Category: HTML

New PVII Tutorials; New Jump Start Designs

A new series of tutorials at Project Seven was announced today. Written by graphics expert Linda Rathgeber-Stewart, the series focuses on making background images in Fireworks. Here’s the first: PVII Tutorials – Making Background Images in Fireworks: Pixel Tiles

On another front, Community MX released a new Jump Start design today designed by Linda Rathgeber-Stewart and coded by Zoe Gillenwater. This Jump Start design is not free, unless you are a member of Community MX. The design is Traverse City.

Zoe Gillenwater, by the way, is one of those invisible women of the web. She is a CSS expert on a par with any big-name CSS celebrity you might mention, but she is very low profile. She writes amazing and helpful advice as a member of the CSS-Discuss newsgroup. She can analyze and fix any goofed-up, hacked-up, misguided CSS problem you can throw at her. She’s helped as many or more people grasp CSS than anyone in the web design community. Lately she’s been contributing a bit more publicly in articles at Community MX, but she is a perfect example of a woman whose quiet accomplishments go unnoted because she’s not out calling attention to herself, she’s simply getting the job done.

Vendors and valid HTML

Am I the only person who gets horribly irritated by companies like Amazon, Google, Flickr, and other outfits that generate invalid HTML for you to use on your website to promote or sell for them? Come on, people, it isn’t that hard. You can match up a product, an ID number, all sorts of random data. Why can’t you do it with valid HTML? At the very least you could let users indicate whether they want HTML or XHTML before you spit out a bunch of HTML for them to copy. Grrrr.

Personal Reflections

I don’t get no respect, to quote a well-known comedian. Have I made a difference in spite of that?

I’ve been reflecting on the success of my book, which I hoped some colleges would use as an instructional text in basic HTML classes. I’m running with some very big name competition in my effort to gain a foothold in this field. There are highly successful people writing about the same thing I’m writing about–Liz Castro’s HTML book has been a best-seller for years, Eric Meyer has published umpteen books so valuable that he has reached deity status in the area of CSS, Molly Holzschlag has written 30 books on this topic, Lynda Weinman is a whole industry unto herself with books, movies, and CDs that top the charts.

All that makes me one little no-name author with a single book, not so much about a technology, but about how that technology should be taught. As a writer, it feels like being in a bike race with Lance Armstrong.

And yet…and yet.

I see changes in the publications coming out in this field now. New books are moving the chapters teaching the deprecated HTML to the back of the book, instead of teaching it first. New books, in addition to mine, are appearing with both HTML and CSS in the title. Molly released one recently. The CSS Hands on Training book from lynda.com is being written by Eric Meyer. Hopefully, that means no more gawd-awful table structures, font tags mingled with inappropriate CSS, and other "Code View" horrors that were the hallmarks of the Dreamweaver Hands of Training books for quite a while. Liz Castro’s last book, a two chapter masterpiece in Peachpit’s Visual QuickProject series, taught HTML and CSS simultaneously.

Does anyone besides me remember that I was a voice in the wilderness saying that’s the way it ought to be done for a long time before things finally began to change? I don’t think so. I think people have decided that it is so obviously the right way to do things that everyone is doing it now because it is obviously right. Okay, I can accept that. I can live with the idea that I don’t get no respect. It is enough to hold on to the knowledge as a secret satisfaction that I made a small measure of difference in the pedagogy of teaching HTML and CSS. When you are as introverted as I am, secret satisfactions do just fine.

Open source WYSIWYG editor

Here’s an interesting open source tool: Nvu – The Complete Web Authoring System for Linux, Macintosh and Windows Nvu allows page editing using tools based on the Mozilla composer and FTP. It claims to work on any platform and looks promising, although I have not downloaded and tried it myself.

While we’re talking open source, let me not forget Plone, which is an open source content management system with plenty of support and help. Plone works on any platform and is based on Zope, but you don’t have to know Zope to use it.

ADDENDUM May 12, 2011: The developers of Nvu have released a new open source WYSIWYG editor called BlueGriffon that you should look at if you’re looking for free software for web design.

Tooltips Tips and htc tips, too

Writing at Community MX, Big John and Holly have a two part series about CSS for making tooltips. In CSS Tooltips – Part One they explain how to generate tooltips with a title attribute. In Part Two they describe how to whip IE into shape for this using a csshover.htc JScript which is called with a conditional statement. Part Two is especially interesting if you have ever considered using an htc file to workaround IE problems.