http://www.openplans.org/projects/topp-design/blog Just another weblog Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:50:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en When we were getting ready to launch the LivableStreets website earlier this year, I ran into an odd renderbug which I've finally had time to write up. The issue I found was that Internet Explorer would cut off portions of an element when negative margins caused it to extend beyond ... http://www.openplans.org/projects/topp-design/blog/2008/10/09/negative-margins-and-internet-explorer-a-cautionary-tale/ Background Our team uses Skitch a lot. It's a pretty invaluable tool for communicating visual information - you can easily annotate screenshots or comps. There's great communicative value in being able to point at something, and as a remote employee in my past two jobs, I can't imagine ever collaborating on ... http://www.openplans.org/projects/topp-design/blog/2008/10/06/click-to-clipboard/ For the Streetsblog WordPress theme, we wanted to include a widget which would display a featured user comment. The comp had spiffy oversized quotes surrounding the featured text. I'd seen http://24ways.org/2005/swooshy-curly-quotes-without-images a while back, and decided to improve upon it for the new Streetsblog site. In particular, the floated close quotes ... http://www.openplans.org/projects/topp-design/blog/2008/09/26/better-blockquotes/ After talking to Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock about our mutual skepticism towards the WYSIWYG model on the web, I thought I'd dredge up these thoughts from February of 2007. As we move towards devoting greater and greater resources towards developing the Xinha Editor, we are faced with an interesting set of ... http://www.openplans.org/projects/topp-design/blog/2008/09/17/thoughts-on-wysiwyg/ When the process for the Design Team at TOPP was first developed it was geared towards meeting the needs of fairly well-defined, planned projects to internal clients like OpenGeo and Livable Streets. As time went on, however, we realized that fires, maintenance tasks, and small projects were falling through the ... http://www.openplans.org/projects/topp-design/blog/2008/09/11/20-time/ Back in March, a blog post appeared on Into the Pudding in which Cholmes outlined his vision for a world in which everyone could remix web maps. It focused on lot on the technology and what not, but the kernel of the idea was to provide a more full-featured consumer ... http://www.openplans.org/projects/topp-design/blog/2008/07/30/thoughts-on-consumer-mapping/ This post is adapted from an internal wiki page and reflects design decisions made for OpenGeo. It's only one small part of a much larger discussion, but I figured it was interesting enough to repost. The original can be found here. The Problem I was tossing and turning in bed the other ... http://www.openplans.org/projects/topp-design/blog/2008/01/30/an-ontology-of-pop-ups/