As I am currently trying to survive in the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) marsh, I want to share some very interesting presentations and books about this topic. These resources are all talking about the famous problem of designing web sites using CSS-based layouts instead of tables.


Web presentations and articles:

• CSS Zen Garden, a amazing demonstration of what can be done using CSS. Play with it!
• Pushing your limits and other secrets of designing with CSS, a sumptuous web presentation by Douglas Bowman
• The beauty and business of CSS by Douglas Bowman
• Throwing Tables Out the Window by Douglas Bowman

Books on CSS:

• HTML Utopia: Designing without tables, using CSS, a book from Dan Dhafer
• Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer Reference by Eric Meyer
• In French: CSS, pratique du design web from Raphaël Goetter (Alsacréations)

Alexa web site shows here a classification of the most visited web sites in the world. #1 is Yahoo!, followed by Microsoft Nework (MSN) and Google is #3. For this classification, Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the usage of Alexa Toolbar users. On Alexa web site, if you click on "Traffic Rankings" and you type your URL, you will see the ranking of your web site. I did that for www.baccoubonneville.com but there is no data for my web site:-(.we are classified at rank 870,885 (10/25/05).

Read also this complete article on Alexa Ranking system from Global Promoter.

Alexa is an amazon.com company.

This great web site gives you the opportunity to test Content Management Systems (CMS) and Blogs open source software with a lot of installed end-user and administrator demos.

See also this 2004 comparaison of XOOPS versus other CMS (phpNuke, PostNuke, e107, Mambo, Xaraya, Drupal, eZ Publish) from Jan Keller Pedersen, IT University of Copenhagen.

Extract from the technical introduction on DWR:
"DWR (Direct Web Remoting) is an open source Java library which helps developers wanting to write web sites that include Ajax technology. It allows code in a web browser to use Java functions running on a web server as if it was in the browser."

I have not yet tested this implementation of Ajax put I will test it ASAP. For more information about Ajax, read my previous note on this topic.

Ajax means "Asynchronous JavaScript + XML". It's not a library but more an architecture, a new approach for web applications based on existing building blocks (XML, CSS, Javascript). The goal of Ajax is to have a more rich user experience in web applications. Ajax is described in an essay from James Garret from Adaptive Path. Google Suggest and Google Maps are good examples of what can be done using Ajax.

On this French article on Ajax from Framasoft, we learn that OpenRico is an open-source JavaScript library for creating rich internet applications and that implement Ajax.

You should also go to Michael Mahemoff's web site on Ajax called Ajax Patterns. It's a tremendous collection of design patterns based on Ajax principles.

Even if Ajax brings probably nothing really new in term of technologies, it has the creditable goal to put user experience in the top prio of web design.