Last week I asked the question on Twitter, “What HTML element do you use for each line of a form? P, DIV, or something else?”

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That’s that over and done with for another year. Whilst the seasonal festivities will continue for a few more days yet, I talk of course of our annual dose of 24 Ways articles.

One of the reoccurring themes in this years selection pack of web design and development goodies is a concept that is splitting opinions like none other. Designing in the browser.

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The problem with CSS pre-processing frameworks is that they don’t really fit within the average web designers’ work flow. Or they don’t mine, anyway.

Having to compile and recompile at every iteration is just a pain in the backside, it’s not the way I work. I like to make some tweaks, view them in the browser, make more tweaks, view them in the browser, and repeat.

When you add in to that the process of going to the command line and recompiling, all of a sudden writing CSS becomes a dull slog. Not the way I like to work.

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Yesterday there was quite a lot of discussion on Twitter about CSS preprocessing frameworks such as SASS and LESS.

It was all in response to a blog article by Nathan Borror detailing why SASS isn’t for him. In the article’s comments there is some interesting debate on the pros and cons of preprocessing frameworks.

For the uninitiated, CSS preprocessing frameworks add clever functionality to writing stylesheets like variables and mix-ins, and ultimately result in writing less CSS to achieve the same result. A good thing in my book.

But it seems many designers are resistant to a technology that abstracts the syntax of a styling language that they are already familiar and comfortable with.

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If you’re like me then your life revolves around email. It is your personal and work central nervous system – your 21st Century digital command centre!

Unfortunately the grip that email now has on all our lives creates as many problems as it solves.

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Just over a week ago I pushed live a teaser page for a pretty massive project I’m currently up to my neck in (in a good way).

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If there is one thing I wish I could convince all my clients of, it’s the value of expertly written copy. But that’s a really hard thing to communicate to a client without it sounding like a direct criticism of their command of the English language.

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This article comes with a serious health warning. So lets get it out of the way: If you install T-Mobile mobile broadband on a Mac running Snow Leopard, you will brick your shiny pride of joy!

Shortly after you install the required T-Mobile Mobile Broadband Manager software (which sucks by the way), things will be very obviously wrong. Certain tools and software will start throwing error messages, you won’t be able to successfully power down, and worst of all, your Mac won’t power back up. You’ll have an iBrick!

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I bought a new font this weekend. I bought Tungsten from the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry. It cost me USD $99 – a sum of cash that isn’t going to break the bank, but considering there is a very real chance that I may end up never using the typeface in a commercial, money-making project, it’s not an amount to be sniffed at either.

Tungsten is the latest in only a very small handful of commercial fonts that I have ever bought. Considering I work in the creative industry, I don’t think I’ve bought many fonts at all. But I expect I’ve bought more than many others – especially other web designers.

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A couple of weeks ago I threw together a simple jQuery plugin that provides a character or word counter for any textarea or input field form element.

The plugin’s options allow you to specify whether it counts characters or words, set a maximum character or word limit and choose the direction in which the counter counts (ie, from the maximum count down to zero, or vice versa).

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