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Technical Articles

Algonquin Studios provides the following articles for your information and your enjoyment. If you have any suggestions or questions about any of our articles, please let us know.

Quick Color Class

Because it is often necessary to reproduce the colors in identity materials when building a web page, it helps to know what to expect from the end-users' displays and ability to perceive color.

Style Switcher in ASP

As more and more sites move away from embedded style, the benefits of CSS to customize a user's visit have become all the rage. It's hard to find a site bragging about its use of XHTML and CSS for layout that doesn't have a style switcher of some sort.

A Merger of Content Management and Localization Workflow

Algonquin Studios and E-Merge Strategies combine business models and software products into one multilingual solution.

The Wrong Way to Use CSS in Page Layouts

Pushes for accessibility and standards in code has made CSS the new buzzword of the web developer. Unfortunately, many use WYSIWYG packages to do development. What some of these developers tend to forget is that pixel-precise layouts are anything but.

A Simple Character Entity Chart

With so many books and sites with character entity references providing the wrong entities for so long, and the W3C's version capable of making your eyes bleed, here's a much simpler chart that you can use to stress test browsers and still make sense of.

Liquid Design for the Web

With so many users and so many variables that control window size, you've got an infinite number of possible dimensions in users' browser windows. This article will address screen resolution by offering some tips and caveats for liquid design.

To Hell With Bad Editors

We're glad the WaSP and ALA took a position on old browsers. But they're preaching to the converted. Instead, let's look at what editors (human and software) can do to increase standards compliance on the web.

Inside the evolt.org Rebuild: The HTML and CSS

Since evolt.org rolled out its new design, people have been asking what we did, why we did it, and how we did it. This article addresses these questions in the context of the HTML, the CSS, and the overall site design.

Breadcrumbs for Those Using ASP

While there are many great tutorials on building a breadcrumb navigation trail using Perl on a Unix/Apache site, I thought it would be nice to have an ASP version as well. It uses the file system to generate the trail.

Real-World Browser Size Stats, Part I

Everybody has their own take on what resolution their users have. Sometimes that target resolution is based on hard data, sometimes it's a best-guess, and sometimes it's just based on the designer's own personal preferences.

Real-World Browser Size Stats, Part II

In Part I of this article I showed you how to write your own script(s) to track the screen resolution, browser viewable size, and bit-depth, of your users. While you are gathering your own statistics, I'll offer mine up for review.

Using Excel Spreadsheets as Web Data Sources

So somebody at work wants to maintain a calendar on the web site, and the application he/she knows best is Excel. Well, believe it or not, you can use that file to drive that calendar. Here's how.

Let the User Skip the Splash Page

The proliferation of splash pages on web sites has been seen by many to be a hindrance to users. Many developers forget about the extra click a user experiences just to get to information. This tutorial shows you how to control how and when it's seen.

Browser Archive

There are many places you can go on the net to see statistics about which browsers support which tags, and sometimes even how they are supported. But none of them can give the perspective of precisely how it appears to the user with that browser.

Some Caveats with Using Frames

While frames are not evil by default, there are many issues that must be considered before they are implemented on a site.

640 x 480 Isn't Dead Just Yet

Designing for any resolution in particular can be tough. But should we cut any users? And what are the reasons for not cutting out those users? A list of reasons why addressing lower resolutions can have a higher overall impact.

Give the User Control Over Your Fonts

There's nothing quite like getting your text just right with all your CSS attributes in place, and sitting back knowing that you finally have some typographic control over your pages. It's just too bad that's not the case for your users.