12 Steps To Professional Web Design

Found this article and thought I’d share. I agree with pretty much all of this. Definitely worth a read. Here it is.

~Charlie

Tables vs CSS

In august I made a site for myself and used tables for the layout. A few years before that I had been making layouts for fun but using divs exclusively. I want to redo my site again but this time wanted to try using divs again in order to be able to change the layout quickly when I get bored.

I hope this hasnt been posted before but I found this while trying to figure out for myself which one was best.

http://www.decloak.com/Dev/CSSTables/CSS_Tables_01.aspx

It covers a lot of issues and I foudn it a fun read because of how serious this person takes the debate.

Web Developer’s Field Guide

This is an amazing list of pretty much everything you ever wanted to know aboot web dev, all in one convenient location. The Web Developer’s Field Guide.

Limitations of CSS

While reading about all the great things you can do with CSS I began to wonder what CSS can’t do. What would someone want to do with CSS that can’t be done? I’m not sure how accurate this is, but Wikipedia offers this info…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets#Limitations

Top 10 Reasons To Use Web Standards

Here’s one of a million top 10’s.

The comments are much more interesting and thought provoking than the list itself. There are still a lot of folks who argue against web standards. Interesting.

IE 8 and Web Standards

March 3rd blog entry from Mary Jo Foley on ZDNET re IE 8 and standards…Mike A.

Embedding Flash In A Strict Compliant Environment

Ever use those little embed tags to post flash? Well, they’re not compliant.

I have to build a website for my MULT 109 class, and since I’m in WEBT I decided that I would try to make every page strict compliant. Then I got to my flash game page. What a nightmare!!!

Anyway, I did an exhaustive Google search for an answer, and I found these articles:

• The Standards-Compliant Flash Object of Desire
• Flash Satay: Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards
• SWFObject: Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script

The third article is the one I finally went with. It was a bit of a bear, since it involves javascript, and CSS for layout, rather than just a simple cut and paste embed script, but wow it works!

Here’s my Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict webpage for proof. There are a  couple of CSS issues I’m still working on, but the page is valid, AND the flash works in both Firefox and IE. I think that’s worth a little extra credit.

Excellent Site/Blog on CSS and Cross-Browser Issues

http://www.designvitality.com/blog/2007/10/designing-for-every-browser-how-to-make-your-site-fully-cross-browser-compatible/This site has some excellent articles and instruction and discussions on the best way to make your CSS cross-browser compatible.The link above takes you to a particular post. The author lists over 10 very well written articles that you should definitely check out.The site itself, DesignVitality.com, is worth looking over for all things Web (and Graphics).Enjoy.-Rodney

Why validation is so Important

Owen Briggs gives some insight here http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/validation.html about why it is so important to validate your code.

This just reinforces things we have already read and learned in class.

Browser Usage

I had asked the question of browser market share in the last class, and really wanted to know the exact answer. I found this page on W3 Schools, Browser Statistics, and the results floored me. These are for W3 Schools sites only, but the market share for Firefox was over 37%. This, of course, reflects a usage for a computer savvy audience. IE accounted for only 55%.After looking into it further, I found that Wikipedia (“Usage share of web browsers“) shows among the general population a 16% share for Firefox, 77% for IE, and 5% for Safari (or 1 in 20 users). These 3 browsers total more than 98.5 % of users, which I feel is sufficient for the site I am working on now. Ignore any of these at your own peril.The W3 Schools data shows that all this is dependent on your market, which is one of the first questions you should be asking yourself or your client when building a site. -Rodney