Archive for the ‘Web Standards’ Category
Jan
15
2008
at 2:40pm
Do you ever have the task of fixing someone else’s code? Someone else’s crappy code? Don’t you wish you could just start over?
You just need to make a few small changes. But the CSS is such a mess! It would be so much better if you could just re-write it. Cut down on the crud and make it all nice and clean and elegeant. Take it all down like Mike Holmes.
But there’s not enough time for that. The changes are due by tomorrow so you have to just make do with what’s there and add in your own necessarily crappy code.
Sigh… this happens to me all the time these days. And I’m sitting here thinking, should I just fix it? How long would it take? There’s a little brick wall here — do I just climb over or do I start again?
Granted, this code isn’t *that* bad. It’s relatively standards-ey (circa 2004-ish). Just lots of layers of disorganized CSS a bunch of IE5 hacks. It still bugs me though.
Posted in General, Web Standards | 2 Comments »
Dec
17
2007
at 2:15pm
Todays’s 24 Ways article, Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix is another take on listing the fonts available in different operating systems and encouraging designers to use a wider range of fonts. This is something I covered with my Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows (not sure what to think about the similarities there!). Obviously Richard Rutter knows a whole lot more about typography than I do so it’s good to have his take on this topic.
I was inspired to come up with my list after looking at the font stacks on Joe Clark’s site. Check out his typography stylesheet for some interesting ideas.
I find myself using the list I from my A Padded Cell article all the time now. Just today I added a few more options as a back-up for a heading that’s already replaced by sIFR. From the way I have it’s easy to pick one font from each column, although I find Rutter’s chart to be a lot cleaner and better as a quick reference (and he’s got Adobe fonts included). I thought a lot about the best way to display that information, especially since I wanted to include information about which fonts are near equivalents of each other, as originated here.
In an upcoming update to A Padded Cell I’m using this font stack:
"Lucida Grande","Lucida Sans Unicode","Eras Medium ITC","Mg Open Moderna",Helvetica,Verdana,sans-serif
It’s working well so far but we need to do some more thorough testing before final release. I’ve also used that list to add some Linux alternatives to the font stack in various stylesheets I’ve come across at work.
If you’re finding my list to be useful I’d love to hear about it!
Posted in Design, Software, Web Standards | No Comments »
Dec
13
2007
at 10:40am
The Web has become essential to our everyday lives. We can’t let one company, Microsoft, control its innovation. This is a fight to protect the Web’s future.
I hope that as developers and Web users you will all show support for this cause. This is not Opera vs. Microsoft, but rather the continued innovation of the Web vs. Microsoft.
The complaint was filed with the European Comission and essentially requests that Microsoft
- implement web standards properly
- detach IE from the Windows operating system or provide other browsers by default
Posted in Software, Web Standards | No Comments »
Sep
17
2007
at 3:00pm
My latest article is now posted at A Padded Cell. It’s about the over-use of div tags and some methods you can use to simplify your code. You can find it here:
Div-itis: What it is and How to Avoid it
Sorry for the lack of posting lately! I’ve had some other things on the go but that’s (mostly) over now so I should be back to regular posting again soon.
Posted in Web Standards | No Comments »
Aug
24
2007
at 11:17am
Laura wrote me and asked why the three sites I have discussed so far in my Great Websites series use tables for layout. Good question! I did notice this about them when I first wrote up my crtiques, but it didn’t affect my decision to include them in the series (although I hadn’t put 2+2 together and figured out that all three were table based). Why? Because I was already drawn in to the site. That’s what really matters – the user experience. Who cares if the site is using tables for layout when the experience is that good? Read more…
Posted in Great Websites, Web Standards | 3 Comments »
Aug
02
2007
at 5:29pm
I’ve got another post up at the SEOmoz user generated blog. This time it’s about the intersection between SEO and Web Standards.
From what I’ve read, there are some misunderstandings on both sides. SEO’s tend to think that validation = web standards and that’s all you need to know. Standards advocates tend to think that standards make a difference for SEO. But do they? That was the question. Read more:
Web Standards and SEO: More Questions than Answers
Posted in Marketing/SEO/Monetization, Web Standards | No Comments »
