Promotion to Design Team Advisor at SitePoint

by Khaled on March 24th, 2007

After being a Design team Mentor at SitePoint for the last 9 months I was promoted yesterday to the position of Design Team Advisor.

And of course I have a new shiny badge:

The anouncement thread can be read here.

This is a huge honor for me to be an Advisor in the biggest Web designers and developers community on the net! if you don’t know about SitePoint yet then you’re missing a huge thing! SitePoint has more than 166,790 members from all over the world! If you want to know more about SitePoint then look here.

Principles of Beautiful Web Design

by Khaled on March 9th, 2007

Yes! yet another contest by SitePoint, after the Photo manipulation one, here’s a CSS contest. I will be a judge in this one too!

Josh Catone (the Community team leader @ SPF) posted :

The Challenge:

Announcing the SitePoint “Principles of Beautiful Web Design” CSS Competition. If you would like to win a copy of SitePoint’s acclaimed new book “The Principles of Beautiful Web design” then all you have to do is to take this html and turn it into a beautiful web page that is an advert for the book.

You are not allowed to change the html and can only use css and background images to create your masterpiece. Unlike the “Zen Garden” examples the html has very few extra “hooks” in the code and you will need to be very creative to turn this into a viable web page.

Advanced css’ers will therefore be able to use advanced selectors to create styling opportunities while those of medium skill levels can concentrate on the graphic side of things.

You must also use the SitePoint logo and the book cover image which can be downloaded from those links and the html for the images is already in place.

General Rules:

• The html must remain untouched.
• All html content must be used and not replaced with image replacement techniques.
• Background images can of course be attached to any available element.
• Valid CSS at whatever level you wish so advanced selectors can be used to good effect in browsers that support them.
• Browsers to support are: IE6, IE7, Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+. The design must display well in all the browsers listed with ie6 as the minimum requirement. However you may get more points if you can utilise advanced css to make the display even better in Ie7 firefox and opera.
• No CSS hacks to be used.
• No Javascript or any other kind of scripting.

The competition will be judged by:
Sarah
Josh
Jelena
Sara
Paul
DT
Dave
(and possibly other SitePoint Forums staff members)

Entries will be judged on technical merit, creativity, aesthetics, and compliance with the rules.

All entries must be received by 1 month from today: 6th April, 2007 at 11:59 (23:59) GMT. The winner notified shortly thereafter.

You are allowed to enter as many entries as you like but the judges decision will be final and will be based on not only the look of the page but also how clever and effective the use of css has been. (Also, you can only win once.)

You can download the html and images from Paul’s basic example but we are expecting much better from you. Remember the CSS is to be completely supplied by you but we have left Paul’s demo there so you can get some ideas on how the page can be manipulated.

When you have completed your design you can post in the competition entry thread and add a link to the layout or attach a screenshot and zip file which we can upload for viewing.

If you have any questions then post below in this thread as the entry thread will be just for entries only.

Good Luck!

So join SitePoint right now and have a chance to win this competition held by the biggest Web designers and developers community on the entire web!!

No future for AJAX?

by Khaled on March 9th, 2007

Many predictions here and there all over the web are stating that we’re going towards a web that will be mostly based on RIAs. So of course the platforms technology for these RIAs is very important! Now we are talking a lot about AJAX… But I guess you all know it is not that easy to make it cross-platform… You will most probably develop it on one platform then go through a tweaking nightmare to make it behave the same way on all the platforms you’re targeting and all the browsers etc…Looking at what has always happened on the net I believe that the pressure on the major companies to improve their services and productivity will probably lead them to replace AJAX techniques to build richer Internet Applications faster and with nicer, better and easier development process than what is available now with the XMLHttpRequest stuff…
Flash/Flex would be a nice alternative, this makes sense in my opinion especially if you’ve heard about the new online version for Photoshop,seeing how this will look/behave will certainly give us a nice example to follow… as it always takes one big company to develop a valuable technique to make others adopt it (Youtube you say?). The only problem with flash/flex, In my opinion, in comparison with AJAX is that Flash/flex is designed, controlled and sourced by one single company… But then Java is widely used in programming despite the fact that it is proprietary and controlled by a single party…
On the other hand we have the open source OpenLaszlo platform that is written in XML and JavaScript and then compiled to Flash and DHTML, so it is a kind of advanced AJAX application platform and it looks promising as it offers a lot of possibilities…

The replacement for AJAX should be more responsive and more interactive, with a bigger penetration and ubiquity, with a better and nicer development experiences and processes, offers a java-like cross-platform development and with reasonable cost…

I am thinking this is happening quite soon!and as I’ve said before the release of the photoshop online version by Adobe (which was my starting point for all these thoughts) will give us a better idea about the future of RIAs…

May be you’re thinking it is too soon to discuss this… but who knows…