Archive for January, 2004
Web design
From the great Dave Shea (creator of the CSS Zen Garden. (no relation to Dan (At least I don’t think))) (yay for parenthetical statements).
I used to think [that you should develop first in IE, then test in Mozilla and the rest], but there’s a good reason why my mindset shifted. If you develop in IE, what happens is that you create dependencies on its buggy rendering. Since the other browsers don’t use the same flawed rendering, you’ll have to bend over backward to hack your layout into working properly with most of them. In fact, when I was developing in IE, I used to curse Mozilla quite frequently for rendering my code ‘wrong’. My experience has been that if you start out by developing in Mozilla or Safari, and then test in everything else afterward, you have to do much less hacking to make it work. The fringe browsers benefit; IE5/Mac gets a surprising number of my layouts right without any extra effort. Opera generally cooperates, although it can be a crapshoot at times. IE (per the general tone of this thread) is the big problem. Can you get away with developing in IE? Of course. Is it easier? Generally not. If you don’t care about the fringe browsers, then you’ll get away with it. If you do care, then you’ll have a far nicer time developing in Mozilla.
Developing for Mozilla (and everything else besides IE) first, and then hacking for IE’s shortcomings has made my Web design life a lot easier. I’m still struggling with a site (can’t give a link yet, sorry), that I designed for IE, and am fervently hacking to get to fit in everything else. It’s a mess. Meanwhile, my sites where I started developing for Mozilla and then hacked for IE are flying high and beautiful.
UPDATE: Doug Bowman (most famous for his redesign of Wired) had a great blog on Monday about the Headaches of IE. Such a bad browser…
As I said before you should switch to Mozilla
Definition List
One important aspect of coding with Web standards is semantically correct markup (that is, choosing the proper HTML tag for the TEXT you are MARKing UP. (HTML = hyper TEXT MARKUP language). An analogy can be drawn between using semantically correct markup, and using proper grammar. I think a more apt analogy is comparing proper markup to using English. Example: “Cat brown the sits leaf pile on of a”, is definitely not correct if you are trying to say “The brown cat sits on a pile of leaves.” However, this is the way many Web designers’ HTML looks…
There was a great article on an underused, but very useful little tag known as the definition list. Check it out.
Also take a look at the end of the article for some cool things you can do with definition lists via CSS.
William Gates KBE
Bill Gates was Knighted
“The honorary KBE is in recognition of his outstanding contribution to enterprise, employment, education and the voluntary sector in the United Kingdom,” the Foreign Office said.
This on the heels of Tim Berners-Lee’s Knighthood leaves me with some hope :)
IAEA redesign
The International Atomic Energy Agency recently redesigned their Web site using CSS and XHTML. It is good to see an international organization using international Standards in designing their site. Their previous version was a mish mash of tables, images-instead-of-text, tag soup, and other highly inaccessible (and nonsensical) “techniques”.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Andy Budd of UK based Message Design wrote a great article on the Business case for Web Accessibility, a topic of great interest to me. Check it out.
Simply put, web site accessibility is about making a site accessible to the largest range of people possible. For the majority of website owners, this is simply good business sense. After all, the more people you have using your site the better.
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