot of people who signed up for the same reason... Check out the Bianca Broussard entry on Wikipedia.

One of her best friends was dating one of my best friends (they're still together, actually), and we met at their apartment.

It made me believe in love at first site... and we're going to be married soon, probably two years to the day we met.

Graduated too.

I was in third grade at Thornton's Ferry Elementary, and we went next door to Mrs. Wilson's room to watch it live on the TV they set up. I don't remember many of the details, but I remember watching the TV and seeing it go up, and up, and up... then something went terribly wrong. The two or three teachers in the room were in too much shock for the first minute to do anything but stare at the TV in disbelief while the group of kids (about 25-30) watched something we didn't really understand.

It was just two weeks before I turned 9.

Official graduate of Merrimack High School in Merrimack, NH.