Archive for November, 2004
This is the way we do things around here
Derek Featherstone describes something that seems to be a common feeling among “web standards advocates” right now. For those of us who have been using and evangelising web standards for the last few years it all seems so obvious. In my own company our use of web standards saves us time. Over and over again the benefits are there – cancelling out a hundred fold any extra bit of time puzzling over an IE CSS bug. This is just the way we do things and, over the last couple of years lots of other people have started to see that working in this way, validating mark-up, creating semantic and accessible web pages is a good way to work.
However, as Derek describes in his article, there are sites being launched every day that are full of nested tables, spacer gifs, paragraph text styled as headings – even font tags. When does web standards stop being an added extra and just become the way things are done around here?
I don’t actually remember at which point I realised that valid mark-up, or CSS for layout, or creating accessible web sites was the way to go. Although looking through my archives I found this post, written just before I launched my first CSS layout for this site. Despite having learned to handcode HTML, prior to there being tools like Dreamweaver available, I remember those first CSS layouts being a great struggle and I don’t think I would have got anywhere had it not been for the layouts at Glish.com.
Times have changed though, there are so many excellent resources if you want to learn CSS, or web standards or accessibility. However, the people who will go out there and learn the new thing, and keep themselves informed of best practices have already learned this stuff. How do we get to those people who don’t even know that the issues exist, or don’t care? You only need to look in your average basic web design magazine, or hang around on a design mailing list that doesn’t have a strong web standards evangelist user base to realise that the battle of getting people to realise that web standards are important, or even that they exist, is a long way off being won.
Geeks unplugged
On Saturday Drew and I left our respective desks and headed into London to meet up with Simon Collison, Malarky, Andy Budd, Jon Hicks, Richard Rutter, Patrick Griffiths, John Oxton and Jeremy Keith. Photos here, here and here – not a pooter in sight!
The CSS Anthology
My book, The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks is now on sale from Sitepoint. The book contains 101, “how do I …?” questions, with practical, cross-browser solutions to those problems. They are the answers to questions I have seen frequently posted to mailing lists; explanations of commonly used techniques; and just things that I have learned during the past 4 years of using CSS extensively.
It’s a practical book for people who need to get things done – based on my experience of being a practical sort of a person who uses many of these techniques on a daily basis to get things done. It was good fun to write and it is fantastic – if not slightly scary – to actually see it published!
Using tables to layout forms
A while back I wrote an article about forms and CSS and covered displaying forms in tables, for this impropriety I was immediately lynched by the purists. As an application developer I still maintain that sometimes a table is the most appropriate way to layout a complex form. In fact, very often, a complex form is in itself a representation of tabular data – and in an application is often being inserted straight into a row in a database – as tabular data. So I was interested to see this article (hat tip: Jon Hicks) which puts across this point of view well.
The important thing to remember is that if you do use a table to layout a form, you don’t put your accessibility and semantics brain under the pillow and just “stick it in a table”. Using label properly, setting the tabindex of the fields and keeping the table to a minimum, using CSS to style how it looks in the browser, means that you can maintain accessibility despite the use of a table. As detailed in the above article, there is a good argument that a table is often the most semantic way to describe this data input.
Firefox 1.0
Firefox 1.0 has been released today. If you are an Internet Explorer user and concerned about spyware and viruses getting onto your machine via your web browser then there has never been a better time to switch away from IE – Firefox will happily import all your favorites and settings and it’s free – what do you have to lose?
