Among other things, 2005 is going to be the year of the (10-year-old!!) PNG.

A truly useful CSS resource, css.maxdesign presents examples of CSS list treatments, a nicely-executed floatutorial (that’s a tutorial about floating elements), and more. (thanks victor)

Jeff has a nice forward-it-to-the-VP writeup of the business value of web standards.

Zeldman: Designing With Web Standards

Of course, as with most CSS/XHTML sites, all the examples have relatively similar columnar layouts. It’s no accident that news and corporate marketing sites have been the first to embrace CSS/XHTML. Compare the amazing work Move Design has been doing in Flash (“the grid is dead, long live the grid!”).

CSS Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design is a wonderful little site. A few of the designs are quite lovely. I do have to point out that if we need a web site devoted to proving that you actually can design pretty sites with CSS (honest you can), then something ain’t quite right.

Using Background-Image to Replace Text

Not sure if I ever saw this… WebDogme 01. I don’t think web design in 2001 (or even 2003) has gotten anywhere near where cinema was in 1995, but I always like a good manifesto to mash up the brain.

Eric Meyer on CSS, in particular the browser hacks page.

Zeldman: 99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete. Yeah, but…

In general, I agree, but with 2 caveats:

First of all, a lot of people still use Netscape 4, including some of the people writing the checks to designers.

Second, CSS-P is a big pain in the a**. And don’t send me a link to some CSS layouts page. Yes, it’s fine for putting a few boxes on a page, and you can do some neat stuff with it, but anyone who’s actuallly wrestled with a complex layout (say for a web application) knows that it is downright nasty getting CSS-P (which was designed specifically for layout for gosh sakes) to do what you want. I’m not denying CSS is an improvement over spacer gifs and the like, but it leaves a lot to be desired as a layout language, and requires plenty of ugly hacks of its own. There, I’ve said it.

HTML: OPTGROUP—Option Group.. I didn’t know about this (which is a good sign, because it means I haven’t been spending my time dealing with HTML ;)

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