is the blog of Amit Karmakar about photography & life in Sydney, Australia
… short and to the point and with loads of real world examples! If you are serious about your Web Standards approach to the Web, this book is for you!
Dan Cederholm has written a book ‘Web Standards Solution – The Markup and Style Handbook (Pioneering Series)’ — ISBN: 1590593812.
This was inspired by the format of SimpleQuiz — If you wish to read more about the book, stay tuned. This book is due to be released early June 2004, under the Friends of Ed series and …
Web Directions ’06 is almost here. Last year was a lot of fun indeed and here’s hoping it’ll again surpass my expectations. Keep your eyes peeled on all official photo-streams at the following urls and if you take photos during the event add them to Web Directions 06 Group Pool. Please tag all your Web directions photos in flickr with the following generic tags and of course you can add your own.
Continue reading ‘Web Directions 06′
Bumped into W3 Complaints sites this morning and on investigation realised this is one of Sean Ho’s brain child. Congrats Sean this is really a great idea! It helps the conscious web designers collate a reference of sites that are truly being complied to by W3 Guidelines of semantic and valid markup along with Accessibility Guidelines and conformations.
A big thank you to the core members of the Web Essentials ’04 group(Russ Weakley, Peter Firminger, John Allsopp, Maxine Sherrin) and all those that helped yesterday’s event come together so beautifully. It was a free briefing session for the Government and Education sector about Web Standards, adherence to code semantics and Accessibility(WAI). The Speakers included Russ Weakley, Roger Hudson, Dean Jackson about raising the consciousness in the Government and Education sector with focus on:
As you can see I have reproduces the table with the CSS from standards-schmandards. Brilliant use of CSS and Aural text class. Take some time to read through the enrty and the demontration. I think this is a great way to put information up on web where a table is required and the visual representation of data is a must. It is visual, accessible and rich with CSS. Why don’t you try it, go ahead and disable the CSS of this page and you would still see the graph as legibly as it would othwise be with bells on!
Below is an overview of banana imports for top importing countries. Source: Food and Agricultural Organization 1998.
| Country | Millions of US dollars per million people |
|---|---|
| Sweden |  17.12 |
| United Kingdom | 8.88 |
| Germany | 8.36 |
| Italy | 5.96 |
| United States | 4.78 |
| Canada | 4.62 |
| Japan | 4.30 |
| France | 3.33 |
| Russia | 1.04 |
Russ, Lisa, Ajay and I are off to Canberra for the day to attend Web Standards Group meeting on Internationalization tomorrow. Russ has already blogged it so here goes! Can’t wait the drive will be fun. Canberra here we come. A small road trip before the big one 
A good time was had by all! We were 13 +2! and we had a blast! Visit the links below for some flickr lovin’ 
Very proud to say the new mycareer site launched today: http://mycareer.com.au. Its the next major site from the Fairfax Digital network to take on css layout as part of a redesign. The site gets hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and is one of Australia’s largest job ad websites.
A great new addition to WebKit—the Web Inspector. It lets you browse the live DOM hierarchy in a compact HUD style window, catering to the needs of web developers. The Web Inspector highlights the node on the page as it is selected in the hierarchy. Search for nodes by node name, id and CSS class name is also possible within the same window! Whoa!! I like it already!
Download the nightly build from http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=41 and run the followinf in Terminal.
defaults write com.apple.Safari \
WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true
And you should be set to go. You’ll then see a new “Inspect Element” contextual menu item on any web page. This will open up the Web Inspector and refocus to the node under your cursor.
I bought Xylescope yesterday. I’ve been playing with the previous version a bit and its very handy tool for an web developer/ designer on mac. In fact I will go a step further to say it will save you an awful lot of time using Xylescope! Below is a screengrab of one of my gallery pages. On selecting on one of the thumbnail (backlit leaf) you will notice how the hierarchial navigation, HTML view, CSS view and Selector view are all exposed in the one pane!
While checking my logs on Sunday I came across a rather unusual incident and no it wasn’t a very pleasant one. http://www.hotbook.com.br had generated some traffic onto my site so I was curious to know what it was that brought people to karmakars.com.
On further investigation I found that someone over in Brazil presumably by the name Marcio Sgreccia> has copied my layout, blog text, graphics, CSS including old banner, well almost everything possible of the front page!!
Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.
- Sir Walter Scott (Marmion, 1808)
Great spotting D. Found this during our walk around the Rose garden in Devon Cottage.
Check out the latest happenings at WE05 on our flickr group.
Listen to podCasts of each session soon after they are done at WE05 website or Odeo
Track what blogs are saying about WE05 via technorati, and make sure you tag your blog posts like this
WE05.
Event: Sydney Web Standards Group Xmas drinks
Date: Friday 16th of December
Venue: Bungalow 8
Map: http://www.bungalow8sydney.com/sections/map/map.html
Time: 6 pm onwards…
URI: http://www.bungalow8sydney.com.
See you there!!
Update: There wasn’t a very big turn out but all the same it was fun. It poured non-stop. We were at the Opera Bar for a while before proceeding on to Aqua. Thanks to all those that made an effort to turn up and show your support and appreciation to both WSG and Firefox. Head on over to Maxine’s Flickr for the photos from last night.
Just letting you know I may not live up to your expectations today! And if you are wondering why… I got off the bed at 9 this morning! And almost flew to work… totally forgetting that I’d to take my camera along… and right now its raining pretty hard! 
I am still looking forward to the usual WSG crowd if not more… and yes after I have pinched some photos off Maxine’s camera I will have ‘em here for you to ogle!
And for those interested in yesterday’s meeting at Wellington, NZ, here you go.
TeamSite is a CMS produced by Interwoven Inc. And an approximate listing says about 1000 clients across the globe use it for pushing content both within the local Intranets and different extranets worldwide. Most sites that talk about Content Management process and architecture like CMSwatch.com, www.cmsmatrix.org and Oscom hold TeamSite in high esteem. But I have always been skeptic about it because I haven’t seen a single site deliver clean, valid code! As a website developer, designer and website consultant I am very pedantic about valid, clean and semantically correct code. But my view about TeamSite changed since David, Ruth and I started working on building a Template for a website.
Westciv, developers of the leading cross platform CSS Editor, Style Master, and long time supporters of web standards have released a special iPod edition of their renowned CSS Guide. Featuring a handy overview of CSS concepts, and in-depth information for every
selector,propertyand@ruleof CSS 2.1
Its not much of an original post when you copy paste information, but sometimes you *have to* remind giants that sleep at the wheels inconveniencing and killing healthy competition and growth in the IT industry. Yes you guessed it I’m talking about Microsoft. Minutes ago I got an email from Campaign Monitor and The Email Standards Project. And soon I post the message you’ll know what I mean. I quote:
Microsoft have just confirmed they plan on using the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.
This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position and no background images. Not to mention the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.
What is the difference between Localization and Internationalization in the world wide web context? What are they and why do we designers and developers need to know?
The Lead of W3C Internationalisation — Richard Ishida (blog) during his visit to Australia conducted seminars in Melbourne and Canberra asking developers to think futuristically to allow for greater localisation of Websites and Web applications.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. CSS is a standard for specifying the appearance of text and other elements on web pages.
A worthy read if you plan to use the following to optimise your CSS
There are many CSS editors out there… I have used a few over the years and the one that has been my favourite so far above all is CSS Edit. Extremely fast, luscious graphic interface, easy to use. Of-course there is no substitute to handcoding but its not always handy if you are looking to pick up colours etc…
Do you believe in Luck? Well, I don’t but I don’t mind if you do, although I have sometimes found myself using phrases like…. “you lucky thing”, “Oh so lucky!” But they are merely expressions of half-hearted self-centred joyfulness. I neither believe in luck, yeah I said that a second time nor do I advocate anyone reading this… so you are on your own if you read this on Friday the 13th and a missile goes through you head and you die and land in Hell in Devil’s bedroom lying naked next to his warm skin on his fur bed surrounded by the fires of Hell and Devil’s slippery green mossy tail hissing over in slow meandering manouvers over your face? Chances are you’ll never come back to planet Earth to design a Web Standards compliant website nor talk of Web Accessibility or bitch and moan about the shitful IE or even take the micky out of ya mates on Flickr, what a shame — but then you would have Devil’s undivided attention wouldn’t you just and I’m sure he’ll keep you entertained!
Over the last weekend I burnt the midnight oil to give (Nancy) a “little surprise“. She gives herself so selflessly for Rotary and for that matter almost anything that needs a helping hand. In the last few weeks she even took up a Dreamweaver MX course to get up and running with site maintenance/creation. Nan even started on a site up for Maysville Rotary! (I wasn’t aware of this earlier). I really admire her zeal to learn, her thirst for knowledge, there is no stopping when you get her going.
I didn’t know Nan had aready bought a domain, and hosting and even done a good amount of Dreamweaver work in getting a basic site together for her Maysville Rotary Club. She even taught herself a little flash and spent time trying things out and worked out how to create Flash Buttons in Dreamweaver. If this is not giving selflessly what is! She neither needs to do a site for Rotary nor go out of her way to help needy souls — especially when there is so much to be done, pressing needs that screem for attention. But amongst all the hustle and bustle of life she did.
Continue reading ‘Maysville Rotary club is on air’
I am getting fed up of my own blog I need more design elements. But I don’t have the time. I want it too look prettier, but content is King and I know looks make it better sometimes but nowhere near as much as good content!! I want to get rid of the grey and have something fancy. I might too, LOL, too hard on myself as always, too critical of my own site. I want my site to load in less than 6 seconds on a 56KB dial-up line, this one does!! Try it but hey making an arty-farty site will look sauve but will it reach out to that many people? NO. Again content is king. I want to, like the rest of the world design my entire blog in Illustrator and then redev it. But that would be so futile an excercise… I do care about people on slow lines. And I respect their choice for not moving on to broadband — whatever the reason.
I have been reading a lot of good things about Segment Publishing lately. I got great recommendations from Hicksdesign, Maniacalrage, Zeldman, Waferbaby and then decided to investigate further. I also realised that Waferbaby and Segment are brothers well that would explain Waferbaby’s bandwidth fetish
By now it would be clear as day that I’m a blogger of some description who enjoys sharing. Blogging makes it an enjoyable & satisfying experience for me. I started relatively early on the MovableType bandwagon ages back & found my way to WordPress. My archives speak of silent times & times when I’ve written gushing stories. The tempo never seems to teem any sort of consistency much like life itself. And even though I do spend a bit of time online I do manage to pull away from it to do things that are just as exciting in the offline world…. travel for one, photography and generally enjoying life with friends and family and loved ones.
I generally keep politics and religion at bay. My views expressed here are clearly and entirely mine. Having said that, since I do this for recreation & relief its only fair to say there is no set topic or genre that I write on.
This site uses Transitional XHTML compliant pages that conform to Web Standards, good semantics and Accessibility. Most pages and templates were hand coded. This site uses Cascading Style Sheets. The use of a modern browser such as ( Safari, Firefox or OmniWeb) is strongly recommended. However, if you do not have one handy you should still be able to read the textual content on every page on this site.
RSS Feed for Lightly Toasted is available here. Should you wish to communicate with the author please use the contact form and keep your message short and succinct. Thank you.
Contact: http://karmakars.com/contact
RSS Feed: Lightly Toasted RSS Feed
Between the all so young and hyped netlovers of myspace and the telly watching yuppies am sure Lawrence Leunig isn’t just another face in the crowd. Surely not in Australia. Perhaps, not at all for those seeking live comedy especially if around Melbourne. Lawrence is only just 100 years young, full of beans, loves story telling, likes doing social experiments and has nerdy obsessions like puzzles, ghosts, solving the Rubik’s cube. Wait, did I mention puzzles?
Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web.
More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Web accessibility also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.
The process of adhering to the guidelines laid out by WAI(Web Accessibility Initiative) helps websites become more accessible to a broad range of audience irrespective of age, physical or mental disability, gender, cultural background or technical knowledge.
Below is a list of tools that help assess websites for Web Accessibility as per the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
The same person (probably) has floated another site without my conscent again anguruh.com.br/novakang/kanguruh.htm
Oh how I love the net!
A much needed yet subtle move towards Standards in Digital Photography. If you read Photography journals you would already know how Canon and Nikon people fight over each others gear, native file format and picture clarity. This certainly is a great move towards a more standardised output without being biased towards any one major brand! Well done Adobe!
Continue reading ‘Photoshop CS Camera Raw Plug-in adds DNG support’
Overwhelmed by the amazing response to WE05. I don’t know where to start. Despite being a fortnight late in publishing this I seem to be still reeling from the effect of a total WE05 utopia! It was definitely an amazing conference. Let me take that back it was not only a conference that stood out as being unique but this was backed up with amazing friendly people from many walks of life and many continents around the globe. Rare! A collaboration of this nature can only come to pass where people think beyond their own thirst for knowledge, and not just the organisers and speakers but also the delegates… I, for one, saw the conference from a very different standpoint as compared to last years. Continue reading ‘WE05 from my perspective’
UPDATED 16th March 2006: Capture a Screencast with a Mac — tutorial on how to organise yourself before doing a screencast by Miraz Jordan.
Mac OS X comes with its own screen grabbing tool called Grab and it is fairly comprehensive but I needed something more powerful as I intend using this a whole lot more. On doing some quick searches I landed up here at Pure-mac with 26 applications to choose from. Holy Moly! Jeremy helped me pick the best one and I tell you this is one kick ass screen capture software. Wow!
Here is an assortment of various things I enjoying dipping my fingers into. These are not in an particular order of liking, just an outpour of things that ran down my head. Enjoy the randomness!
Recent Comments