A List Apart is like they say themselves “For People Who Make Websites”. It’s an online magazine which is published once or twice a month with articles from various masters of CSS and other aspects of web design and coding. I rarely read the issues as they come out since I’m not that deeply involved in web design.

The articles of previous issues stay online and the website provides a search facility, though. That’s where A List Apart becomes an indispensable source for web know-how. It helped me a great deal while I was redesigning the Squareness website, which will be deployed soon. It contained the hints I needed to make the menus and tabs work.

deviantART is — as the name may hint at — an art community. People submit art of all kinds — mostly images of all sorts — and other people comment on those posts — named deviations. It’s not an exclusive club or something like that. They let me — with my rather limited art talents — in, so it cannot be exclusive ;) Many deviations probably don’t qualify as art. On the other hand: What is art and what are the metrics to assess whether something is art or not?

Yesterday version 5 of deviantART was deployed. The new version looks really sleek and is a great improvement over the last one. The menus need getting used to, though. The first time I opened one of the new menus I moved the mouse cursor to an entry with an arrow and waited. The arrow indicates that there is a sub menu and normally the sub menu appears by itself after a while. Not so in dA v5. You have to click on it. The sub menu then replaces the original one. So it’s somewhat like navigating a file system. It’s not bad and probably the right choice for a web application - cascading javascript menus tend to be a bit jerky. They shouldn’t have taken the arrow as a sub menu indicator, though. The similarity to the menus you see on other applications implies that something will happen that surely won’t happen.