Web Standards Solutions 157
| Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook | |
| author | Dan Vederholm |
| pages | 253 |
| publisher | Friends of Ed |
| rating | 8.5 of 10 |
| reviewer | William Nichols |
| ISBN | 1590593812 |
| summary | A clear reference on designing with XHTML and CSS through a standards based approach |
With the title Web Standard Solutions (which we will refer to as WSS from here on), you might expect this to be a book that is going to solve your problems, and without disappointment that is exactly what is does.
WSS takes a problem based approach instead of the commonly used project based approach to teaching you the value of designing to strict standards. I found this approach very refreshing, WSS kept my attention by presenting a problem, and then presenting 3-5 solutions on how to accomplish the task at hand. With each example Dan takes you through several ways to achieve the required result. Each of the methods shown are common patterns that different developers/designers would use, and the pros and cons of each are well articulated.
A lot of you may know Dan from his Simplebits. website. If you frequent Simplebits you will immediately recognize his style in the writing of WSS. Much like the mini quizzes that are used on his blog, this book is really a compilation of the hurdles that you are likely to face when trying to design to strict standards, and the solutions presented will get you over them.
WSS will also help the budding developer realize the business value of designing to standards. Once you start designing with standards, search engine rankings can jump, continued maintenance becomes a breeze, and the accessibility to screen readers (or other requirements) can be elegantly met.
One of my favorite parts of the book is the in-depth techniques used to style lists. WSS shows you how to take a regular non-formatted list and, using CSS, style it in several ways: as a vertical shopping list; without bullets and indenting; with custom bullets; and eventually as a horizontal navigation bar with changing bullets.
This book really stands out when covering the most basic foundations of layout such as paragraphs, lists, headers, titles and the like. The first half of the book really gets into the proper use of the most basic CSS techniques and proper selection of tags for headings, quotations, etc. While the second half of the book requires you to use what you have learned along the way to start building CSS based layouts.
If you are a regular at some of the advanced sites like CSS ZenGarden or A List Apart this book may be a little basic for you. Even still you will probably be able to take some techniques from it that you can use, this book is really more for the designer that is capable but not quite deadly with their CSS knowledge.
Overall I would give Web Standards Solutions the Markup and Style Handbook an 8.5 out of 10. I really think it does a fantastic job at keeping the reader interested in the subject (something that is often very hard to do in technical books) and will definitely be a great business tool for you. A quick read it is, but a valuable reference that has earned a spot next to my keyboard, my 3 bars of caffeinated soap, and the trusty case of bawls.
You can purchase Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Definition of Irony: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Definition of Irony: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Definition of Irony: (Score:2, Funny)
Got it?
Re:Definition of Irony: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Definition of Irony: (Score:4, Insightful)
Not So Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
The articles on A List Apart create a static HTML mockup of the front page. However, there's more to Slashdot than the front page, and it's not just a matter of copying that mockup onto the site and having done with it. The Template Toolkit templates have to be rewritten to use the new code, and similar new markup and CSS must be written for things like comments, the comment form, the nutty little boxes and so on.
CowboyNeal has said repeatedly that if someone was to submit a complete, working template he'd consider making use of it. Also, more recently it was claimed that someone was working on one. The software that powers Slashdot is an open source project, and Template Toolkit is not specific to Slashdot and pretty well documented. If it really bothers you, scratch your own itch and submit a patch.
Re:Not So Easy (Score:1)
Re:Not So Easy (Score:5, Informative)
The Perl bit is already written. You just need to write a set of Template Toolkit [template-toolkit.org] templates. I seem to remember from looking before that the way they are used in Slash is pretty obvious once you find the template files in the source distribution [sourceforge.net].
Re:Not So Easy (Score:2, Interesting)
I am working on Slash theme that complies with web standards. It's mostly editing templates but also some perl hacking.
If anyone feels like helping out it is available from CVS: :pserver:anonymous@strict.openflows.org:/var/lib/c vs co strict-600
cvs -d
Re:Not So Easy (Score:2)
Re:Definition of Irony: (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW, this has been active at least for three years, but very few people know about it.
Re:Definition of Irony: (Score:1, Interesting)
Geez. I mean I'm all for the geeky/nerdy/retro circa 1996 html "look" but similarly horrid code to match that wastes gigabytes of bandwidth...
Re:Definition of Irony: (Score:1)
Re:Definition of Irony: (Score:2, Insightful)
If someone from the W3C cares enough, they can write the email address that they get on the resulting page and tell us that their script is smarter now.
Re:Definition of Irony: (Score:1)
Re:Definition of Expected: (Score:5, Insightful)
Becuase many times the standards do not tell you elegant solutions which people have used in the past.
Kinda like the difference between English class and Creative Writing classes
Ted Tschopp
Re:Definition of Expected: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Definition of Expected: (Score:1, Insightful)
I personnaly like to read books and read about other people's experiences. Specs from the W3C will NOT teach you about the various quirks and problem you will encounter while trying to code with standards in mind. Any experience web designer will tell you that coding standard HTML and CSS is easy. Making it work in IE/Firefox/Netscape/Safari/Opera at the same time
error in the infobox in the review (Score:3, Informative)
Re:error in the infobox in the review (Score:1)
Karma whoring information (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Tip for auto-validating PHP generated XHTML (Score:5, Informative)
Simply turn on output buffering at the top of your script using ob_start(). It's best to do this in a common header script called by all your pages.
Then, in a common footer script, load the output buffer (retrieved as a string using ob_get_contents()) into an instance of PHP.XPath using the importFromString method.
If your page displays, it will at least be valid XML (most of the way towards being valid XHTML). If you break the well-formedness of your output your page will not display because PHP.XPath will raise an error.
Re:Tip for auto-validating PHP generated XHTML (Score:5, Informative)
Put this at the very top of every HTML page:
Then if you do your development in Mozilla/Firefox, it will die any time your XHTML is malformed.
It has the added benefit of something you would leave in on your production server.
Re:Tip for auto-validating PHP generated XHTML (Score:2, Informative)
/**
* Sends the content type as XHTML if the agent supports it.
*
* @return bool $sent True if XHTML was sent, false if HTML.
*/
function xhtmlHeader()
{
global $client;
Base::logMessage(__CLASS__.'::'.__FUNCTION__ , null, null, PEAR_LOG_DEBUG);
$qHTML = 1;
$qXHTML = 0;
$accept = PMK_Util::param($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], '');
$uAgent = PMK_Util::param($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], '');
$xhtml = preg_match("/a
Re:Tip for auto-validating PHP generated XHTML (Score:2)
This is short-sighted. Looking for an occurance of "application/xhtml+xml" in an HTTP Accept string [w3.org] isn't reliably going to determine a client that prefers XHTML. A user-agent that doesn't want
Re:Tip for auto-validating PHP generated XHTML (Score:3, Informative)
But you can go further get validity if you want. Instead of putting that stored content into PHP.XPath, try writing it to a temp file and running onsgmls -wxml -E0 -s -c /etc/sgml/catalog $tmpfile 2>&1 over it. You'll need to ensure that you have nsgmls and the W3C DTD's installed, but that's exceedingly simple in debian; you just need the opensp and w3c-dtd-xhtml packages. Any output from that you can stuff into the
Re:Tip for auto-validating PHP generated XHTML (Score:2)
re standards (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither S in CSS stands for "Standard". What i mean but that is that do NOT expect CSS to give you a right once play on any browser with the same results.
CSS is great to reduce download speed of pages. To keep all the style in one place. To separate logic from data. But do not think writing a web site in CSS will solve all your browser compatibility problems.And don't fall under the influence of some elitist CSS religion.
The amount of hacks, even by the experts, required to even get close to modern browser compatibility is really hilarious. (ooops i mean painful.)
So get into CSS. Use all the great features in offers, but remember that its not magic bullet.
Yes, i'm sure there are some simple sites that can be pulled off with CSS and look pretty much the same but honestly, when you reduce your site to this level, they ALLL look alike:
-header graphic
-2 or 3 columns
-a sort of anasepctic feel to it.
In the mean time, stick with a combination of CSS AND minimal tables.
Don't believe it? FIne, its not my hair that you will pulling out
Re:re standards (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... you might be suprised at the varity that is allowed when you know what you are doing with CSS. I would have to say that the sites at CSSZenGarden [csszengarden.com] look quite different. I could point out other examples, but I'll promote a bit of myself, just click on my URL and check out the code for both the front page and the Forums. Both use tables only on imported content from outside sources. The rest is full CSS.
Ted Tschopp
Re:re standards (Score:2)
I went to csszengarden and clicked on a couple of sites.
Its showing exactly what i am talking about. Fine and pretty and nice as they are (and i mean no disrespect to the authors) those are simple sites.(not large scale corp sites) and yes i know of fastcompany.com. I'm not going to be pure CSS just to be cool if it blows out my budget. and people like dan (the book writing in this article) agrees. table != bad.
The stuff i work on and am talking about are much more complex. (I actually got into a min
Re:re standards (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand that tables are not bad, but that's not the point. If you follow the patterns of developing in only CSS, you end up solving a bunch of other problems you face later down the line in the development and maintence lifecycles (accessifying the site, turning pages into CMS template
Re:re standards (Score:2)
AOL [aol.com], Wired [wired.com], ESPN [espn.com] not large enough?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:re standards (Score:2)
But, so what? Yes, HTML readability is nice. Yes, saving bandwidth is nice. Yes, data flexibility is nice. But what does HTML readability get us? Nothing, of course, because most of us aren't editing our HTML with a text editor any more (a
I agree (Score:1)
I couldn't agree more. The time invested in perfecting CSS does NOT repay itself with most sites. CSS takes much longer to get right than table-based design and CSS-P was something of an afterthought, hence the contortions required to do some things in CSS which are trivial with tables, eg. getting the background colour of a column to extend to the largest height of a group of columns.
The sheer weight of hacks required to make CSS work makes me wonder, with Opera 7.5 STILL not getting there, whether the C
Re:re standards (Score:3, Insightful)
The last time I visited this site, it seemed the different designs rely too heavily on graphics. I was about to reply to the original post, but, then, I realized that good cross-platform CSS+HTML pages really do end up following the predictable header/column approach with light graphics for modem users.
Given the nature of putting content on the WWW, I really don't think this is that big of a deal. I'd take a simple header/column CS
Re:re standards (Score:4, Interesting)
Off the top of my head (finishing a long day at work):
1) CSS Zen Garden is great, but it's much easier to mess around with CSS style-switching like that when you have only one page to support. It becomes much more difficult to do when you have a lot of different pages with different types of content and different amounts of content on different pages.
Plus, a lot of the designs on CSS Zen Garden are eye-catching - but hardly useful (and rather distracting) if you are trying to make a serious site geared towards content delivery. This it not a slam on CSS Zen Garden at all, which is, after all, supposed to show that CSS can deliver the goods when it comes to amazing graphic design. Just that, at the end of the day, what matters is normally intuitive content delivery wrapped in a good design, not being able to switch styles.
2) It can still be quite a bitch to get CSS to work the same in Opera, Mozilla, and IE.
3) Given the difficulty of getting CSS stylesheets to work correctly across all browsers, you have to ask yourself - doesn't it make more sense to use tabular design and some content management system that contains templating features, rather than struggling with the theoretically cool but difficult to implement CSS design switching?
4) One of the things that initially attracted me to CSS was the possibility of creating web pages that are more accessible to sight-impaired and motion-impaired users. But, after much effort, it has become clear to me that CSS is not a magic bullet for this at all. First of all, tabular design is not as inaccessible as it's made out to be. Screen readers are very good at dealing with tabular design by now. Secondly, there are a lot of situations where CSS has no bearing on the issue. For example, if I have a budget tool that I want to update costs on the fly, that will wreak havoc on screen readers, regardless of whether CSS is used or not. (More generally, web standards are no magic bullet. For example, let's say we have a tool where most users will benefit from being able to click on an item and have a pop-up window appear with more information on the item. Now, some users will have JavaScript turned off, meaning that the budget item link should use TARGET=BLANK for those users. But according to HTML 4/XHTML 1 Strict, you cannot use TARGET=BLANK any more, because that would be mixing content and design. In theory, the W3C is absolutely right. Where the link opens is a design issue, and should be handled by manipulating the DOM, not in the anchor tag itself. But, unfortunately, theory leaves those users with JavaScript turned off with a much lesser experience, becuase they would benefit from viewing both the additional information in the pop-up window and the information they were viewing previously at the same time on the screen. Maybe that's the right trade-off to make, but it's still a trade-off.)
5) The idea that with different stylesheets you can support radically different user agents - Palm users, WebTV users, users with 640x480 resolution, users with 1024x768 resolution, screen readers, etc. - is a great idea. I question how many sites have actually put it into action, though. Let's be honest - how many site really have a need to deliver information to users across all those user agent types yet? And, if you do have such a need, you're probably a huge site where it may make more sense to - again - use an advanced CMS that can handle that by relying on custom conversion from XML to whatever template you have for the different user agents, rather than CSS.
6) CSS would become much more useful if we could get some of the features that were be
css switching (Score:1)
Re:css switching (Score:2)
Styles via cookies, an ugly approach if you ask me.
Re:re standards (Score:2)
7) CSS isn't a magic bullet for making clean HTML, either. One of the ideas behind CSS is that, by separating content from design, you only use the HTML tags required to describe the data, and don't introduce any extraneous ones that are used just for design.
Unfortunately, due to some current limitations of CSS, you see a lot of CSS sites introducing extraneous HTML tags - just different kinds of extraneous HTML tags. Where old sites used TABLEs where there was no tabular data, you'll se
Exactly (Score:1)
Some web pages, such as photo albums, actually increase in size when converted to CSS layout. The idea that replacing table tags with equivalent div's and span's somehow reduces code bloat is a misconception.
As for accessibility, would someone please present the case for improving devices which help minorities to access existing content instead of having the majority limit their design options to cater for poorly-featured devices? Isn't this back-to-front thinking?
Re:Exactly (Score:1)
Only if you do it wrong.
try something like this:
Re:Exactly (Score:1)
Re:Exactly (Score:1)
Let's try again :-) I think that should be:
.photo_gallery img {
Re:re standards (Score:3, Interesting)
In most of the designs, custom images were made to replace the header text to get a nice look. It is a good trick, don't get me wrong, but this doesn't allow you to create a site with different content using the same template. You will have to generate new header images for every page you make.
Re:re standards (Score:2)
CRT tans (Score:1)
Re:re standards (Score:1, Interesting)
i'm sure you meant "presentation from content"...as the logic would be whatever PHP/ASP/JSP/etc you got running
and no, css does not make a page more antiseptic, just as using tables does not result in sites looking like an excel spreadsheet. yes, it takes time and effort to learn it, but think back at how much time you wasted learning all those wonderful obscure tricks to coax a table into displaying the way you want, with nesting, spacer graphics, setting widths and heights
Re:re standards (Score:1)
tables should be used for tabular data _only_. all layout should, and can, be done with CSS. there are a few hacks (box model [tantek.com], etc.) that you'll need to get it looking right cross-browser but it's really pretty easy. if you can't do it then YOU can't do it, there are TONS of sites out there doing it with only a handful of hacks (and they're almost ALL for IE...no surprise).
Re:re standards (Score:3, Interesting)
It's still alpha software, but it works pretty well in my testing.
Re:re standards (Score:1, Insightful)
That's a bit of an exaggeration. And please, don't beat around the bush; when you say "modern browser compatibility" you mean getting it to work with IE. If you didn't have to care about IE, doing layouts (of whatever complexity you can imagine) in CSS would be a breeze and would look the way you want it to everywhere.
To be honest, I've never done a table layout
Re:re standards (Score:3, Interesting)
Conversely, I can use tables and image spacers to layout a page and I can be guaranteed that it will look the same in a large variety of browsers because tables are very common. In fact, the
Re:re standards (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't believe it. Consider the following:
- Internet explorer is the dominant browser...
- (well over 90%)
...and it doesn't support CSS fully. - (not much CSS1, and no CSS2)
It's incredibly easy to lay out a complex web site without using table hacks when you use CSS and have a dominant browser that fully supports it. The problem is that only browsers based on Mozilla code (Camino, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) have support for these standards. There's nothing wrong with the standards out there currently, but there is something wrong with the people who don't obey them on the application (server) level.It's a tad cliche, but Internet Explorer is doing more harm than good without all its serious security problems.
Re:re standards (Score:1, Informative)
Opera and Konquerer-based browsers do as well. They have some minor rendering differences, but it's trivial to make things look identical across these. The trouble is that the dominant browser is crap. Still, it's easier to design for standards and tweak for IE than to design for IE and tweak for anything else.
Re:re standards (Score:3, Interesting)
> The problem is that only browsers based on Mozilla code (Camino, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) have support for these standards.
A possible temporary solution is this one [edwards.name]. On the long-term, I suggest sacrificing goats until the MSIE team makes a new, improved release. They've recently resurfaced [msdn.com], so maybe they're alive and coding on it, who knows :-)
Re:re standards (Score:2)
This is the *big* problem why IE is really bad - it's not that it's not standards complient, it's that it has got such a huge chunk of the market that you have to support it on commercial sites, and the fact that MS don't care. I think (hope?) that most of the other browsers would continue to get bugfixes and innovations, even if they had 100% of the market. This is one reason why MS shouldn't be allowed to bundle such brok
Re:re standards (Score:3, Funny)
Re:re standards (Score:1)
But do not think writing a web site in CSS will solve all your browser compatibility problems
And the worst part is, even IF a certain broken browser gets fixed in its next incarnation, the old versions are going to be in the majority for YEARS to come.
Re:re standards (Score:2)
It solves most of them... especially if you remove IE from the equation.
In the mean time, stick with a combination of CSS AND minimal tables.
I recently redid my website [nexusuk.org] in XHTML 1.1 and made sure I used the correct tags for the data I wanted to present (not the layout). i.e. only use tables for tabular data, menus are lists, etc. It resulted in far neater code and (importantly, IMHO) it presents very readab
Excellent Reference (Score:3, Interesting)
I also bought it because I met the author at the 2004 TOevolt Conference [evolt.org] and he gave a great seminar and was a cool guy to boot.
It also spends some time on web accessibility, something all developers really need to start thinking about.
Wedding (Score:2, Funny)
Cool, are we all invited to the wedding?
Buy It Cheaper (Score:2, Interesting)
SAT analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
CSS/XHTML
as
hand-coded HTML
Re:SAT analogy (Score:1)
css and css free (Score:2)
http://www.csszengarden.com/
looks nice for the eye,I find it almost unreadable.
Compare the css free version
http://www.csszengarden.com/zengarden-sa
Re:css and css free (Score:1, Insightful)
lol - boy, you missed the boat on that one. Not surprising since this is
The point of CSSZenGarden is to show what is possible using CSS and spawn creativity through inspiration. Too often people equate CSS with only font, color changes and non-javascript rollovers and miss the boat that there's a WHOLE lot more that it can do to help separate code from content.
Re:css and css free (Score:1)
Read JWZ's rant about web designers [jwz.org], it's hilarious:
I think my standards have lowered enough that now I think ``good design'' is when the page doesn't irritate the living fuck out of me.
Anyway, from what I've seen, most designers would rather pull their hair out than see completely unstyled content.
I suppose that's the difference between a righty and a lefty.
XHTML you say (Score:2)
which XHTML browser are you using for that ?
Re:XHTML you say (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:XHTML you say (Score:2)
Handle is not the same as render correctly see
http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/xhtml/media-
sadly no Konqueror on that list
I agreee about I.E. it is the backwater browser
Standardisation = Complicating Stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine if the Internet had started out with today's newest XML standards back in the early 90s. Imagine that browsers were strict and accepted only standards-compliant code. To design a site you'd have to know strict XML and understand DOCTYPES and all that. The layout of your webpage would be strictly defined by CSS 2.0, which means you'd have to learn that too.
Would the Internet have flourished? Maybe. But I bet adoption would have been slower. It would have certainly put off alot of people trying to create a simple functioning webpage.
Heck, it might have caused some genius to invent a simpler alternative to XML/CSS
Re:Standardisation = Complicating Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't you rather have a human being decide how a page should look, rather than having a web browser GUESS what to do with invalid code? That is basically what web browsers have been doing for years. Hmmm, thought Mozilla, no closing </a> tag. Should I end the link at the paragraph break, or let it extend across four table cells to the next link?
Re:Standardisation = Complicating Stuff (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Doctype. There are three acceptable doctypes that can be cut-and-pasted, and the difference between these is pretty straightforward.
2. Valid code. You have to close tags, and you can't place tags out of context (e.g. a <li> tag outside of a list).
What am I missing?
The reason I ask is that I find XHTML/CSS to be simpler than the "old way" of coding. Nested tables? ro
Re:Standardisation = Complicating Stuff (Score:2)
Strict XML is very simple: All you have to do is be careful about capitalisation, always close tags, and always put attributes in quotes. Basic CSS is also very simple: Nothing more than a series of 'property : value' statements.
If XML has been used the web would have been far more easily (and meaningfully) indexe
Re:Standardisation = Complicating Stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
If you had wanted to build the whole web around XML and CSS, all it would take is for one person to create a Schema and for one person to create a stylesheet, which could then be used by anybody else. This is, in fact, exactly what happened, except that the stylesheet was hardcoded in the browser, and the Schema defined in some standard document.
Re:Standardisation = Complicating Stuff (Score:2)
The reason it is a Good Thing is quite simple - the behaviour for how to handle complient markup is well defined and so you (should) get (mostly) identical results on all browsers. The behaviour for fixing broken code is not defined (and would
Re:Standardisation = Complicating Stuff (Score:2)
Dare to dream...
To design a site you'd have to know strict XML and understand DOCTYPES and all that.
You wouldn't have to understand DOCTYPEs, actually. DOCTYPE-switching was only introduced as a direct result of browsers accepting malformed code. If the browsers had done it right from the beginning, DOCTYPE switching would never h
CSS Parent Selector? (Score:2)
An assload of useful online CSS resources (Score:5, Informative)
Lists
Floats
Filtering
Type Issues
Missed two of my favorites... (Score:2, Informative)
Reference:
Tutorial:
I didn't like it (Score:3, Informative)
Ooooh... CSS! (Score:3, Interesting)
For all I know, it just teaches you Microsoft's faulty CSS1 specification they used back during the release of Internet Explorer 3.0 [microsoft.com] back in 1996 [microsoft.com], exciting! What could be better worse than this? Lots of things, I'm sure, but even Cascading Style Sheets For Dummies [dummies.com] mentions CSS3 [w3.org] which Opera and Firefox/Mozilla support.
Re:Ooooh... CSS! (Score:3, Informative)
Having said that, I'm looking forward to CSS3 as (AFAIK) it'll offer transparency support, that feature alone makes it worthwhile to me (yeah yeah, you can get variable opacity with current browsers using pr
Complex sites (Score:1)
I'm not that familiar with CSS, but I'd like to see some examples of pages that have actual user interaction widges - buttons, drop down lists, editable datagrids.
The examples I've seen linked in this thread are nothing more than glorified text documents. But the WWW has progressed a little past sites of that simplicity.
How does CSS handle comple
Re:Complex sites (Score:1)
please click through a couple of those sites in a browser that is not IE (i know for sure they all work in firefox)
Re:Complex sites (Score:1)
You can do all of that too - that's the easy stuff. The hard bit is getting the design and layout right using CSS. To create a button, use <input type="button"/> and to create a drop down list use the HTML select tag. For data grids, you might want to use
Some other XHTML/CSS references (Score:2, Informative)
want to spit blood? (Score:2)
I am not a designer, and worked for a week on the site, so it almost looks the same on every browser.
However I realised, that a lot of the browsers have broken css render (such as IE 5) and many people are using those still, so you will end up writing lots of version detection stuff, that will put different css for every browser.
Instead of turning everythi
Re:Foolish Projects (Score:1, Insightful)
i'll hazard a guess and say "not a project that employs school kids"...*sigh*
requirement for standards-compliant code is more and more common on projects large and s
Re:Foolish Projects (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait -- and you think it is foolish to exclude the average schoolkid from coding large web projects?
Whenever people say that "anyone can learn HTML," I laugh. That's like saying that "anyone can use Photoshop" because anyone can hit ctrl-i to invert an image. Sure, anyone can learn what means, but can
Whoops... (Score:1)
Sure, anyone can learn what <a href=""> means...
Re:Foolish Projects (Score:2)
There are more people out there with knowledge about all sorts of amazing stuff outside modal geek interests, who have been able to share it with the world despite not 'understanding' good web design principles. This is largely due to basic HTML being so straightforward, and 'fault-tolerant' browser interpretations (not to mention the plethora of authoring tools). Because of thi
Re:Foolish Projects (Score:3, Interesting)
Way back in the day there was a battle between Netscape and Microsoft, and Microsoft decided to start supporting a more lax standard. This made it easier to develop to their standard becuase it wasn't as picky.
Your attitude of the webserver only serving up webpages to be viewed in a browser is quickly being replaced with
Re:No need for standards (Score:1)
One couldn't find a better example of evolving language then Slashdot.
Relax (Score:2)
Re:Dupe? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, he is a web developer!
Re:Top 5 problems with CSS (Score:3, Insightful)
4. Ummm, CSS files are downloaded once on the first time to the site and then kept locally for the rest of your visit to the site. This reduces bandwidth, and reduces loadtime. So yes, this happens the first time you hit the page, but not any other times.
3. No they want to depreciate broken HTML. There is nothing wrong with HTML which follows the standards. And CSS is simple, very simple.
2. Hardly anyone uses
Re:Top 5 problems with CSS (Score:1)
Re:Top 5 problems with CSS (Score:2)
5. That is partly bad writing, if you write it well it will degrade OK. You can harldy blame the technology for naff implementaion.
Also, at some point you have to give up support for older browsers, or you never get anywhere. If you write for IE5.5+ and Mozilla it's pretty easy (bar some IE gotchas). A degraded site may not look as nice as a pure HTML one on old browsers, but it will look a hell of a lot better on mobile appliances (if done properly).
4. You do know that browser download the css and java