Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Presentations from the Web Essentials Conference are online, including these:
Dan Cederholm of simplebits.com wrote Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook. It is published by Friends of Ed (2004).
The book grew out of Cederholm’s practice of asking his simplebits.com users to offer ideas on markup by asking questions such as, “What is the best way to markup such-and-such a page element with XHTML?” The responses were interesting and so is the book, which explores standards-based structural markup and CSS in a way that is fast and easy reading and provides very useful content.
Cederholm covers topics such as markup for lists, headings, tables, forms, and anchors. He looks at CSS for all those elements, plus print styles, CSS layouts, image replacement techniques, and body styles. He examines possible ways to do all these things and brings you gently to understand the way that best uses standards and semantic markup to accomplish the job.
Although this is not a book for beginners, students with basic knowledge of XHTML and CSS will like this book. It is quick to use, provides good examples and resources, and is written in an engaging and light-hearted style that is fun to read. Definitely recommended.
Developing With Web Standards by Roger Johansson is just a TOTALLY AWESOME summary of what we should be teaching web design students as best practices. I would tell you to print this article and give it to all your students, but there are so many valuable links in it that it is better to use it online. Many of the references included for further study are links I have mentioned here previously, but it is a great service to have this all gathered into one intelligent and coherent article and resource. Listen up, publishers! This is the curriculum we need to be teaching.
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification The World Wide Web Consortium released two Document Object Model (DOM) specifications as W3C Recommendations. With DOM Level 3 Core, software developers and script authors manipulate the content, structure and style of Web documents. DOM Level 3 Load and Save allows programs and scripts to load, serialize and filter document contents.
The CSS ‘Reader’ Media Type is a new specification which would have the effect of making screen reader functions controllable by CSS. W3C is now accepting comments via their discussion group on this draft.
Eric Meyer, CSS author and former Netscape evangalist has launched a new consulting company, Complex Spiral Consulting, that is based on the notion that the use of Web standards in making a Web site saves money, bandwidth, maintenance costs and improves speed, accessibility and support for mobile devices. Employers are going to start asking for people who can create work for them that meets
Web standards. Those of us teaching Web topics need to be sure the students we unleash on the job market know Web standards.
Tom Green, co-author of Building Web Sites with Macromedia Studio MX from New Riders Press, had some thoughtful comments on this topic, which I’m quoting with his permission.
“The question I have always grappled with is: Am I training designers or bit heads? Around [my] college this has resulted in an awareness of the two sides of the web fence that I call the ‘geeks and the freaks’.”
Tom said, “Educators that actually hang out in the industry have seen the job become very complex, very fast. As I have been hammering in the book, Building Web Sites with Macromedia Studio MX, the business, almost overnight it seems, moved from the one person shop to multi-discipline teams. This means there is room for designers and there is room for the coders. The astute educator will recognize neither side can even hope to master the other’s knowledge base. In order to accommodate this I, for example, make it very clear to my students we aren’t going to turn them into code jockeys. What we are going to do, though, is make them aware of how the code works in order to help them actually work and communicate, knowledgeably, with a code jockey. . . In fact we are starting to pair up the coders and the geeks at my college.”