Magnetblog

I <3 XML/XSL and CSS

I am falling in love with various markup languages today, thanks to the W3C's CSS reference and the XSL reference I posted about a few days ago. I'm working on a bunch of reports for work, and the raw report data gets spit out in XML format. Right now I'm using CSS and XSL transformations to spit out a bunch of different report formats, and, let me tell you, I never really *got* why these technologies were so wonderful until now. I mean, I got it - separation of style from content, yadda yadda yadda - but actually using the stuff on such a large scale instead of just on some personal project really drives the point home. So wonderful!

Color Scheme Chooser

Wow, this is a great tool for helping people like me pick color schemes for websites. By "people like me", I mean people who are programmers first and formost, but who like to pretend like they're designers from time to time. Don't forget to play with the brightness / saturation sliders on the right. [via kottke]

Nice XML/XSL Reference Site

Zvon.org looks like a pretty useful reference site for XML/XSL. I haven't looked through the whole site yet, but definitely found the XSL Reference to be really good.

Color Blender

Eric Meyer created a really useful tool for blending colors and getting the resulting hex codes. It's great when you have a color you'd like to use, but you need something a little lighter or darker - just take that color and blend it with white or black, respectively.

Go nuts, kids. The web-safe color palette is dead, anyways.