XHTML and CSS

My idea is to write a Photoshop tutorial, my first one, that would show how to apply realistic drop shadows to photos. Once you get desired result, you can slice your image up and, using CSS rules, apply creative shadows, hence 3d effect, to any image, Drupal block, Drupal box, etc. Similar tutorials are all over the web — well, not exactly, but there are quite a few of them. However, I had difficulty understanding the best of them. I clarified the whole process for myself, and have decided to dump it here. Lovely photo. Attached is my Photoshop CS2 file. The remaining step is to slice the image, of course. (If you examine the above image, you'll notice that I still have work to do to achieve truly realistic results. For example, the color of the 'white' outline is not realistic at the bottom.)

A first release candidate of Drupal 6 was made available on December 20, 2007, that is, two days prior to the publication of this theming guide... which covers Drupal 5! Drupal 6.1 has since been released, and many of Drupal’s most popular add-on modules are now ready for use on production web sites. The author mentioned on his blog that an updated version of his book will be published, but Packt Publishing is not yet listing 'Drupal 6 Themes' among its upcoming publications. Still, I read the book, and worked through its examples on a Drupal 6 install. As a somewhat seasoned Drupal developer, I still found the book helpful. I recommend it, provided that, as you read along, you refer yourself to the concise (and well-put-together) Drupal 6 theming guide available on Drupal.org. Theming has definitely taken a leap forward in D6. For instance, intercepting and overriding theming functions is a lot easier now.

When you’re creating a theme for Drupal, you have two tricks at your disposal to deal with floats, each trick aimed at one particular float ‘problem’. Read more →

This article tells the story of how Flash 8 movies learnt to fluently converse with Javascript using the ExternalInterface “API” in XHTML strict. Read more →

The attached pdf document shows how to add an icon to the left of a heading or link element using CSS. Read more →

Revisited as in “wait a minute, what if the methods for CSS drop shadow generally proposed on the web and in books by clique & all — Standards Village People — were just... convoluted ?” Yes, I have read CSS Mastery by Andy Budd & all. Read more →

The Strict xhtml Document Type Definition states without ambiguity that the <object> element is an inline element, not a block element. Read more →

We can use a Javascript library to properly embed a Flash “object” on a web page, or we can simply use W3C-compliant (X)HTML markup. Read more →