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50 free and exclusive Twitter icons that you can use for your websites. The icons are provided in both raster and vector formats: The transparent PNG versions are 256×256.

Now that we've announced the book, we can also announce another exciting thing: Handcrafted CSS: A Day of Markup & Style will be a unique, one-day workshop presented by Ethan Marcotte and myself on September 14, 2009 at the Hawthorne Hotel here in Salem, Massachusetts.

You'll get a copy of the book (the Video Edition, including the DVD), and we'll present the content live, throughout four takeway-packed sessions, followed by Q&A. Breakfast, lunch and two snack breaks are also provided. And we'll cap off the day with an after party at an awesome location to be determined.

The Hawthorne Hotel is located in downtown Salem, just 16 miles north of Boston. It's also just a 10-minute walk from the MBTA Commuter Rail station which connects Salem to Boston in about 25 minutes.

This will be a unique opportunity to buy a book, then have the authors work through it live, with a chance to ask questions along the way. It's sure to be a fun day -- and we're pretty damned excited about it.

Early-bird and student tickets are now available at a discounted price of $399 per person. Act quick! There's limited seating for 100 fine people like you.

Oh, and interested in sponsoring the event? We'd love to hear from you.

2009-07-03: W3C launched a new Device APIs and Policy Working Group, co-Chaired by Robin Berjon (Vodafone) and Frederick Hirsch (Nokia). The group's mission is to create client-side APIs that enable the development of Web Applications and Web Widgets that interact with devices services such as Calendar, Contacts, and Camera. Additionally, the group will produce a framework for the expression of security policies that govern access to security-critical APIs (such as the APIs listed previously). Per its charter, this group will conduct its work in public. Learn more about the Device APIs and Policy Working Group. (Permalink)

2009-07-03: The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group has published six Last Call Working Drafts. Together, they allow systems using a variety of rule languages and rule-based technologies to interoperate with each other and with other Semantic Web technologies. Three of the drafts define XML formats with formal semantics for storing and transmitting rules:

A look at how CSS's @font-face property- supported in FF3, can be used with current CSS selectors to create engaging, nuanced and more mature typography.

The web's future isn't what the web's past cracked it up to be. 1999: XML is the light and XHTML is the way. 2009: XHTML is dead—kind of. From the W3C news archive for 2 July 2009: XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources ...

Clusterfuck, despite its saucy name, does not refer to a pleasurable group activity. Its origins are military, its antecedents bloody. The Urban Dictionary offers ten pages of definitions. Our favorite is a double entendre on "cluster bomb" and the oak leaf or star cluster insignia worn by incompetent military brass ...

The earliest websites were minimal in the extreme, but without the style and flair to make a virtue of their simplicity. 37signals and Kottke pioneered the combination of simplicity with deft design sense. Cardigan made it art. Although it is never popular, never the dominant trend, rarely wins design awards, and ...

It's outrageous that the CSS standard created in 1996 is not properly supported in Outlook 2010. Let's do something about it. Hundreds of millions use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the web, and Microsoft Outlook to send and receive email. As everyone reading this knows, the good news is that ...

In Issue No. 286 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites, Patrick Lynch explains why beauty matters in design, and Mark Birbeck introduces us to RDFa. Introduction to RDFa: Learn how semantic features normally confined to the head of an HTML document can be used to add semantic richness ...

WaSP InterAct is a "living, open web standards curriculum." Put together by an amazing group of dedicated educators and industry experts, the curriculum is designed to teach students the skills of the web professional—and ease the burden of colleges and universities, struggling to develop timely and appropriate curricula for our ...

For the third edition of Designing With Web Standards, I've brought in a co-author: the brilliant and talented Mr Ethan Marcotte. Mr Marcotte is a web designer/developer who "works for Airbag Industries as a Senior Designer, swears profusely on Twitter, and is getting married to an incredible lady." He is also ...

The zeldman.com redesign is up. You're soaking in it. It's old school. It's brand heritage, baby. It's retro 90s web. It's so retro it's nowtro. Because old is the new new. Mainly, the redesign is content focused. After so many years as a web designer, and after creative directing so many ...

Michael Lopp shares lessons on how to separate office politics from truth when leading a team, and Lyle Mullican explains how the key to faster, more empowering user experience may begin in better database design, in Issue No. 285 of A List Apart, for people who make websites. [tags]A List Apart, ...

The html5 gallery is a showcase of sites using HTML 5 markup. html5 gallery has two primary aims, the first is to showcase sites that use html5 for markup, so that we can see how people have interpret[t]ed the specification and how they’ve implemented it. This leads me on to the ...

A "Not Safe for Work" Tag has been proposed for HTML 5: One of the most common descriptive notes people have to write using text when they post links or images to blogs, comments or anywhere in HTML is to say "this link is not safe for work" or simply "NSFW". ...

Robert Black was right. OS X 10.5.7 adversely affects the internal heat management of some iMacs (and apparently also some MacBooks), causing the machines to overheat. Overheating, in turn, leads to such problems as freezes during iCal sync; freezes during iTunes sync; and the inability of attached hard drives to ...

Update: see OS X 10.5.7 overheats some Macs. Fellow Mac users, let's see if we can isolate the triggers of the OS X 10.5.7 blues. If we learn the cause, others may know whether it's safe for them to update, and we may provide Apple's engineers with a clue on how ...

Update: see OS X 10.5.7 overheats some Macs. Apple's OS X 10.5.7 update is dangerously unpredictable. Although many Mac users have updated without incident, many others have had nothing but trouble. Friends' problems range from dead hard drives to frazzled MacBooks to freezes and beyond. In my case, the update destabilized ...

Even if your computer craps out, there's no reason to lose your work. Rated five stars on VersionTracker,  SuperDuper! is the dead-simplest and most reliable backup program for Macintosh I know. With a click, it makes a fully bootable backup of your hard drive. If disaster strikes your data, or ...