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One of these colors is not like the other

How can two Web browsers display the same graphic in different colors? They can’t — at least not until recently.

Color management, a term familiar to photographer and print graphic designers, is a forgotten art for many Web designers. Primitive low-resolution monitors limited early Web artists to a palette of 216 colors. Now, aside mobile devices, most users have high resolution monitors capable of handling millions of colors. A limited palette should no longer be an issue, but another issue emerges: The color profile you used to so lovingly turn out that graphic or photo won’t be recognized by most browsers.

Getting your perfectly tweaked photo to appear the same way on your Web site is challenging. I didn’t think about this until I began mocking a Web site for a friend’s wedding. A background image kept appearing a different shade in Safari versus Firefox and Internet Explorer. Imagine — a Web design problem not linked to IE.

Safari, as it turns out, has included color management since version 2.0. Firefox has it now, but you have to go through some trickery to get it to work right or download a plugin. A proposed future version of CSS will include the ability to specify color profiles.

Even with a profile specified for your graphic or photo, good luck matching it with the browser’s default implementation of CSS colors.

How did I solve my problem? I re-exported my graphics file from Photoshop with the ICC profile option unchecked. This turned my colors just the way I wanted to match the surrounding CSS colors — or at least I hope so. Even with the Web being able to display millions of colors, it still has a long way to go to display them right.

Three pseudo classes beyond LOVE/HATE

I thought I knew all I needed to know about CSS, at least as far as modern browsers allow me, after reading a string of books about it over the past two years. (CSS Zen Garden is the best.) Somewhere along my studying, I blocked out certain rules, in most cases because Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t support them.

With Internet Explorer 7 more than two years old, used more than IE 6 and IE 8 coming soon, it’s time for designers to adopt more advanced CSS features. (IE seems to be losing market share as well.) The Microsoft developers’ site outlines IE’s support of CSS. Today we’ll look at pseudo classes.

LoVe/HAte is a handy way of remembering which way to order your link styling in CSS by :link, :visited, :hover and :active. (Not following this order will screw up things. Really. Trust me.) These familiar pseudo classes specify the look of your hyperlinks.

But wait — there’s more — and they don’t even have to be used for links!

:focus is a way to add focus to an element, like a form, and works now in Firefox and will supposedly work in IE 8. This is fantastically useful and a great way to make your site’s forms user friendly. Example.

:lang, again, not in Internet Explorer until version 8, but allows you to specify language of an element, like a quote box, and supply custom quotation marks. You can also use it in combination with XHTML to declare the language attributes of text in a document.

:first-child, now a part of IE 7, matches a style to the first child element of any element. For example, this selector could specify that the first paragraph of a document turn blue, but the rest of the paragraphs remain the default paragraph color.

Mixed feelings about Kindle, bookstores’ inevitable demise

I have to be the only guy alive who finds holding an Amazon Kindle for the first time a little emotional.

I’ve always been a voracious reader, sometimes going through several novels at once. I love to kill time at a bookstore, especially ones with tons of used books. There’s nothing like going on a treasure hunt through some attic full of dusty old paperbacks.

I blame my mom. She read to me religiously when I was little. Together, we went through quite a few books during my tender years.

The Kindle is Amazon’s electronic tablet for reading books. I missed that bandwagon by about a year. In fact, the Kindle I held wasn’t even mine; it was a colleague’s. Holding that liquid-crystal-powered reader for the first time was a mixed experience for me because I am fascinated with the promise it holds, but morn what toll it will take.

I love books and exploring book stores.

Yes, good ole, tree-derived, Gutenberg-inspired, pulpy-white-page-filled, books. I almost feel curmudgeonly about it.

But I’m not a curmudgeon. I just have don’t know what to think about the coming digital conversion. Whereas newspapers going from print to digital doesn’t bother me at all, the venerable book’s changeover makes me a little sad. My inner-gadget-geekness stands in conflict with my inner-printed-book-lovingness.

I like the escape. So much of my day is spent in front of something electronic. Although I wouldn’t call a stack of dead tree-derived pages organic, leafing through a book does seem a little more relaxed and natural. Here’s some irony: I prefer teaching myself about Web design through printed books.

As this recession wrecks havoc on many businesses, bookstores are equally being punished. Borders Books and Music is particularly vulnerable. The mega book seller is sitting on a mountain of debt and declining sales. (Barnes & Noble appears to be in better shape.) Even its late return to selling books online doesn’t seem to be helping. After seven years of using Amazon as its online bookshelf, Borders relaunched its own .com last year. Much like newspapers, Borders watched the Web revolution fly by and reacted too late.

I feel some attachment to Borders — it was the first really large book store outside of a library that I had ever been in. My 10-year-old mind nearly exploded the first time I stepped into one.

I’ve used electronic readers before. What makes Kindle different, though, is its ease of use and backing from Amazon. Some hail it as the printed book’s version of an iPod. I found it easy to read, fairly resistant to glare, but lacking a back light. Graphically, again, the text is crisp but all pictures and text are just in black and white. The screen isn’t green, but it did remind of  Nintendo’s original Game Boy. You can access the Kindle bookstore without a wireless connection via Sprint’s mobile network. Authors can even self-publish their works in the online store.

I’ll tell you one thing — my sore back, which lugged at least 18 pounds of books in college, would have loved one of these babies. Who needs sentimentality when you’re walking around campus like a pack mule?

TechDirt asks: Is the physical bookstore a thing of the past? Revolution, in whatever form it takes, won’t happen overnight. Still, I fear my beloved brick-and-mortar booksellers and printed books are writing their last chapters.