Numerous people who are better at keeping on top of things than I am have already talked about how good Ben Ward’s “Understand the Web” is, but I’m not going to let that stop me joining the chorus. With so much being thrown around about which proprietary vendor is more open, and what extra tool could be considered part of the HTML5 crowd, it’s good to see someone working to get to the core of what the web really is and working from there. ...
Despite years of progress by web standards advocates, and a significant improvement in the quality of the HTML on the web, many of us still end up grappling with outmoded, broken HTML on a regular basis. When confronted with a large site filled with broken pages it can be hard to know where to start. Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Refactoring HTML offers a step by step recipe book for migrating such sites to clean, semantic code. ...
One of the numerous projects I’ve been juggling over the past few months has been a redesign of the Greenbelt Festival website. That redesign went live late last night. Working from Wilf’s designs I initially built new HTML and CSS templates and began to establish some rules for how we’d handle the new image management requirements for a site that is now very photo-heavy. When it came time to apply the new designs to the CMS, however, it became apparent that there was a much bigger job ahead. ...
Aimed at those with a knowledge of HTML and CSS but with no prior experience of programming, Drupal 5 Themes sets out to show you how you can quickly and easily get a drupal site up and running with a highly customised look and feel. Drupal is highly themeable, with most aspects of the user interface being accessible purely in the theme layer without needing to dip into module development or the CMS’ core. The book takes the user through the various theme hooks and introduces the simple PHP code needed to override them, add new ‘regions’ (in which blocks can be displayed), customise existing themes and create your own (almost) from scratch. The primary focus is on the default theme engine, PHPTemplate, but others are referenced and a little time is spent on the options for building your own theme using raw PHP (without the extra layer of a theme engine). ...
Such has been the flood of information since Aaron Gustafson broke the news of Microsoft’s radical new plans for Internet Explorer that I’ve mostly sat back and tried to absorb it all, waiting before contributing anything. For those who haven’t been following the developments, Microsoft have said that future versions of Internet Explorer will support a new HTTP header and/or meta-tag which will indicate to the browser which version of IE the page is designed for. Unless the page specifies otherwise, all future versions of Internet Explorer will render it just like IE7 would. If you want IE8 to actually use the new features it brings with it, such as (we hope) improved standards support, you will need to explicitly ask it to do so. ...
As anyone keeping an eye on my deli.cio.us feed may have noticed, quite a few links have appeared to information about the preparation of HTML email. It’s a nasty business, as a quick glance at the website of the email standards project will tell you. But sadly, nasty as it may be, sometimes it has to be done. Even if the email I send out is going to have CSS scattered inline, for building the templates I’d much rather be able to focus on writing the structure of the document and leave worrying about my CSS for another time, and another file. That wouldn’t get me around the nastiness of having to use tables for anything but the simplest of layouts, but it still feels right to keep the separation for as long as possible. ...
One of the many tricky decisions to be made when building content management tools is how to allow users to control the basic formatting of their input without breaking your carefully crafted layouts or injecting nasty hacks into your pages. One approach has long been to provide your own markup language. Instead of allowing users to write HTML, let them use bbcode, or markdown, or textile, which have more controlled vocabularies and rules that mean it’s much less likely that problems will occur. ...
I am not a visual designer. That’s a statement that’s probably obvious to anyone who’s spent much time on one of the sites for which I am solely responsible. Thankfully I have numerous friends and colleagues who are designers and thanks to them there are a number of projects which have come out looking good. For a long time I’ve been wanting to redesign this site. To give it more presence, to make it a bit friendlier, but mainly to make it neater. I’ve had numerous ideas, but always lacked either the time or the skill to make them a reality. But today, finally, I have at least achieved the third of my aims. It’s all thanks to the CSS framework of the moment, blueprint, and a little free time to work on it. ...