CSS Web Images Will Save Download Times

Came across this blog post this past weekend:

CSS is the new Photoshop

It’s talking about CSS3 and HTML5’s ability to render graphic elements with absolutely no images involved. The benefit being that you have fewer calls to the server to retrieve images (why CSS sprites have become popular).

The print guys can think of it like Illustrator vs Photoshop. This new process doesn’t use pixels (like Illustrator). Where Photoshop pixels have the overhead of downloading from the server, these can render within the browser itself.

Nested several links deep it gets to this CSS Images example page (requires the latest Safari or Chrome):

It’s not necessarily the slimmest HTML out there (you can see how they…

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IE9 Will Not Be Available For XP

(NOTE: IE9 is not to be released until sometime in 2011)

IE9 is already being highly talked about as having many of the features that developers have been asking for (HTML5, CSS3, Canvas, etc.), but the disappointment for developers is going to be more for the fact that Windows XP users won’t be able to upgrade to IE9 at all.

Internet Explorer users still hover around 70% of all browsers used by the general public.

That breaks down by version:
—IE8: 59%
—IE7: 30%
—IE6: 11%

IE8 has done better at getting users to upgrade than IE7 ever did. But IE6 still hangs around despite (or “in spite”).

Operating systems very similarly show Windows at about 87% of all web users.

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Google Analytics Intelligence - immediate knowledge of trend shifts

Google Analytics recently added some new features to their service, and one of them in particular is going to prove to be extremely useful: Intelligence reports and alerts.

Here’s Google’s spotlight blog on the new feature:
Google Analytics Blogspot Article

The purpose of the intelligence section is for Google to alert you to unexpected changes. Google highlights items (anything like visits, or people from California, or specific referring sources) and it will show the value that Google expected and what the actual value was (high or low). It even lists a significance meter on each alert.

Additionally, you can create custom alerts so that if something important takes a dip or gets a spike, you can have an email sent to yourself.…

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Web Usability Research

I came across this article via a post at Scene360.com:

Smashing Magazine has compiled findings from several usability research groups into a helpful overview titled “10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines”.

There is certainly some great advice in this article, some items are rather debateable. There is a time for comformity and there is a time to give the users something completely new. Then there are hard percentages that can hardly be ignored… A good read no matter what your take on it.

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