I just brought home a new MacBook to replace my creaking old workhorse, a Mac G4 Powerbook. Apple promised an easy transfer of data and even applications from the old machine to the new one using a Firewire cable. It worked wonderfully, although I wish it had allowed me to make more fine-grained choices about what I wanted to bring from one to the other. In only about 3 hours, all my documents, preferences, bookmarks and other goodies were in place. All I had to do was find them. The finding took a few more hours. Within maybe half a day I had recreated by mail history and all my Quicken financial files, my site definitions, my iPhoto library. I’ve spend days in the past migrating to a new computer. The Firewire is my friend!
Month: June 2007
Review: Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns
Jun 16, 2007 by
Web Teacher
Summary: use with intelligence
★★★☆☆ Michael Bowers wrote this book (Apress, 2007) to provide design patterns in web designs that the book cover states will “increase creavitiy and productivity.” While design patterns can indeed save you time and effort, I both love and hate the way the book goes about providing the patterns.
First I’ll tell you about how the book works, and then explain why I have mixed feelings about it.
There are over 350 patterns in the book. Included are such patterns as creating conditional stylesheets, right-alignment of elements, treating block elements as inline elements, creating equal sized content columns, making drop caps, displaying callouts and over 300 other patterns. For each pattern, you get suggested HTML and the CSS to create the pattern from the provided HTML.
The author suggests that you take the reusable patterns and “simply drop them into your code.” While I think that the patterns are a valuable aid in helping web designers solve specific design problems, I have a problem with the idea of just dropping the book’s code directing into your page.
My problem is that almost every pattern uses a class. That class is assigned to every HTML element involved. A major erruption of classitis would result if some intelligence wasn’t used to adapt the patterns.
A reader with a background in CSS, who could see how to use the CSS needed to create the design element with intelligence would make best use of this book. With appropriate CSS savvy, a user could adapt the CSS pattern so that it could be applied to a page using descendent selectors instead of with an omnipresent application of classes.
HTML5 differences from HTML4
Here’s an easy to read summary from the W3C of the current draft differences between HTML 4 and the proposed HTML 5. HTML5 differences from HTML4.
Latest working draft of WCAG 2.0
On May 17, 2007, the W3C published the latest version of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Changes have been incorporated because of the criticism the first working draft received. There’s a very helpful review of the changes at The Web Standards Project that might give you a quicker summary of what’s new than reading the entire W3C document. The latest working draft was released before the WCAG Samurai came out with their “errata” earlier this week.
Review: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
Jun 9, 2007 by
Web Teacher
Web Teacher
Summary: CSS for design
★★★★☆ This book by Jason Beaird (Sitepoint, 2007) discusses some of the principles of design and explains how to implement those principles using CSS.
It covers some of the same ground as the popular design for non-designers books by Robin Williams, but takes on new topics. And explains how to write the HTML and CSS to make it happen. It even includes some hints for chores in Photoshop. The book has chapters on layout and composition, color, texture, typography and imagery.
As for using it to teach, the book could not stand alone as a semester’s core for a design course. However, it would be a good resource in a general web design class. It’s a slim book and a fast read, so it would be easy to use to supplement other assignments.
WCAG Samurai stir things up
A group led by Joe Clark and calling itself the WCAG Samurai has taken a stand against the much criticized WCAG by issuing a set of “errata” for the guidelines. Start with the Introduction to WCAG Samurai Errata for WCAG 1.0 and then read the complete errata.
This is a powerful idea for a way to make (or force) change. There will be lots of blogging, conference talks, and other noise about the work of the WCAG Samurai in the future, and I fully expect it to create change within the “official” world of WCAG guideline drafting.
The great thing about errata is that you have to give the corrected information in connection with the notice of the error. Maybe the Democrats should come up with a list of errata for the Bush administration. With specific corrections for each mistake. Might make an interesting party platform.
The HTML Scope/Headers Debate
The HTML working group, according to Juicy Studio, has concluded that the headers attribute for complex tables is unnecessary for HTML5. The group is leaning toward letting scope handle everything. I’ll keep an eye on this one, as it will be interesting to see where it goes.