McArthur GFX

Recently, I've been more in favor of using the browsers rendering instead of background images to achieve looks, since that reduces bandwidth and loading times , and also increases maintainability . I used to slice images that would give something a shadow or button type of a look, but have moved more towards just making the browser do it. I wanted to share some examples of effects and how easy it is to do so.

Just a quickie: I was browsing the new Class script of Mootools 1.2.2 , to learn about all the changes (which are quite awesome), and I hope to rework my Privates Mutator real soon to work with the new way of things. I noticed this immediately:

if (params instanceof Function) params = {initialize: params};

I didn't have the priviledge of using SWFObject or the likes.  I just needed to create a movie in a modal-like window that depended on the page you were on. So, taking a list of properties and params, I proceed to use the DOM methods to build my Object and Param tags. Well, Prototype 's Element methods, actually. It worked in Firefox, and partially in Safari / Chrome, and none at all in Internet Explorer 7.

I've seen several big name web-sites point out this argument about whether or not CSS is worse for making web-sites than tables were, and I'm honestly getting sick of it .  Some (self-proclaimed?) bigwigs in the web industry are even saying it's easier to use tables and that's what they're going to use for now.  I assume everyone knows the reasons for using standards, semantic html, cascading stylesheets, and the like instead of tables.  The benefits are enormous.  But is it really too hard?