A while ago I agreed to organizing a series of talks about web and web technologies. They were and will be the cause for occasional outburst of Slovene on this blog. As Slovene speaking readers already know, the first one will be tomorrow at 19.00 in Cyberpipe , which is a rather cool place I almost never visit, because I’m weird and don’t like it all that much. But if you’re into net art, free wifi, cyber cafe and like meeting like-minded people, than it’s the place for you in Ljubljana.

I agreed to a job with no salary, fame or groupies and I did it whorishly quickly, because I thought it would be really cool to get Slovenian web community be, well, more communal. A better thinker than me would certainly notice that I’m not actually necessary for this plan to work and so could leave this task to someone else. But I’m as much a sucker for leaving my mark and doing it my way as any dog out there. Or better a cat. Yes, definitely a cat. Tomcat that is.

So, here we are, on the eve of first talk, which I’m certain will be a great (success) as all others will be and I’m working on November’s and December’s schedule, which are not coming together as easily as I’ve hoped. Series is aimed at experienced part of community and there are awfully lot of Wednesdays for something as small as Slovenia . I mean 20 thousand square kilometers and 2 million people. If any smaller it wouldn’t be a country, it would be a city.

Therefore I’m asking both of my readers which option is least annoying:

1. Forget a regular schedule. Have a talk when you can, but let it be worthwhile.
2. Have a regular schedule, but keep it regular with more basic talks (e.g. how to build your first web page).
3. Have a regular schedule, but keep it regular by having regular speakers.

I like variety, even in food, although between you and me, I could eat pasta every day. I’d prefer to have as many different speakers as possible, but I’d rather listen to the same lot (if good) then nobody or even worse, to talks I can’t care about anymore. How about you?

P.S: If there’s anyone that would like to give a talk and is willing to come to Cyberpipe, please let me know. Reasonable costs of transportation can be reimbursed.

Another Slovenian announcement…

Jutri, v sredo 5. oktobra ob 19:00, bo Jure Koren v Kiberpipi predaval o varni uporabi jezika PHP na spletu.

Na predavanje ste vabljeni vsi, ki bi se radi pobližje seznanili s pastmi PHP-ja ali pa si želite spoznati in družiti z drugimi spletnimi ustvarjalci.

Naslednji teden pa nadaljujemo s predavanjem Frya o mikroformatih .

A few days ago I wrote about a difficult goal of having a pleasantly looking submit button that is also as accessible as possible. I also had a simple demo that almost worked, but not quite.

I played with it a bit more and actually got it working as far as I imagined I could. You can see the result here (just change the size of fonts).

What I did is set base font size in all browsers to a known value as described by Richard . It isn’t really necessary to use 62.5%, but it does reset initial size to 10 pixels, which is a value that is easy to work with.

Then I just set height of an image button to its real size, but using em’s instead of pixels. In my case that’s 25 px or 2.5 em’s. I also set font-size of input button to 1 em, which for some reason is needed in browsers other than Safari, to enforce 10px size for fonts and 25px height for the button.

That’s it. Button is now resizable and has its original size by default.

Solution, which is entirely CSS based, is not perfect and I don’t believe it will ever be. Or at least not using incarnations of XHTML and CSS that we have now.

As can be clearly seen on the demo, it all comes down to a choice between better legibility of scaled type=submit buttons and more flexible design of type=image buttons.

I imagine I could do better with multiple sizes of an image for each button and using javascript swapping, but it wouldn’t work where javascript is missing and multiple images would significantly add to production costs.

Personally, I think web sites should have a design readable for vast majority of its readers even without text scaling and this trick can be good enough for the rest. However, at the same time I don’t expect to use it often.