Cross-browser RGBA support has long been one of those web design holy-grails, more often than not resulting in our old friend Internet Explorer frustrating us yet again.

Last week I released a Compass plugin that makes wild promises – actual cross browser RGBA support! Well, sort of…

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Excuse me whilst I blow the dust off my blogging keyboard. It’s a been a while…

Last Friday I couldn’t help noticing many of the people I follow on Twitter having a good old grumble about Apple’s recently published HTML5 showcase page.

The main gripe surrounds Apple’s claim that the page is a showcase of modern web standards, yet at the same time uses browser sniffing to detect if you are using Apple’s own browser and, golly-gosh, if found to be using anything other than Safari, blocking you from seeing all the visual delights entirely.

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Today I released a new jQuery plugin called Simply Smart Login Fields. It’s actually not that smart, in fact it’s really plain simple. It’s a plugin for adding default values to login form fields.

Adding default values to form fields can be useful in situations where the design doesn’t allow for a text label – for example when the login form is tucked neatly up in the top corner of a page.

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What can only be described as an ee-shit-storm kicked off today, when an ExpressionEngine developer called Alex Gordon released a forked version of the popular EE extension, FF Matrix.

Forking of open source software is normal. In fact, the open source scene relies on the self-perpetuating effect of contributors forking, modifying and enhancing software all for the greater good.

What makes this case a little controversial though is that Brandon Kelly (the author of FF Matrix) recently set up business on his own. He has changed the license on all current and future versions of FF Matrix to a commercial model.

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Yesterday Microsoft released to the world a platform preview of IE9. I’m sure you’ve read all about it by now, so what do we all think?

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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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