I just finished off a small project I have been working on for a while on my free time. It’s a full screen image gallery that automatically scales the image with kept aspect ratio to fill the browser background. I also spiced it up with a flickr search engine, thumbnails, captions, preloader and some other goodies.

View Demo

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Tripoli, the generic CSS standard for HTML rendering, have reached the Beta stage. By resetting and rebuilding browser standards, Tripoli forms a stable, cross-browser rendering foundation for your web projects.

So, what’s new in the beta?

There are many new things in Tripoli. I have listened to the public voices from people using it in real world projects during the last 6 months and the result is even more stable, generic and dynamic. Here’s a quick run-down:

• no more print styles
• a brand new layout plugin
• more ways of implementing Tripoli to simplify installation
• hundreds of tiny corrections since the alpha
• even less specific styles in the base component, expand tripoli as far as you need
• the heavy IE expressions in the late alpha has been removed for better performance

Tripoli is the same as before, only much better and more dynamic. If you are using tripoli today and would like to upgrade, you should be able to do so without any major issues.

Read more and try it out in the Tripoli project page. If you are new to Tripoli, you might want to check out two earlier blog posts as the project was initiated: Introducing Tripoli and Tripoli Beta in Development

A menu with a visual active state is a popular technique on web sites for obvious reasons:

1. It gives the user a clear signal of where he/she is on the site, especially for visitors coming from a search engine or deep link
2. It can be attractive and signal a well-structured and balanced site
3. Used carefully, it can replace the classic breadcrumb trail.

This article aim to explain how some popular techniques are used to achieve an active state, including a digestion of our latest laboratory project called :path. I will also show you some simple examples of different visual approaches, including some very popular sites that doesn’t use active states at all.

Is active states on navigation anchors crucial? Should you always use them or are there cases when it is not such a good idea? Use the comments form to discuss the topic.

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