typography

(Note: this entry was originally published on the Skyscanner Geeks blog.)

Andy Clarke discusses why it is not necessary for a site to look exactly the same in every browser: Five CSS design browser differences I can live with.
Digital Web Magazine has a sample chapter from Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank’s provocatively titled book, “Everything you know about CSS is wrong“. It covers table-related properties in CSS.
Jonathan Hoefler blogs about a team of scientists using an atomic force microscope to create the world’s smallest writing. The scientists claim “It’s not possible to write any smaller than this”. Really?
Jason Santa Maria shares his design-related recommended reading list.
Amazon shows once again that they are all about the user experience: “Frustration-free packaging“. (Non-parents may react with a WTF? But for parents, this is an OMG!)
Flickr: Lessons learned while building an iPhone site.

Steve Yegge on the “Universal Design Pattern“. (Via Simon Willison)
Alex Vasquez of Particletree points to some articles about “beautiful code“.
Milan Negovan of AspnetResources.com reviews Bob Martin’s new book, Clean Code.

Cringely on threading and clouding.
Amazon’s EC2 service is now out of beta, and has an SLA with a 99.95% uptime target. They are now starting work on supporting Windows and SQL Server.
Microsoft is getting on board the whole cloud thing with the newly announced Azure platform. Like many of Microsoft’s early glimpses of new technology, it appears to be suitably nebulous.

For those times when you want to talk about your shiny new idea but are worried that your buddy might nick it, Rands delivers the FriendDA.
A unistable (or monostable) polyhedron is a shape that will only balance on one of its faces (assuming uniform density). The unistable polyhedron with the fewest known faces is shown below. See notes at Wolfram Mathworld and the Mathematical Association of America. (Via the Risks Digest.)