Lately, I've been getting into calligraphy in my art. I've gotten obsessed with how the letters are formed and how to draw them effectively. In fact, I find that most of the art I'm doing tends to deal with letters in some fashion. And it's fun to use type decoratively. What's interesting is that I hadn't really thought too much about this when it comes to Web design. Sure, I have lots of information on my site about fonts and typography, but even though I put it together with my offline designs, I didn't make the connection to online.

Then I found this post on The Design Cubicle: Type is the backbone of good web design. In it, Brian discusses many simple ways to improve your designs just through how the type is displayed. I love it!

I found this post on Jens Meiert's blog today: HTML/CSS Frameworks: Useful, Universal, Usable, Unobtrusive and I really enjoyed it. I've been looking more deeply into HTML/CSS frameworks for a while now, and honestly, I hadn't found any that really met my needs. And I think a large part of that is because many of them don't meet the criteria that Jens outlines. He recommends that they be:

• Useful
• Universal
• Usable
• Unobtrusive

Most of the ones I've looked at are either not useful to me or not usable because I couldn't figure them out quickly. From my perspective, unless it's immediately obvious how a framework is going to help me improve my site designs and speed of delivery, the tool needs to be so easy to use that I can muddle through for a while until I figure it out.

Are there any frameworks that you use regularly? Do you think that they meet the criteria Jens outlined?

An include is a script or tool that helps you include one HTML file in another. The most common reason to use includes is because you have content that is repeated across your website - such as navigation. When you use an include, you write the navigation as one file and then call it with an include reference in the pages where you want it to appear.

The thing is, includes are not something you can do with plain HTML. You have to use a script or tool of some sort to handle it. The original include was the SSI or server side includes. But now you can create includes with languages like PHP and ASP, JavaScript and even frames. You can also use tools like Dreamweaver library items to act as includes offline.

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