Some of the most powerful CSS2 and CSS3 selectors defined in the specs are avoided by web developers because they’re not supported by commonly used web browsers. Sometimes in order to work around these shortfalls solutions with large overhead such as javascript libraries are used or code becomes littered with many specialized classes and sites become difficult to maintain.

Over time I’ve developed the habit of using specifically named class attributes to represent exactly where a pseudo-class would have applied. To aid in clarity and maintenance these classes are named with the same text as the name of the pseudo-class being represented.

Drew McLellan has for the 4th year running wrangled a bunch of great authors and launched the Web Development Advent Calendar 24ways.

It isn’t December yet [in this time zone anyways] but the first day’s article has been posted for your enjoyment — Easing The Path from Design to Development. This is a nice piece on interaction between different sides of the site building process, something I’m intimately familiar with. A few pointers from my experience that are worth adding to Drew’s comments…

Its another blue beanie day to show your support for web standards. Find out more from the original blue beanie wearer and Designing With Web Standards author Jeffrey Zeldman.

Sometime in the last couple weeks I started noticing that my browser would hang while loading some Flash content, and since I’ve been too busy to diagnose the error¹ or even just to reinstall the Flash player I’ve been surfing with Flash disabled via the built in Flash block feature in Camino.

A funny thing happened between noticing sites loading faster and lots of ads missing — prompted by the sight of the Razorfish redesign I noticed how many web development agencies had sites that were just big empty flash movies and thus all looked the same. Nothing but a big empty browser window, with a big “F” or play button, and sometimes a background color other then black.

Clockwise from top left: Razorfish, R/GA, Schematic, WDDG, Organic, The Chopping Block, EVB, Big Spaceship — all looking nearly identical.

I’ll again be attending the Future of Web Design conference in NYC tomorrow [after running out to vote] and as usual I’ll have the camera in tow. If you see me, say hi.