Archives for web
The Survey for People Who Make Websites 2008
The guys over at A List Apart have posted the Survey for People Who Make Websites 2008. Despite the awkward name, this survey is worth your time if your job has anything whatsoever to do with the web. The results from last year’s survey were really interesting, and now that they’ve refined the questions a [...]
WebVisions 2008
WebVisions is a Portland-based web conference that I’ve attended twice before. Sadly, due to a crisis at the office, I was only able to attend the first day of sessions this year, which means I missed Andy Baio’s presentation on internet memes and Jeffrey Veen’s keynote. What I did see was good, but not great. In [...]
Version Targeting and IE8 Followup
Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post). “In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting ‘Standards’ [...]
Version Targeting and IE8
Previously on Web Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by using a valid DOCTYPE. A lot of people, including Jeremy Keith, think this is a [...]
The Email Standards Project
In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind. This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards in [...]
Good Web Designers are like Good Newspaper Designers
“The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.” – Jeffrey Zeldman, Understanding [...]
I Was A Baker
“I was a baker. You can’t just turn up the oven and expect to take the bread out sooner.” – Eric Danielson, NorthTemple.com QA lead, commenting on the futility of trying to rush some kinds of development.
Now Witness the Power of this Fully Armed and Operational Regular Expression
For a recent project, I found myself having to convert 60+ product detail pages from the old table-based format to the new XML-based format. I was doing this on my own, and I didn’t relish the thought of manually editing hundreds of tables of product details. For example, here’s an excerpt from one of the [...]
WYSIWYG Editors are the Bane of My Existance
I had to make a slight tweak to a page on a site with a content-management system today. After spending a few minutes unraveling the code, I found out that a simple list of three links was using the following markup, which has clearly been screwed up by the WYSIWYG editor on the site. <p> [...]
Selling Web Standards is Hard
I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that the extra money we charged them to upgrade their site to web standards will make [...]
Citations, Emphasis and Italics
Wanna get a headache? Go type “html book titles italic em” into Google and read for about 15 minutes. What you’re looking at is an intense debate over the best way to mark up a book title using HTML. I’ll save you some time and tell you that after several hours, my conclusion is that [...]
First Annual Web Design Survey
“People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession.” A List Apart is hosting the first annual Web Design Survey in an effort to learn more about the people in the web design profession – presumably so we can have more efficient [...]
