Tools

• PowerBand - A powerful IE add-in to explore and partially modify current webpage. Very cool and powerful tool. The only complaint I have is that working with CSS is somewhat limited. Computed (a.k.a runtime) CSS for an element can be copied into clipboard, but that’s it. I can’t even view it on the fly.

Design

• UI Hall of Shame - Love it or hate it but most developers eventually have to get into UI design. I for one have to do it quite often and I realize there’s a lot of space for improvement for me. One of the ways to learn something is by looking at what not to do and this website is all about bad examples of UI design.

Web development

• Pure CSS buttons and XML button via CSS - Often blogs feature button-like elements to allow readers to subscribe to the blog feed. Most of the time images are used, but there are a few techniques I found that can unleash the power of CSS to replace image with HTML tag. If you own a blog and are not afraid of modifying it’s look you might find the links interesting.
• Whitespace in the DOM - White spaces are always a tricky subject when it comes to HTML (or XML) programming and understanding how they are processed is important for any serious developer. This article covers how Mozilla treats them and how to overcome some of the limitations imposed as the result. I’ve actually done something similar in my UI project to make code compatible with both IE and Mozilla.
• W3C CSS2 Specifications - I wish I’ve known of this place earlier. It’s one of the best resources on CSS programming. It’s well written and easy to understand (unlike most of W3C writings). There are a lot of examples and discussion on how various special cases should be handled by the browser. The only problem is that none of the browsers fully support CSS specifications. You find that some things work differently in IE or Mozilla from what you might have expected after reading this manual. Still this book is a good starting point when you try to understand why something is behaving unexpectedly.

Web development examples

• CSS Desktop - a Windows-like desktop simulation written in JavaScript. Pretty nifty although still needs some work.
• WebCmd - an example of command prompt written using JavaScript and AJAX. This approach could create powerful tools for remote administration through web interface, but I doubt there are many uses for it other than educational. (via http://www.ajaxian.com/archives/2005/06/ajaxian_command.html)