User Interface

An online magazine about web design, with some of the highest-quality articles available.

An assortment of CSS demos, tests, and documentation from one of the world’s experts on the topic.

Searchable API documents for Rails, as well as for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

An extensive, free online reference to CSS.

Extensive online HTML reference from the folks at SitePoint.

Home page for jQuery, a full featured, light-weight Javascript library. From site: “jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages.”

API documentation for the Prototype JavaScript framework.

Scriptaculous has moved its code to Github, and the documentation will be ported in time.

Scriptaculous in-place editor widget documentation.

A static capture, sans styling of the original Scriptaculous documentation wiki, which will eventually be ported to github.

Javascript function to add a tooltip when the user hovers over certain items. Uses Prototype and includes Rails helpers.

An open-source CSS framework, which provides a good starting point for your CSS designs.

An open-source, Ajax mapping client that runs in the browser and renders maps from Web Map Services (WMS), Web Feature Services (WFS), GeoRSS, and Google Maps.

Unless you use tables for layout, achieving equal-height columns is a matter of choosing the lesser of various evils. This is a sophisticated JavaScript solution that has a lot to recommend it.

Flash-based chart generator.

Windows-based utility for analyzing page load times.

Open-soure project for viewing RDocs with and Ajax interface. This is the code behind RailsBrain.com and RubyBrain.com.

Prism is a Mozilla tool for creating “single site browsers” to turn a web app into something that acts a little more like a desktop app.

Central site for the Prototype JavaScript framework.

Scriptaculous has moved its code to Github, and the documentation will be ported in time.

A library of extensions for the Prototype JavaScript framework.

Rails plug for creating Flash-based charts.

Plugin for using the Dojo JavaScript libraries with Ruby on Rails applications.

Comprehensive debugging and in-browser development tool for Firefox.

Plugin for integrating OpenSocial with Rails.

Browser Debugging tool (like Firebug), but runs on any device that Opera runs on.

Main web site for the Scriptaculous project.

Plugin for integrating the WYM editor into Rails.

Plugin for using Yahoo maps in Rails applications.

Great set of resources for learning the peculiarities of CSS.

A list of essential reading for people interested learning CSS. Most of the articles are from A List Apart, but the volume of articles at A List Apart can can be overwhelming to people just to getting started. Consider this a pocket guide to the best of A List Apart with a few additional links thrown in to spice it up a bit.

Slides from a session at SXSW 2008 that included the authors of the Prototype and Scriptaculous frameworks, as well as other notables.

A Digg-like site for web design articles.

Forum for discussion of Prototype, Scriptaculous, and other Rails spinoffs.

An excellent list of web-related conferences.

A great free visualization tool for picking sets of colors according to various schemes.

This free service renders your page in a variety of browsers for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh, so you can see how your design fares in browsers that you don’t personally have access to.

A great free service for seeing what different fonts and settings look like on screen.