Who said creating type with images was bad? I say, fooey!

As I’ve been nursing a wicked sinus infection for the past week — often flat on my back in bed, trying to get healthy again for SXSW — I haven’t been able to get much client work done. As a result, I’ve had extra time to work through a few ideas and experiments I wouldn’t have finished otherwise. The frame spacing test from earlier this week was one of them. continued

In two days, I’ll be one of the many flocking to Austin for South by Southwest, in part, due to Tantek‘s generosity. No speaking engagements — I’ll just be waiting patiently in the audience for chances to heckle the few speakers I know. If you’re attending the event, make sure to say hi. I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of people whom I only know via digital ink.

Unfortunately, my flight isn’t arriving on Saturday in time to join the kickoff game of KICK. But if you’re there, be sure to join in. Either by playing or spectating. And if you’re into storytelling and open mic, check out Fray Cafe 3 on Sunday night.

Two noteworthy XHTML/CSS redesigns have recently launched:

Macromedia – The good and bad wrapped into one. Good: Clean, airy, pleasing color combinations, fun imagery, classic Macromedia typography, aesthetic, and balance. Heavy use of Flash, but no excessive animation. Bad: The scary thing about this redesign is the source code of their home page (or should I say how little source code there is for their home page) and how reliant they are on one big umbrella .swf file. continued

Slim-Waisted Frameset seeking Valid Working Markup for harmonious live-in relationship. Introduce me to new style that everyone can love. Otherwise, you must be able to understand and accept the cosmetic tricks I use to hide my own stretch marks.

Give it up. It’s a fantasy. It’s a dream. Never meant to be. Not now. But why? continued

In general, I’ve avoided the use of frames in the last few years, and I usually recommend others do the same if possible. In fact, I haven’t worked on a frame-based site since we stopped updating Cocktail many years ago. They often require additional maintenance and file management. And should normally exist alongside <noframes> content for browsers lacking support for frames. continued

Based on recent experience with an indexing robot, I discovered a critical architecture flaw in the way I set up my calendar for viewing Log Entries by Day. Due to a bit of laziness, as well as intrigue of the cool-factor in going to any possible date between 1000 and 9999, I didn’t originally include stops at each end of the archive (earliest post and latest post). The calendar allows a user to tab through each month, one at a time, displaying the dates for which entries are available as links. Nothing special here. continued

Thanks to the recent news and hype of Google’s Pyra acquisition, it seems Blogger has been quite bogged down recently. Lots of transfer errors. Connection problems. Most likely due to every Blogger user trying to post about the story. Unfortunately, for the past few days, on each post attempt, Blogger has been deleting my entire archive list except for the most recent entry. Each time, I end up needing to republish the entire archive again. continued

It didn’t take long for the person (or group) behind the website I mentioned on Friday to pull down or move the site to another address. Perhaps they were too embarrassed, or never intended the site to be seen — at least by my eyes. Since the site appeared to be set up to solicit corporate sponsorships for the event (upwards of $8000 a pop for “Gold” level), perhaps someone realized the dangerous legal territory they had entered. continued

Been wanting another shiny new example of tableless design that pushes CSS and web standards to their limits and doesn’t look back? Not just another personal site or weblog, but a good-size content site from a well-known company? We get a big fix with the redesign of Netscape DevEdge. Not sure how much traffic DevEdge gets, but Eric Meyer and team at Netscape deserve a lot of praise for pushing a high-profile developer-centric site to showcase advanced web standards usage. continued

The second informal gathering in San Francisco, similar to the first one we pulled together last December, is happening this week. Rather than rephrase what he’s already written, I’ll just crib Tantek Çelik’s explanation and place it here:

Douglas Bowman [that’s me] and I [that’s Tantek] will be holding the second irregular early evening get together to chat about web stuff, semantics, structure, style this Tuesday, February 4th, from 6 to 8pm. What with the recent drama about XHTML2, nearly everyone restyling their blogs, and other recent events, there will be no shortage of topics.

Location: a friend’s house in the Mission district. Send one of us a message for details.