HTML Archives - Page 18 of 31

Summary of eHow Articles for April

Last year at this time I was getting ready to go to Greece. My favorite part of the trip was the stay on the island Naxos, where this rock formation tantalizes a few yards away from the shore near Naxos Town.

Here’s how I spent April this year, at least the eHow writing for April.

HTML Basics: What every learner needs to know

Sometimes the basics get lost in the quest to get going quickly, start designing, start looking good. Teachers and learners sometimes lose track of the fact that the foundation holding up every act of communication on a web page is HTML.

The basic fact in terms of foundational HTML mastery is just this: HTML elements are based on semantic logic. HTML elements communicate meta information about what certain parts of a page do semantically. HTML tells you that certain bits of text are headings or paragraphs, or lists, or blockquotes, or links, or subscripts, or tables. That semantic information is the essence of a successful communication. Get the HTML right, and your page communicates successfully with everyone in every circumstance.

Before looking good even enters the imagination of a designer, the knowledge needs to be there about the semantic building blocks of every web page, and that, my friends, is plain old basic HTML.

Summary of eHow articles for March

Welcome to Spring, and to that indescribable and delicious time of year known as SXSW Interactive. Here’s what I was thinking about during March at eHow.

WCAG Samurai Errata now finalized

The WCAG Samurai Errata published a final version of their suggested improvements. This is the work of a group of independent accessibility experts formed by Joe Clark to attempt to address shortcomings in the WCAG, a W3C recommendation from 1999. From the Introduction:

The first thing to understand is that you do not have to comply with these errata. The WCAG Samurai errata are an optional addition to WCAG 1, which we use as a base. You start by reading and understanding WCAG 1, then you read these errata as a correction to WCAG 1.

Read the Introduction for an overview and summary of the main points. Then you can get into the details. A few highlights of the recommendations by the Samurai are that you must comply with all Priority 1 and 2 guidelines, but you must not attempt to comply with Priority 3 guidelines. Layout tables, frames, and untagged PDF documents are banned. Video soundtracks must be captioned. Sites must use valid code and correct semantics for content.

There are separate documents for color and PDF.

If you do choose to comply with these guidelines, there is suggested phrasing for inclusion on your website. An example: “Our site is built to comply with WCAG+Samurai.” There is no mention of which tools are capable of making an evaluation such as this.

I’d like to see a standards advocacy group like the Web Standards Project or a Samurai-like group take on one more thing that is a constant concern to me. I use ads and other third party content on my site from sites like Amazon, Google, Flickr, and Yahoo. These third party sources do not provide valid HTML. Pressure on vendors to provide valid HTML would be an important project to improve the web. I know this wasn’t the aim of the WCAG Samurai, I’m just saying . . .

Summary of eHow articles for February

It was cats and kids month in my personal life. In my writing life, here’s what I did at eHow in February. (The CSS attribute selector article appeared here first, in an easier to use format.)

Useful links

College Degree.com is a portal for all sorts of online college information. They recently put together a list of 60+ Killer Open Courseware Collections for Web Designers. This includes courses from schools like Miami Dade, the U of Minnesota, Berkeley, and the U of Indiana.

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 is an important article for educators by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler at Educause.

A Command of Headings: Usage and Styling from Mike Cherim is a terrific article about headings. Examples with both HTML and CSS for everything you might want to do with a heading and some tricks you may not have heard about yet.

The Need for Speed: Externalize your JavaScripts and CSS

Let’s say you have an HTML page that weighs in at 8K. You have some CSS that might contain 32K. And you have a couple of JavaScripts that are 4K and 12K. That adds up to 56K.

If you put the CSS and the JavaScript information in the HTML, you still have 56K. One would assume 56K is 56K no matter what. However, there’s a little thing known as browser cache to take into account.

Let’s say every page in your site uses the CSS and JavaScripts we’re talking about. If those are externalized, then the very first time a page from your site is downloaded, all 56K gets downloaded. But the external CSS and JavaScript files get cached. Which means, for all subsequent pages that are downloaded, all the browser sends out a request for is the HTML. If the HTML is all content (no presentation, no scripting), speed rules.