Digital and Environmental History

Here is a selec­tion of notable links from the design and web devel­op­ment front. For those work­ing with type on the web, I highly rec­om­mend the fol­low­ing 24 Ways arti­cle writ­ten by Richard Rutter: “Com­pose to a Ver­ti­cal Rhythm.” I also rec­om­mend Meagan Fisher’s 24 Ways arti­cle“Make Your Mockup in Markup.” Are you explor­ing pro­gres­sive enhance­ment in your designs via CSS3? Then CSS3 Please! The Cross – Browser CSS3 Rule Gen­er­a­tor is just your ticket. For some POSH (Plain Old Seman­tic Hyper­Text) design, I think the fol­low­ing arti­cles on markup and seman­tic class names are quite useful:

• “The Ele­ments of Mean­ing­ful XHTML,”
• “Com­pe­tent Class­ing,”
• “Keep Your Classes Clean,”
• and “A Touch of Class.”

Of course, I would be remiss if I did not pro­vide a few notable links from the dig­i­tal his­tory front. To that end, I sug­gest George Lakoff’s arti­cles on “Gulf War Metaphor, Part I” and “Part II” as well as Cameron Chap­man’s “Apply­ing ‘A Pat­tern Lan­guage’ To Online Com­mu­nity Design” as wor­thy read­ing. Both Lakoff’s and Chapman’s arti­cles made me won­der about the of role lan­guage — both used and con­structed — in dig­i­tal his­tory? I think this is a par­tic­u­larly intrigu­ing ques­tion when one con­sid­ers how dig­i­tal his­to­ri­ans use one lan­guage—e. g. POSH — to con­struct dig­i­tal his­tory tools and another lan­guage — e. g. Eng­lish — to develop and pro­mul­gate (the lan­guage of?) com­mu­nity and col­lab­o­ra­tion via dig­i­tal his­tory tools. Finally, on a “non” dig­i­tal his­tory front but engag­ing nonethe­less is Paddy Donnelly’s “Learn To Fuck­ing Spell.” His post is engag­ing not only for its sub­ject mat­ter but also how that sub­ject mat­ter is effec­tively com­mu­ni­cated through the lush illus­tra­tions — another lan­guage in its own right — that heav­ily inform the post.