Posts Tagged ‘HTML’

Beef up your gutters and put your columns on a diet

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Thumbing through the UK version of WIRED magazine the other day made me realise that online there is very little experimentation or use of quirky or edgy layouts like we see in print. What I mean by this is most layouts online tend to be safe. They express a certain conservative nature with uniformed gutter sizes and content columns of same or similar width. They don’t evoke any emotion. Reading WIRED provokes emotion; each article has its own identity and style related to the content. One column may be far slimmer than the next with a gutter between them that you could drive a tank through.

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Tags: columns, CSS, design, graphic design, gutters, HTML, layout, typography
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Working Smarter: Standardise your code

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

In my previous post about keeping a code snippets library I eluded to the fact that within this file structure I had created a number of HTML skeletons which give me a basis for beginning a new project. It removes the medial task of creating a container <div> and the usual suspects of a header region <div id=&quo;header&quo; />, content area <div id=&quo;content&quo; /> and <div id=&quo;footer&quo; />. I tab indent my code for easy scanning too so shaving off the few minutes laying these out correctly along with other items that may get missed within your <head> such as common <meta>. I took my skeletons a bit further by adding in unordered list items for the menu area, aside and footer. These may not all be used but it is quicker to delete than it is to type.

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Tags: CSS, HTML, semantics, sexy stylesheets, standardise code, working smarter
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Why aren’t experts like Microsoft being expert?

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

It shocks me to see web programming examples breaking the rules of accessibility and common practices in published books. I don’t feel it sets the greatest of examples to anyone trying to get a foot in the industry when supposed authorities on subjects cannot even get it correct in their own publications. Take Microsoft Press for instance. Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5, published 2008. This is written by Dino Esposito, an authority on ASP.NET and AJAX. When it comes to writing HTML he seems to have forgotten the fact that we keep the code in lowercase. All of his HTML examples begin with a capital letter. Now I understand that ASP.NET is different and uses some uppercase characters for server side controls, but please let us not forget the industry standard for writing static HTML. Long have the days passed when HTML tags were written in complete uppercase and contained now deprecated elements such as FONT and CENTER.Furthermore another example I have spotted failed to include a DOCTYPE and the appropriate XML format for closing a HR tag. I realise this is not the purpose of the book and that the level of reader will most likely have a full understanding of how we conduct ourselves as web designer and developers in 2008. But why do experts insist on writing poor examples?

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Tags: accessibility, ASP NET, authorities, click here, Dino Esposito, experts, HTML, Microsoft, Web design, Web development
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