8 Ways to Sunday

The more one relents one’s self to inaction, the less apt one is liable to be when the opportunity for action is ripe. The more one practices constant reaction in response to one’s environment, the more ready and willing one will be to act upon one’s opportunities.

— Kev Burns (from the TextDrive forum)

In the quest for self-improvement, the ability to smell your own bullshit is half the battle.

— Me

Kev’s words were just the thing I needed to read at the beginning of this particular week. As for my own aphorism — concocted earlier this month — I like to think that it makes up in pithiness what it lacks in eloquence. Maybe.

Vitaly Friedman seems to be your go-to guy for lists of web design and development stuff. I landed on his site by accident, having followed a link promising free fonts. What I found was a treasure trove of resources.

• The 25 Best Free Fonts (via)
• 25 Sites You Shouldn’t Have Missed in 2005 — An incredible quantity of good stuff here, including links to such gems as Typetester and SiteScore.
• JavaScript Libraries Roundup
• The Web Developer’s Handbook — The penultimate list of web development links. Mind-boggling in its exhaustiveness.
• Cheat Sheet Roundup: Over 30 Cheat Sheets for Developers — Not Vitaly’s work, but useful enough to mention. And I found it through Vitaly, so it almost counts.

Mike Purvis has taken a stab at making sIFR-enhanced hyperlinks act just like the real thing. It doesn’t work in in Internet Explorer, and having to generate two flash movies for each replaced text block is kind of kludgey, but it’s a start.

I’d love to see this developed fully, perhaps using the sliding doors technique that Mike mentions on his demo page. I don’t have the JavaScript expertise to make it happen, unfortunately. Any intrepid DOM scripters care to take this on as an addition to sIFR 3?

(Props: found out about Mike’s hack from his comment on Mark Wubben’s post “sIFR 3: A Look Into the Future”)

Updates

• 2/2/2006 @ 1:27 PM — Didn’t have time to read the whole thing over lunch, but it looks like someone may have already tackled the sIFR link problem (via). (Note: This solution is no longer very workable as written, thanks to the Eolas patent settlement and IE’s new “click to activate” approach to Flash movies. You may be able to work around this with certain JavaScript tricks.)
• 2/2/2006 @ 1:27 PM — Here’s another neat trick: two-color sIFR (via).

Jeffrey Zeldman gives the Web 2.0 hype a good swift kick in the ass in his article for the latest issue of A List Apart.

Also in that same issue: how to achieve AAA-level accessibility when browser support and the specs themselves are working against you.

The Times of London has the whole story.

(Props: Pandagon)