Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Accessible Data Tables has some updated info about tables at .net magazine.
CSS Grid Layout: What Has Changed? is from Rachel Andrew. These are changes since her post on the topic at 24 Ways and based on the latest W3C working draft.
Keep the Underline says Dennis Lembree and talks about when an underline is a UX necessity.
It’s true. You don’t need to know anything about HTML or CSS or JavaScript or any other techie stuff to write a blog. You have to fill in a few forms, choose a theme, answer some questions, and start writing.
Anyone can be a blogger.
That’s a good thing. That’s a great thing. We have plenty of wonderful bloggers in the world who are good at writing but don’t know much about what’s happening behind the scenes on their blog.
Two things can happen when you write a blog without having any background knowledge about HTML, CSS and other web standards that make your blog work.
If you do number 1, that is, stick with the way things are set to appear in your theme or template, you’re okay. Your theme or template has a style sheet (that’s the CSS) in place that determines appearance. Go with that and you’re golden.
If you do number 2, you are adding things into the post that aren’t in the theme style sheet. That means you are inserting stuff about appearance into the content of your post. You may not see it in what you write, but it’s happening behind the scenes in the HTML. Adding stuff about appearance into the content of your post is a problem.
You cannot predict what people are using to view your blog. It might be a smart phone, it might be a large monitor, it might be something in between. The style sheet for your theme probably has made allowances for this unpredictability – unless you are using a really old theme. But when you add appearance stuff right into the post, it doesn’t go into your style sheet and it might not adapt to different sized viewing devices.
In addition, added appearance stuff right in the post isn’t portable. By that I mean it makes it hard to reprint your post somewhere else and have it look good there. When you copy and paste somewhere else you carry along all that appearance stuff and it won’t look good in the new location. The new location for your brilliant post has its own style sheet, its own appearance, and you’re pasting in stuff that doesn’t work with that.
I talked a bit about this in my post Web Teacher’s Seldom Asked Questions. I even made up a law about it called Virginia’s Law Against Unintended HTML. It goes like this:
Play with the way your content will look before the content is on the page, not after.
The bottom line for you don’t-know-anything-about-HTML bloggers is pick a theme you like and stick with that appearance. You do need to format your headings and lists and that sort of thing, but don’t fiddle with how those things look on the page after you’ve written them.
Adobe is closing its browser lab. All you Dreamweaver teachers take note.
There’s a good summary of all the latest news in web standartds at .net magazine: Hot in Web Standards.
If you’re a blogger who does reviews (as I do) you should take a look at the new FTC guidelines for disclosing info in product reviews.
The Problem of CSS Form Elements is at Smashing Magazine.
Seven Things Still Missing from CSS at .net magazine.
Video from the recent W3Conf are available on YouTube.
The Google Glass Feature No One is Talking About. Is Google becoming Big Brother?
Lerio Designs has blog posts with weekly roundups of web design and development resources that is excellent and worth subscribing to.
With little ceremony other than an announcement written by Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth on the Web Standards Project blog, the volunteer army of people who worked to bring web standards into common use have ceased their organizational work.
I want to quote the entire announcement. I know you can go to the WaSP blog and read it, but it seems like something of an homage to the important work done by so many dedicated designers and developers for the past 14 years to reprint it below. And I’m proud of my small part of the work as a member of the education task force and the development of a web standards based curriculum.
When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns “advancing” HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.
Realizing that this fragmentation would inevitably drive up the cost of building websites and ran the risk of denying users access to content and services they needed, Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded WaSP and rallied an amazing group of web designers and developers to help them push back. The WaSP’s primary goal was getting browser makers to support the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
In 2001, with the browser wars largely over, WaSP began to shift its focus. While some members continued to work with browser vendors on improving their standards support, others began working closely with software makers like Macromedia to improve the quality of code being authored in tools such as Dreamweaver. And others began the hard slog of educating web designers and developers about the importance of using web standards, culminating in the creation of WaSP InterAct, a web curriculum framework which is now overseen by the W3C.
Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.
Many (if not all) of us are continuing to work in the world of web standards, but our work is now largely outside the umbrella of WaSP. If you are interested in continuing to work on web standards-related projects along with us, we humbly suggest you follow these projects:
- A List Apart – The magazine “for people who make websites” is run by WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman and is a consistent source of forward-thinking articles and tutorials.
- HTML5 Doctor – A solid resource and discussion forum on all things HTML5, brought to you by Bruce Lawson and his team.
- W3C Community Groups – If you have a passion for a specific web technology, you can help make it better by participating in one (or more) community groups. In particular, you might be interested in one of these: Core Mobile Web Platform, Responsive Images, Web Education, and Web Media Text Tracks.
- WebPlatform.org – A fantastic web standards resource, providing up-to-date documentation, Q&As, tutorials & more. Chris Mills, Doug Schepers, and a number of other standards advocates are involved in this project.
- Web Standards Sherpa – An educational resource founded by WaSP which continues to operate under the leadership of Chris Casciano, Virginia DeBolt, Aaron Gustafson, and Emily Lewis.
- Web Standards + Small Business – An outreach project started by WaSP that educates small businesses about why they should care about web standards. This project is overseen by Aaron Gustafson.
The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now, and we look forward to working with you, and wish you much success.
Congratulations and a big thank you to everyone who gave time and talent to the Web Standards Project. WaSP changed the world.
There are a number of posts here at Web Teacher that provide information for front end developers about how to use ARIA-WAI in a page design to increase the accessibility of the page. Here’s a list of some articles I wrote. There are also many links to ARIA posts in my useful links category.
While responsive web design has taken off like a rocket, the question of what to do with images in a design that adapts to any device that might be used to display it is still under investigation. I’ve gathered some resources to help you understand the issues and see some of the tests and demos that have be done.
I don’t think we have a final answer that will become “best practice” yet, but there are a lot of great minds grappling with the issues.