Because I like pain and suffering, I recreate browser UI and form elements for my mock-ups from various sources for almost every other project. (Protip: This is how inertia and laziness manifests in more work later on.)

Today, I decided to get my act together and downloaded the Browser Form Elements PSD from Teehan+Lax, the same guys who made the wildly popular iPhone GUI PSD file.

If you need more UI elements from a slightly wider range of browsers, try the Designers Toolbox’s Web Browser Elements. Also recommended, but somewhat unrelated, is the excellent Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit.

The analysis was from Journalism.org and the very pretty chart was done by GOOD, which are both not old-school media, which runs counter to the results of the study.

Or does it?

Interesting…

Mark Pilgrim made a cute (and simultaneously ugly) illustration explaining Web Workers, a neat bit of Javascript magic that runs in parallel to the main page. It’s a clever, cool and very capable piece of technology that was sorely missing all these years.

Here’s the thing about using comics and illustrations to explain things: they tend to over-simplify the most complex things, as Mr Pilgrim has done. Wikipedia has an example using a Web Worker thread to continuously compute prime numbers – yes, prime numbers. HTML5 Web Workers are only for those who know what they’re doing.

For the rest of us… hey, what else could go wrong?

Welcome to the new decade. Java is a restricted platform, Google is evil, Apple is a monopoly and Microsoft are the underdogs.

›› A little Twitter cleverness amidst all that noise

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Actually, HTML5 works just fine with Firefox, Chrome and Opera. It’s just that Apple’s demo page has some Webkit-specific features enabled. So much for Steve Jobs rejecting Flash because it was not an open standard.

Styling HTML forms using just CSS has some drawbacks, especially when it comes to elements and tags like radio buttons.

One way to dance around this limitation is to use a JavaScript library like jQuery to do some pretty nifty form styling. Here’s a quick list of free and good jQuery plugins to help skin HTML forms:

1. Niceforms:
   Lucian Slatineanu has an excellent script for replacing the boring default HTML form elements. It’s also very easy to customise and build your own theme. (See the Demo.)
2. jqTransform:
   Another easy-to-use script that’s good on the eye and also customisable.
3. (Functional) Pretty Forms:
   I’ve not used this before, but on first glance, it doesn’t look too hard to implement and looks minimal and slick.
4. jNice:
   jNice is nice and looks great but there doesn’t seem to be much documentation.

One major caveat: Your mileage for IE6 support may vary—don’t hold your breath. I seriously consider the job done if the scripts degrade gracefully (as Niceforms does).

That’s some seriously insane (but totally valid) CSS by Román Cortés.

And now I’m feeling thirsty.

Weirdly brilliant, yooouuutuuube.com takes a YouTube video and cuts it all up into some bizarre lomo action sampler-like strips. I used the Doves‘ excellent Black and White Towns video to try it out but I think it’d probably work better with psychelic or cheesy 80s videos.

A good topic for discussion on It’s Nice That. I think I may drop by and anonymously comment on how awesome the topic is…

YouTube as your website — clever!

The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys… My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.

›› Gotta love Stephen King