Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Check out my article called Make Your Site Mobile Friendly published at Vitamin today.
If you have my book Mastering Integrated HTML and CSS, you know there’s a chapter about CSS for handhelds in it. This article contains material that isn’t in that chapter, so even if you are one of my faithful readers, do take a look.
If you have any comments about the article, please leave them at Vitamin.
Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, Dreamweaver, Web Standards, Mobiles, CSS
A documentary project recording stories about the spread of web standards as taught at the Art Institute of Atlanta is explained at Aarron Walter | Web Standards Documentary Project. Here’s a description of what it’s about.
The Interactive Media Design department at The Art Institute of Atlanta has been teaching the merits of Web Standards in our curriculum since 2002. Over the years, we have seen many of our students evangelize the importance of Web Standards to their employers in and around Atlanta, Georgia. Below is a selection of audio interviews with some of our students who have introduced Web Standards to their employers, some with a successful outcome, and others not.
You can listen to the stories online and see how these Art Institute of Atlanta students presented the benefits of web standards to their employers. The audio files are brief excerpts from longer interviews and only contain the most relevant parts of the interviews.
Technorati Tags: web design education, web standards
I don’t understand why people treat the Code View option in Dreamweaver like it’s a bad thing. Like everything has to be done in a visual environment. Like the stuff behind the magic mirror of Design View is too awful for even a glance.
If you are using Dreamweaver, or teaching Dreamweaver, or writing a book about Dreamweaver, you and your students or readers deserve the chance to appreciate the joy of a clean, semantic page of HTML. Clean, semantic HTML is a joy to behold. Everyone deserves the opportunity to admire that nicely crafted doctype, the powerful link to the stylesheet, the well-written title. And what a body you get to see! You see properly marked up headings and paragraphs and lists and blockquotes, uncluttered and clean and purposeful. You may see an occasional div enclosing a group of page elements that fit together logically into a stylish and functional part of a page: perhaps a luscious sidebar or a shy footer.
The joy of clean HTML is that it’s all content. There is no clutter, no presentational trash like font tags and align attributes. Just beautiful words, words marked up or identified to indicate their logical purpose as headings or lists or acronyms.
There’s a name for HTML like that: standards-compliant.
Standards-compliant HTML goes anywhere, does everything, never quits being available, and always makes sense no matter how you get to it. That’s a lot of joy from something so basic and simple as clean markup.
If you are using Dreamweaver, or teaching Dreamweaver, or writing a book about Dreamweaver, open things up to Code View now and then, or maybe Split View, so that everyone can see what they are really doing. Then people can see if what they’re creating visually is joyful, clean, and semantic HTML. HTML that is meant for the masses. HTML that can go anywhere, do anything and always make sense.
That’s too hard you say. You have to learn CSS, you say. CSS takes too long, you say.
But. There’s motivation to consider. If you are using Dreamweaver, or teaching Dreamweaver, or writing a book about Dreamweaver, do you think you or the people you are training want to be what Kathy Sierra calls kick-ass users? Do they want to reach the most people on the most devices? Do they want to create work that will go anywhere, do anything and always make sense: professional level kick-ass work?
Let’s look at motivation a bit more. Suppose someone using Dreamweaver wants to move something over to the right on the page a few pixels. Using only Design View, you could have them use the text indent icon on the Property inspector. The stuff would move, right? But what if they were using Split View and realized that they had, in reality, created a blockquote. Having survived 10th grade English, your user realizes in her heart of hearts that whatever she just moved a few spaces really isn’t a blockquote.
Here’s your moment of motivation. In this moment, you show this user how to move things to the right just a bit with a CSS property called margin-left hitched up to a class or id for the element being moved. Not too hard, not too much CSS to take forever to learn. Just enough CSS to help the user kick butt with clean, semantic, standards-compliant HTML. Ah, joy.
Another example. Suppose you or a person you are training creates a class and assigns it to a paragraph. Wow, you feel cool cause you’re using CSS. However, each time you press Enter in Dreamweaver and type another paragraph, the class attribute persists. Soon you have a page full of paragraphs with dozens of class attributes scattered in the markup.
Unless you looked at Code View now and again, or perhaps work in Split View, you’d never know that the page was littered with class attributes. If you did look at Code View, you might wonder if you really need to assign the same class to every single paragraph you write. Isn’t that, like, classitis or something, dude? Here’s that moment of motivation when you explain that one style for the p element could do the same thing with no classes needed anywhere. Suddenly the difference between cluttered markup and clean markup makes sense and CSS isn’t so hard after all.
I’ve been known to call this notion integrated HTML and CSS, but today, I’m calling it joy.
Is writing standards-compliant web pages is a worthy goal? Is work that will go anywhere, do anything and always make sense a worthy goal? I certainly think so. If I’m right, we have admit that Dreamweaver’s Code View is worth using, at least sometimes. We have to admit that using CSS instead of presentational HTML is easier in Dreamweaver if people can experience the joy of HTML.
Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, CSS, education, web design education, web standards, Dreamweaver
(with apologies to ee cummings) in Web- standards when the world is markup- luscious the semantic html advocate separates words and presentation and everyone comes running from the inaccessible and unusable and it's joy when the content is open-wonderful the valid old handcoder posts far and wide and readers come dancing from mobiles and screen-readers and it's joy and the strict-doc standardsista posts far and wide
Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, usability, CSS, web design education, web standards
A three part series by John Allsop about semantics in HTML at microformatique – a blog about microformats: Semantics in HTML takes you from traditional HTML Semantics, to Standardizing Vocabularies, to Towards a Semantic Web.
I discovered a very interesting woman in the course of getting ready for SXSW. My co-presenter for a SXSW Interactive panel, Stephanie Troeth, is that woman. Luckily, she agreed to an interview of sorts, since I thought you would like to know more about her, too.
Steph is a member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP), a grassroots organization working for the adoption of web standards. She’s a co-lead of the International Liason Group and serves on the Education Task Force at WaSP. Steph said she became interested in web standards because of an excellent mentor she had while in college. To Steph, web standards and usability just made sense. She calls them elegant. They save time, work, and create beautiful results.
Her involvement with WaSP began in 2003 when she was recruited to work by Molly Holzschlag after Molly saw some work she did for an outfit called MACCAWS. Steph’s personal website is unadorned.org, where she laments that everything is out of date. You can see a few examples of her poetry and other writing there, even though she is too busy working and traveling to promote web standards to keep it updated often.
Steph has a computer science degree. Her minor is in musical composition, and she performed on the keyboards from the age of 7 all the way through college. Although she is not composing music right now, she retains a strong interest in the arts, music and–get this–modern street art. As we strolled around the streets of downtown Austin today, she kept remarking on how square everything was. I must get her away from downtown so she can sample some of Austin’s very unsquare and famously weird ambience.
She was born in Borneo, is of mostly Chinese extraction, went to college in Australia, and now works in Montreal. You can see where her interest in using standards for the internationalization of web sites came from! Her day job at a Montreal company bills her as Director of Technology and Web Development. Part of that job is to hire people in the web development area, a job made more difficult because the college graduates she has to choose from are not often taught to use web standards as a best practice.
If you are at SXSW, come by on Sunday at 4:00 to see our talk on Best Practices in Teaching Web Design. Steph will also be participating in the WaSP panel on Monday at 5:00. Catch her in both places.
This is cross-posted at BlogHer.
Go read this excellent article by Andy Rutledge: Design View / Andy Rutledge – Web Misunderstandards. In his explanation of what web standards are he says,
First of all, it’s important to understand that design has nothing to do with Web standards.
He explains well what the distinctions are and why.