Quality feeling UI design +

When I first visited pownce and deviantArts website, their background texture give me an unique feeling of material-like surface. It's very distinctive visual from HTML-ish webpages. Today I understand why. Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces by Mike Rundle

Web design / digital content design is way different from traditional design. On screen layout systems support much richer styles, like transparency (RGBA), sub-pixel rendering, dithering, interaction (Mike Rundle's website logo can move!), multimedia. That's why MIT's most awesome lab is called nothing else but Media Lab.

I wish there's a native texture and rendering library in all browsers. Think of embed an simple static style sheet to indicate browsers to display pre-compiled processing/nodebox generated textures, something like this:

$mycolor { color: #646464; color-noise:63%; }
.button { background-color:$mycolor; }

How awesome is that! :)

via