That Norwegian Guy

Humble Norway

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:36:15 +0000

I’m going to try to write something sensible, probably mostly just a diary for my own future reference or something. So much great has been blogged and tweeted in the last two days in response to the horror that happened on Friday afternoon, it’s overwhelming, and it makes me proud to be Norwegian.

I was with my girlfriend at a friend’s cabin, on our last day of three weeks of summer-holiday. It was my first extended holiday at the “Sørland” (Norway’s south coast) since I was an adolescent, and I’d seen more of it than I’d ever done before, first staying with my parents, later visiting various friends along the coast, enjoying being a tourist in my own country. We were just packing up when I got a phone-call from my mum, telling me there’d been an explosion in Oslo. I instinctively looked up on Twitter for more updates, the regular news sites would hardly load, but the headings were clear. Something bad had happened. And for every bit of information that came through the bad became worse. Sadly this has been one of the constants this weekend.

We sat glued to the TV for about 1 hour before the footage and reporting became to repetitive, and got in the car. We still had to get home after all. At this point nobody knew who or what exactly had happened. It was clearly a terrorist attack, but we didn’t yet know who or why. Foreign media were already blaming Muslim extremists, but local media kept their cool and stuck to what little facts we had, which pointed nowhere, and weren’t afraid to report that. Fear-mongers: 0. Common sense: 1. I admit I hoped that it wouldn’t be muslim terrorists behind it, because I didn’t want Norway and Norwegians to turn into scared anti-Muslims. As it turned out I’m supposed to fear tall blond men, if I was to follow that rhetoric.

Then came the first tweets about shots at Utøya. The radio caught up within minutes. We were stuck in a que at the freeway.

For the first time in my life I made a decision based on fear of terror. Having now idea of the scale of the attacks, and the seemingly randomness of a bomb in Oslo and shooting at Utøya, I suddenly felt like a sitting duck being stuck in the que at the freeway. I took the first exit.

My suburb is pretty far from downtown where the bomb went off, so coming home everything seemed very normal. But it didn’t feel normal, to much listening to the radio I guess. I went to my neighbour to pick up the mail she’d collected while we were gone. She’d been in town, but hadn’t understood the seriousness of it until a shop clerk told her about it, which naturally scared her. And having her son about to board a plane didn’t do much good for her nerves either.

We watched the news getting increasingly worse as it got later.
I wanted to do something to help. I heard they needed blood donors, and was considering getting back in the car and driving into town. Luckily I found out that only already registered donors could give blood before I headed down. I signed up as a donor online instead. Hopefully they get me in the system soon enough. I also naively thought that I could head into the city on Saturday and help with the clean-up. I didn’t think about the military guarding the entire perimeter. Eventually I got to sleep at 3am. At this point there were hardly any confirmed dead at Utøya.

I was woken up the next day by my girlfriend getting a call from a friend, and the first thing I heard was the number 91. I was immediately awake. The number was tenfold of what I’d fallen asleep to, which was more then bad enough. I got so engulfed in the news that I didn’t even eat breakfast until somebody on Twitter had the sense to remind us all to eat. Or maybe it was a retweet. I’ve never seen so much beautiful supporting words been offered in 140 characters as I have these last two days. I’ve never had so many people write to me on Facebook, nor send me support on Twitter. I wish they wouldn’t have had to.

I eventually had to turn off the fire-hose of news and do something normal. I mowed the lawn and went for a long nice walk with my girl. It felt really good.

Back home the unreal world was continuing, but it still felt like it didn’t quite affect me. Yes, I had a small lump in my throat, and my brain was getting fried, but it wasn’t until I read the first eyewitness blogpost that I burst. What a nightmare those poor people went through. And what troopers they are.

We spent Saturday night at home watching a movie. It annoyed me that it had a terrorist plot, but it turned out to have a happy love ending. Typical Hollywood stuff, but I’m way more emotional than usual, and the happy ending did me good.

Today I eased of all the media a lot more, and I noticed both my Facebook and Twitter stream has calmed down quite a bit. The longer essays about how could this happen etc. are out. Some very good articles, some horrendous ones. It’s become to much to cover. We chose to go and do something normal instead, and spent the afternoon at the rock-climbing gym. The gym was full of people, everybody seemed quite upbeat. I think everybody was there for the same reason as us, and were happy to just get out and be with friends.

I was also happy, even though I felt tired and climbed like shit, which normally would’ve annoyed me. There’s no way I could bring myself to feel like I have any reason to complain about anything whatsoever.

And I went into town. To look. I just had to. Not to see the damaged buildings, but I needed to feel the atmosphere. And I’m glad I did. The flowers are beautiful. People are friendly. It’s this sense of a communal being. Nobody knows exactly what to do, but we’re in this together, and we will do the right thing.

So now what?
I’m afraid it is just a matter of time before I find out that I know somebody that’s been lost. Norway is to small a country for something this big not to affect everyone.

But the response makes me immensely proud to be Norwegian. The official response is that we will fight terror with democracy and humanity, and we the people have taken this to heart. I’ve seen the prime-minister cry. The King patiently stand in line to light a candle. Armed soldiers in my town. A sea of flowers, candles and kids’ drawings. And a cold calculated mass-murdering terrorist getting appointed a lawyer and a civilised trial. Because that’s how we do things.

BankWest redesign

Eystein — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 15:51:28 +0000

To me a good online banking experience is the most imporant aspect of a bank. It’s how I deal with the bank 99.9% of the time (I still don’t have a mortgage). I’m willing to jump to any bank that will give me this. But from what I’ve gathered by talking to my peers, my bank, BankWest, is as good as it gets. Then something amazing happened: BankWest redesigned.

That’s what I first noticed since I always go directly to the login page. Though they’ve renovated their entire site, which must have been a lot of work for someone, good on them! It’s an improvement, but I still miss a lot. I immediately put on my scrutinising glasses, so this post is going to mostly point out the negative sides. But that’s what the comments are for – correcting my mistakes.

The media release lists a few new features, most of which seems to benefit BankWest more than the customer. Such as ”Credit Card Limit Increases”, ”Tailored Product Promotion Banners”, and an ”Offers & Apply Facility” which only offers new credit cards. The positive parts is an iPhone/handhelds version, and a progress bar for the payment section. Period. I feel bad for putting those to in the same sentence, I hope they didn’t spend the same amount of work on both. But that is all that is in the news article. I would have liked to see a write-up on what else has been done, from a user and technical point of view, front-end and back-end.

For mobile

Naturally I had to check if there was an iPad specific version as well. It isn’t, but it defaults to the mobile version, which surprised me a bit. As a result the input fields ends up being extremely wide. An option to switch to the default web interface would have been appreciated. Nevertheless, I decide to pay some bills using the iPad instead of the laptop. The large navigation column from the desktop has been replaced with various metaphors for navigating around, and I have no problem getting directly to where I need to be.

I come across my first obstacle as I tapped the input field for amount to be paid. Turns out I just can’t move the selector to the start of pre-filled numbers. I assume the problem is with some padding/positioning in either the css and/or the javascript dealing with the input fields. Also they haven’t used the input type=”number” attribute, so you get the default text keyboard on mobile Safari. This would probably affect other new browsers as well (Opera?). It would’ve been easy to save a tap here.

On the desktop

This is when I started writing down notes for this post, so by the time I got back to the browser it had not surprisingly timed out. So I give the normal web version a go.

It’s been my pet peeve, and I can’t believe they didn’t get rid of the big warning message disply on login whenever I hold down Shift while typing my password. The alert reads:

Note: Caps Lock is on. Having Caps Lock on may cause you to enter your password incorrectly.

I see what they’re trying to do, but can they at least get the keys right?

Once logged in things look new and refreshed. But hardly anything has changed. The navigation is all the same. All elements are in the same location, in the same layout, giving the same information. There’s the same old links with same old actions. It’s been redesigned, but not realigned, so actually using it is the exact same experience, except it looks more 2010.

By the way – I’m not the only one who has noticed the redesign. “Toolmantim” is offering a case of beer for the development team to implement his proposed change for choosing a payment type.

The homepage

To get to the login page you have to choose an option from a dropdown select list, and it spawns a new window for me to log in on. First of all: pop-up windows? Really? I think I’m grown up enough to decide where I want my browser tabs. Secondly: Why hiding what must be one of the most used functions? Surely there must be a large enough number of users who go directly to the online banking for them to validate a direct login, or a direct link to the portal you use the most often. I hope there’s user testing and stats that prove me wrong. The funny thing is I didn’t even think about it until I disabled the CSS, and and it turns out that the select list is really a list of links styled as a select box. At least that means it’ll be easy to change further down the road.

Markup

The markup is …weird. There’s a lot of inline javascript. So much I wonder if it’ll even work without javascript. Well, it definitly won’t let me pay bills without javascript enabled. Not that it tells me it won’t, I just get stuck on the first selectbox without a ‘go’ button. There’s also a lot of conditional comments filtering out stuff from IE to see. My 10 second test in IE8 revieled square corners on the login button, but not much else.

Finishing rant

I signed up with BankWest purely by chance, as they had a branch close to my house. I wonder if they would’ve let me sign up and do everything online and never had to set foot in a branch? Because that’ what I am used to from Norway, where I signed in with Skandiabanken way back when they showed all the old players how it could be done.

Part of this is service. I can call them at any time and speak to someone. The online personal chat help thing actually has somebody manning the chat that will answer you. There’s no fees. But most importantly, I can do everything I need to online. Oh, and did I mention – no fees! It pisses me off that the bank will charge for me to do their legwork. I let them keep my savings and do whatever it is banks do with my money these days, and they let me do what I want with it myself.

iPadify your WordPress

Eystein — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:22:25 +0000

Just tried Padpressed on the iPad. Seems like an awesome idea, I was very wowed be the Youtube videos on the site. So I went ahead and tried the demo on my iPad. (Don’t bother trying in desktop Safari, the designs are completely different.)

First impression

I’m sad to say that the demo felt a bit to much like a beta version. It tries so hard to behave like a native iPad, and it gets about 80% there. Which makes it a bit weird, odd, or uncomfortable to use. The iPad uncanny valley.

The article links seem to trigger a little bit to fast on the scrolling of the articles on the homepage. It’s like the scrolling sensor is competing with the anchor sensor and the wrong one wins. I ended up in articles repetedly when I was attempting to scroll.

Once in the article itself I wasn’t allowed to scroll all the way to the bottom. And it allowed sideways scrolling, even though it didn’t need it, so I ended up scrolling diagonally by mistake.

Second impression

Wrong. I just tried again, and realised the sideways swiping is for going to the next article. Just like it says on the website. Playing around with it for a bit makes it easier to use. But I don’t think it’s ripe for a typical client website, unless the business has a very specific demographic. For something that has a lot of returning users, e.g. a web-app, it could work better.

Just a bit more than a Tweet after 3 minutes of use.

Aside

It won’t hurt to know a little bit about what to consider when designing and developing for the iPad before you just whack a plug-in in to take care of it for you. This article, Designing web apps for iPad, at Six Revisions seems helpful. I haven’t read it, but consider it Instapapered.

I Heart HTML5

Eystein — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:16:59 +0000

A HTML5 for Web Designers review

I received, opened and read the HTML5 for Web Designers book by A Book Apart in 2 days. If you know me, that means it’s a good read. While reading I started taking notes on my iPad, thinking it would be good to do a review. Now this turned out to be part review, part notes, and part rant. A great mix i reckon. Get a cuppa and enjoy the read now, or Instapaper it for later.

Coming home from the gym this morning i found my long awaited HTML5 for web designers book had arrived. After admiring the package for a brief moment, * ooh, Happy Cog. ooh, New York *, I threw away the idea of taking unboxing photos, and had a hot shower. Don’t get to excited, I came from the gym remember?

Breaking up the fresh book I dove straight into it over breakfast. It’s thin, only 85 pages, though I already knew that thanks to Twitter not being able to keep it’s mouth shut. The typography and layout makes it pleasant to read. And thanks to the foreword I now know that i can change my bio to “Accessible, standards-based designer-developer”, with a dash of “CSS author”. I haven’t been this excited about a book in a long time (since Web Form Design to be exact). I guess rich semantics are closer to my heart then GTD, business and project management, agile work methods, and even UX.

Chapter 1

The first chapter gives a brief summery of markup. Funnily enough it feels like reading a blog article, I’m pretty sure I’ve read a lot of this before, even in this exact wording. I don’t mind to much though, I’m not expecting the rest of the book to be the same. And it’s kept very short, concise, and straight to the point in an easy to understand way. I wish there were books like this when I started out with this webology.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 sheds some enlightenment upon why certain elements are kept, deprecated, obsolete, changed, and what the difference is. It also has the first bits of markup in the book. HTML5 allows us to do sloppy markup, but there’s no need to throw all our lowercase closing tag goodness out the window. It allows sloppiness for all those old websites that are still out there. No need to break the web here. But for the sake of simplicity I’ll say goodbye to XHTML in regards to the boolean attributes. We also get simplified doctype, character encoding, script tags and stylesheet links. I for one like this, I hate it when the head element has more content the the body itself. And one big one, which I’m already using in client work – “The a element on steroids” – wrap your anchors around other elements, even block elements. The joy!

Death to Flash! Aka. Chapter 3 – Rich Media – talks about the canvas, audio, and video elements.

Thought there isn’t much that’s new to me, it’s being explained in a very easy to understand way. I’ve consumed my fair share of HTML5 articles, tweets, blogs, comics, infographics, tables and podcasts, and have come across pretty much everything in the book (so far). But the book does a damn good job at explaining it better then the accumulated info in my head.

I finally understand how canvas differs from SVG, when and how to use it, and when it shouldn’t be used. As with many things HTML5 fresh it’s dependent on JavaScript to work. Which I find strange to say the least. What about accessibility? We now have these wonderful alternatives, but have to provide a pile of fallbacks because of politics, history, worst/best case scenario etc. More so for the audio element, and heaps more for the video element. Ideally the video element is just that one element. But by the time it’s ready for a client site it looks more like this: video > source.ogv + source.mp4 + flash object > param + direct download link. I’ll still use them though. The same way I’ve always used any new techniques I can, with fallbacks, so I can be as ready as possible when we finally pull the plug on antique browsers and charge full speed ahead without having to learn lots of new scary stuff.

A minor complaint: Figures/illustrations/code that aren’t on the same page as the text they illuminate. This is a bit odd I reckon. It’s something I’ve gotten used to seeing in ePub books, though I don’t like it. But in a print book? From the superstars of A List Apart fame? I’m just gonna let that hang there.

Of the three I’m actually most excited about the canvas element, probably because it’s a whole new thing to play with. Understandably audio and video is going to be, or already is, much more exciting for the social media industry, porn, and friends. And what I’ll spend more time working on then the canvas. I don’t know if the user will ever be able to tell any difference between Flash video and the video element. The only difference they should notice is that its easier to use and crashes less often. A good challenge for us designers and developers.

Chapter 4 – web forms 2.0

Now it gets exciting! Forget about better video penetration. Web forms is the original half of what has turned into the HTML5 specification. Forms are the hard to complete, annoying, intrusive, roadblocks of the information superhighway (did I really say that?). Anything that can make it less annoying to complete a form must be a good thing. And here we have (kind of) 50% of an entire HTML specification. I’m worried that this is also what will take browser vendors the longest to implement. Forms just can’t compete with YouTube in mainstream media. Gotta love the irony though, without forms there wouldn’t be any way to upload the videos in the first place.

Very much of HTML5 has come about by taking a good look at what is commonly used by developers via workarounds, for example jQuery UI date pickers, and creating a native HTML element for it. Paving the cowpaths as they say. In the case of forms, there’s a LOT to cover. I think the book might be worth it for this chapter alone. There’s placeholder, autofocus, required, autocomplete, datalist, search, email, URL, tel, sliders, number, color, and a plethora of date and time. And the good news is that you can use all of them today. It also explains how to check for browser compatibility using JavaScript so you can serve a fallback to the incompatibles. I’d like to see a Modernizr-like library that does all the heavy lifting for me. But instead I see a CSS nightmare. It’s highly unlikely that even bleeding edge browsers will have the same styling of all the new properties and attributes. Apparently they don’t allow for any styling at all for some of the elements. Though you might be able to work your way around that with javascript.

Chapter 5 – Semantics.

Tasty tasty semantics. I love semantics. They keep order on the anarchic web. I could spend hours discussing when to use a data list versus an ordered list. If I could find someone to discuss with.

This chapter covers what I first got interested in HTML5 for. The new elements. You know – header, footer, nav, section, time, aside, article. And some peculiar ones – progress, meter and mark. And did you know that HTML5 don’t have inline elements anymore? They are now “text-level semantics”. This makes sense, as we’re not supposed to describe elements by the way they appear on a display. There is some information on microformats, and good explanations on how to use the attributes for the new elements. I think the datetime would’ve kept me googling for a bit to get right.

There’s some pretty good explanations of when to use the new structural elements – header, footer, aside et al. I know I’ll be looking this up again when I get around to continue working on my HTML5 pet project. Maybe next decade. But sadly there’s no clear-cut answer to the difference between section and article. I personally feel like it’d make more sense to let a section be higher in the DOM then an article, even though that’s not a rule at all. And I’ll change my mind on this as soon as I read some more upon the subject.

Sectioning content.

It’s increasingly common that I don’t know in what context, part of a page or site, that a particular section (not the element) goes. It may be a widget, a blogpost, unordered list or anything. I’m doing my best to use OOCSS practises to stay clear of to much duplication, but whenever a change shows up a couple months down the road there will always be something. The new HTML5 outlining method should help combat more of this. To use the example from the book – a blogpost title might be a H2 in the frontpage, with the site title being a H1. But reading the blogpost by it self the title would probably be a H1. Wrapping the post in section, or more likely, an article element now allows you to use a H1 regardless. Because it is only belongs as a header to which section it is direct child of. Thus you can use the same markup and CSS no matter where you insert the blogpost.

The final chapter. Use HTML5 today.

I wasn’t sure what the last chapter would be, but this was bloody obvious. So we get to know that it’s pretty much a go ahead, except for IE, which needs a special treatment as always. I know IE9 is gonna blow our socks off, even Andy Clarke is excited about it, but really – it’s still going to be IE.

A very useful bit was the info on ARIA role attributes. It’s a very easy method to add a needed flavor of accessibility. This is mainly a note to self to start using that actively.

Finally it rounds off with some well wishes (thank you Jeremy) and a few quality links which I must now go and bookmark.

In conclusion, it is a great little book. You can read it anywhere, there’s no need to sit by the computer to try out the code examples. I’ll be using it to look up details later, or to prove a point in a heated discussion on semantics. There was a point where I wished the book was bigger and went more in-depth, but in the end I’m quite happy it wasn’t. I’ve probably spent more time writing this then it took me to actually read the book. So if you care about making good web, you know what to do. Happy reading!

Top 20 web designers

Eystein — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:58:58 +0000

Top 20 web designers, according to TypeFace that is.

With all the web superstars in my twitter feed mentioning TypeFace this week I thought it’d be worth a look.

I assumed right. The visual design is great, the navigation of the gallery works smoothly on my crappy internet connection, and the content is most of the web designers you wish you could be. But why – WHY! – is the markup just a bunch of images in a div? It would have been the perfect place for an ordered list.

Also, there are no links to these faces and names. And there is no web without links. So to bring some balance to the web again I have collected them all here for you. In a ordered list.

http://www.markboulton.co.uk/ – So good that when he wrote his first book he turned into a indy publisher. And every book is worth getting.
http://www.shauninman.com/blog – Inventor of sIFR among other things.
http://www.zeldman.com/ – The godfather of web standards. Kind of.
http://jeffcroft.com/
http://jasonsantamaria.com/
http://owltastic.com/ – She is new to me, but working at simplebits.com speaks for itself.
http://superfluousbanter.org/
http://snook.ca/
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/ – Andy Clarke’s wizardry
http://veerle.duoh.com/ – Belgium superstar designer woman
http://subtraction.com/ – Design director for New York Times. Grid specialist.
http://timvandamme.com/ – The new kid on the block, and he is scary good.
http://sam.brown.tc/ – He is new to me
http://www.newtoyork.com/ – Also new to me
http://mikekus.com/ – The name is new, but I recognise his work. Working for Carsonified probably has something to do with it.
http://simplebits.com/ – resize the browser window for some extra easter candy
http://meyerweb.com/ – Though the design might not look like much today, he is an old school CSS guru. I think some of his earliest examples was what led me onto the bright path.
http://elliotjaystocks.com/ – also a new name who’s work I recognise
http://jontangerine.com/ – typography master. Check the logo – no images were harmed.
http://bryanveloso.com/ / http://avalonstar.com/ – I think his blog is redesigned every time I visit it (outside of RSS).

Advanced CSS selectors

Eystein — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:59:04 +0000

I just read fellow Scandinavian Roger Johansson post on Forgotten CSS selectors. I wouldn’t go as far as calling them forgotten, but I definitely don’t see them much in the wild. And they’re not even experimental CSS3, they are good old CSS2.1. Well worth a read.

And just as I think “hm, how do I deal with all this n-child stuff?” Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks tweets about his :nth-child learning tool/tester. Brilliant!

WordPress themes using HTML5

Eystein — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:10:44 +0000

I’ve been thinking of doing a WordPress theme in HTML5 for a while, and the best way to get inspiration is to look at other people’s work. I haven’t found very much though. So far I’ve found:

Do you know of any others?

A couple of good HTML5 resources:

And finally, a great overview of how to build a WordPress template from scratch from ThemeShaper.

I hate forms

Eystein — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:17:49 +0000

I hate forms. Always hated them. Hate filling them out. Hate marking them up. And definitely hate styling them.

But that has all changed. It appeared to me that after all, forms are about user experience, and user experience is something I’m quite passionate about. But what really made me get into forms where a combination of events. I finally got hold of Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski. And I cannot believe I haven’t read it earlier. It’s been out since 2007 for something’s sake!

But it’s clearly a popular book, because I’ve been trying to get it of Amazon before, where it’s been sold out. Then I forgot about it. Then I remembered again as I stumbled across a link to the publishers own website (rosenfeldmedia.com). Enter creditcard details. While I was there I picked up a copy of Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting as well, also recommended. But for now I’ll stick to the forms.

I thought Web Form Design was going to be all about how to get your head around writing semantic HTML and valid CSS for forms without ending up in an asylum in the process. I was wrong. It is much better. There isn’t a single line of code in the book. At least not that I can remember. It puts all it’s emphasis on making forms user-friendly. This is clever, as it makes it almost timeless, something you can’t say about most HTML/CSS trends. And it really makes you think further about what Every. Single. Element does.

Why is there? What does it do? Could it be better? Do I even need it?

And the flow of going through a form. Now I’m aware of how to get a user into a form, through the form, submit the form, and what to do after the form is submitted. This is something most designers never think about. I know I didn’t. And I gotta say, it feels good to make these decisions based on research and facts, rather then a vague feeling. Sure, it takes me a bit longer to make a form now, but damn! – it turns out heaps better.

I usually get the graphic designs handed over from designers who know little or nothing about CSS, HTML, or JavaScript. I’m not sure how many times I’ve had to point out that a link usually has slightly more than one state. So imagine the forms. Now, luckily the people I work with welcome feedback and are happy to learn. But this time I’ve made a clear demand:

Read this book before you ever design another form!

Which means that my book is out on loan at the moment. I have to remember to get it back before I leave Sydney. It is definitely part of my library.

And as it happens, after finishing the book I was cleaning up my email, where among others a few hundred emails from the WSG mailing list needed deleting. And as it turned out, there was a meeting, in Sydney, where Jessica Enders (formulate.com.au) did a presentation on forms. Count me in! At the same time Sitepoint launched another book, Fancy Form Design, which I’m currently reading. In short I’d say it makes a good appendix to Web Form Design. I have learned a lot from all this. And interestingly, nothing of this is new. No HTML5, no AJAX, no social media guerilla branding campaign (sic). Just plain old markup and solid dose of human behavior. I am really happy I’ve been able to improve so much in such a short time.

So now I don’t hate making forms anymore. Instead I hate how horrible some of the forms I’m forced to fill out are. And occasionally I get to love how well it can be done.

Serving CSS to Firefox only

Eystein — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:24:29 +0000

This is a CSS hack for Firefox.

I know, it’s naughty, dirty, against the rules, and Andy Clarke won’t share his pudding with me. But today I just wanted to style that form element my way!

I used this to target a element in Firefox3.5, but it will affect everything from Mozilla1.8 (that is Firefox1.5) and up.

My original CSS had this padding:

.btn {padding: 5px 10px}

Bringing out Firefox hack number 1 helped somewhat:

.btn::-moz-focus-inner {
    padding: 0;
    border: 0;
}

But this wasn’t enough, so after digging into the Firefox’ form.css file and some follow-up googling, I ended up abusing Mozilla’s @-moz-document specification, which led me to this:

@-moz-document url-prefix() {
    .btn {
        padding: 4px 8px;
    }
}

The latter can obviously be used to target any normal CSS, but please use with care!

You become what you read

Eystein — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:09:44 +0000

Do a persons books tell you something about him or her? I’d hope so. Looking at the stack of books that I have next to me on my desk, I realised it shows what I’m aiming for. I wish to be better at what I already do well, I want to build and expand so I’m fluent in related areas. I want to be comfortable that I’m good at my job, as it means a lot to me. So this is my list, my wishes, in no specific order other than what they currently are stacked up as on my desk:

Card Sorting by Donna Spencer
Getting Things Done by David Allen
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web by Mark Boulton (my review)
Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski
The Principles of Successful Freelancing by Miles Burke
The Principles of Project Management by Meri Williams
Learning jQuery by Jonothan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg
and a Mac OS X Snow Leopard disk that’s waiting to get installed…

Titles link to books. Names link to Twitter.