Bill Napier Design

smashing magazine now offers a great collection of links to CSS-based forms.

They note with Web 2.0 registration and feedback forms are everywhere. Because they are the first contact from your company to the consumer (your potential customer) they need to be well-designed, in addition to be easy to use.

They showcase a number of “modern” solutions that a company or web designer can use. One browser based solution is jotForm in which you can actually design and stylize your form inside of your browser. Pretty cool for non-developers.

If you are a web designer, perhaps the most useful (and frustrating) techniques involve CSS. I thought I would add a post to the CSS Wiki and mailing list [css-d] which I’ve found very useful.

CSS Wiki

What is a wiki?
A wiki is a cooperative Web site - a site where any one can edit any thing on any page. Sound like a recipe for disaster? Thanks to revision control and community spirit wikis are thriving all over the ‘net.

Subscribe to the CSS RSS feed here.

Last week, I viewed a GREAT Acrobat online session on Apollo hosted by Mike Chambers, Senior Product Manager for Developer Relations at Adobe. (Actually, I picked up the link from Mike Potter’s blog.)

According to Adobe, “Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.”

Apollo is similar to the Flash stand alone player. That is probably the best way I can describe it initially. It runs as a stand alone environment. And uses all the technologies listed above both while on and off line.

To learn more about Apollo, visit Adobe Labs, ApolloDeveloperFAQ.

Reading Professional CSS last night. At my core I suppose I’ll always be a designer and anything which can offer liquid design with great search engine optimization is the way to go (at least right now.)

But as the editor mentions in the first part of the book, “CSS is not a silver bullet.” It is not just that you need xhtml/css solutions and you’ll be Ok. You need more than that. And sometimes you need other programers.

Professional CSS dictates that style be tied to structure.

This structure reminds me of early web stuff. You remember h1, h2, h3, etc. Levels of heading tied to style. Also, headings are headings and paragraphs are paragraphs.

This counters the way things have been done with tables. Things that should have been paragraphs weren’t always. And elements that should have been ordered lists weren’t either.

Finally after all this time I’m glad to see logic in structure match design.