While the public beta of ');" onMouseOut="setTimeout('hideLayer()',500);" class=hotlink2>Photoshop CS3 has been getting all the headlines of late, Adobe hasn't stopped there. By the time you read this, Adobe will have officially announced preview versions of CSS Advisor and Spry, two Web development tools focused on making certain Web design and development tasks easier. The former is a community-driven Web site, while the latter is a framework designed to simplify the creation of AJAX (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)-driven sites.
Let's take a brief look at what's in store.
CSS Advisor
CSS Advisor was hatched to address what Adobe perceived as a gaping hole in Web design and development: the lack of a central repository for cross-browser/cross-platform CSS issues and solutions. CSS Advisor isn't software; it's "nothing more" (quoted because I don't really want to trivialize it) than a Web site, but one that is designed from the ground up to be community-driven.It's free to use, even if you don't own a single piece of Adobe software, and requires an Adobe ID in order to participate (though anonymous browsing of the site's content is permitted). If you've ever registered software at Adobe.com or posted a question in the Adobe forums, you should already be set up with an Adobe ID.
Here's a quick example of how CSS Advisor works: let's say that you have a bullet list with a background color specified, but you notice that the background doesn't show up in Internet Explorer 6 (go figure, right?). So, you head over to CSS Advisor, do a search on lists, backgrounds, ul, li, or whatever other relevant keyword you think might be relevant to the situation, and a page akin to what is shown in Figure 1 comes back:
In the interest of full disclosure, Figure 1 is an official screenshot provided by Adobe, but that perhaps-irrelevant tidbit notwithstanding, you'll see a description of the problem, associated tags, affected browsers, and, most importantly, a solution with an accompanying CSS example.
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