New web standards books from Zeldman and Budd

Posted in on 30 September 2009 | Comments

There are new editions of Designing with Web Standards by Jeffery Zeldman and CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd coming along in the next few months. If you have the previous editions, you’ll know that these are two great books! Must put them on my Xmas present list…

Technorati : ,

Why web standards should be important to clients

Posted in on 22 June 2009 | Comments

There’s a nice summary of the benefits of web standards in an article called Tell your clients why web standards should matter to them on the That Web Guy Blog. Really, the points here are well-known and building websites using web standards is pretty much a no-brainer in my opinion. Nevertheless, there are many websites and web designers/developers out there who ‘don’t get it’. Perhaps the above article will convince a few more of them.

PS: There are some other good articles on the That Web Guy Blog. Nice design and layout as well!

Technorati :

Table layouts compared with CSS layouts

Posted in on 15 April 2009 | Comments

There’s a good article over at Smashing Magazine called Table Layouts vs. Div Layouts: From Hell to… Hell? which discusses the pros and cons of different website layout methods. The article compares CSS layouts using <div> tags with ‘old school’ table layouts. All the relevant points are covered and the article also explores the possibility of using CSS properties like display:table and display:table-cell [now that Internet Explorer 8 supports this].

I used to be a bit sceptical about CSS layouts a few years ago but after trying out some reasonably easy-to-understand examples, I switched from using tables for layout to CSS methods. If there is one thing that solidified that move, it is when I get asked to maintain a tables-based layout that I have not created myself. It can be a nightmare! An example I saw recently used many nested tables and, as a result, simply changing the width of a table column involved digging into the page code to understand the table layout and then changing the widths of all relevant cells in all pages. Compare this with a simple style sheet change which would take a minute at most. There’s no comparison!

Suggested Reading: If you are new to CSS layouts and the use of web standards for building web pages, HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions is an excellent book. It starts from the beginning. Always useful I find! I am reading it now and hope to review it here in the next couple of weeks.

Web standards anyone?

Posted in on 19 March 2009 | Comments [1]

A few years ago I attended and reported a Web Standards Group London meeting where Andy Budd gave an interesting presentation about web standards, including why he thought that the web standards ‘war’ [or promotion of web standards] had reached a ‘tipping point’ [the ‘war’ was won], and why modern web designers and developers should be focusing more on other areas like usability. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Read more ...

Learning about CSS

Posted in on 5 October 2008 | Comments [1]

I was doing some Dreamweaver tuition the other day and my student asked if I could recommend some simple online tutorials or learning resources for CSS. I suggested a few sites but The Web Standards Curriculum from the Opera Developer website also came to mind because I have been reading [1] through the CSS section recently. The Web Standards Curriculum covers a range of topics but the CSS section (starting here) gives a good grounding into CSS with some useful and clearly written articles.

If you want to refresh your style sheet knowledge or if you are new to this CSS stuff, the CSS section in The Web Standards Curriculum is a good place to start.

1 I was reading the articles on Floats and Clearing and Styling Lists and Links. Both good articles with some useful examples.

Technorati : ,


Stop looking at my bottom