Free! Hot Topics from the Blogs: Autumn/Winter 2004

As things slow down for the festive season, those leading edge web developers keep pumping out new ideas. Here Ian Blackham has a quick run through blogdom and attempts to pick out a few nuggets.

Hot Topics from the Blogs: Autumn/Winter 2004

Ahh well it's been a couple of months but, with Christmas approaching, I thought I'd dive back into the murky world of blogdom and see if I could find any pearls for DMXzone readers.

As before the blogs of the Web A listers have been trawled, and gawped over, to find juicy web development morsels to stimulate and educate.

Building the Web the Right Way

In my brief interaction with the blogs of the rich and famous (OK I suspect a lot of designers may argue there, so let's just say famous), it's interesting to see how the relative ease with which web pages can be constructed, has caused huge headaches for those attempting to do it professionally and to high standards. Hence the banding together of web professionals in groupings such as the Web Standards project, or the Guild of Accessible Web Designers.

If you've been building sites a long time and are confused by the proliferation of standards based, and non-standards based sites – well you're not the only one. I felt one really interesting point Derek Featherstone (a DMXzone contributor) made was:

"Blogs currently house most of the recent advances in web development techniques. Blogs are always on the cutting edge. I estimate that I can find solutions to 95% of the problems that I have when building a site on somebody's blog. If the resource itself isn't a blog, its linked to from enough blogs that it is findable."

So armed with that encouragement it's over to Roger Johansson at 456 Berea Street who talks about both using alt and title attributes properly and pushes the use of CSS forward a little in his article on getting images to layout properly while still not using tables.

Another issue picked up on by Derek was the need for blogs to push the message of standards and accessibility to as many people as possible, in as constructive a format as possible. So I'd like to recommend Position is Everything to the assembled readership and complement the proprietors John and Holly on their great mix of solutions, tips and CSS bug documentation.

Of course aspiring to building accessible websites is all well and good, but how can you test everything that you need to. Well, fortunately there are plenty of good resources out there to help you (including the Accessibility toolbar) and a good post over at StuffandNonsense details a few more of them.

Where to next? How about a new tool for slide shows over on Eric Meyer's site …

S5 – A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

Based just on XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, S5 is a cross-browser compatible framework for creating well-structured and accessible presentations – read about it here. This is a rapidly evolving tool as many people are getting on board and helping Eric out with its development (a by-product of this being that he's now having to worry about which public licence to use).

While not the only option for web-based slide shows, Eric's tool has a number of advantages including being lightweight: "[one can] create a fully styled fifty-slide S5 presentation in the same number of kilobytes needed for a single-slide Powerpoint file that had minimal text and no styles".

Awards Section

Well everyone has awards at this time of year so why not this infrequent column (OK more accurately this is the "stuff I couldn't put elsewhere" section).

Web Usability Award

Not much competition here – the Firefox browser was released on November 9th giving the world a serious competitor to IE6 (apologies to users of Opera, Safari, etc.). Since its release Firefox 1.0 has been eating into IE's market share and has been downloaded over 10 MILLION times since it's release.

More recently those lovely Mozilla people have released the Thunderbird 1.0 e-mail client.

Blowing our own Trumpet Award

Goes to us, for spotting Michael Koch's blog entry saying that his article for DMXzone on applying a CSS styling to the previous table-based layout of the gofrohere.com meta-search engine site has been adopted! Well done Michael, and of course if you want to know how it's done check out his article Transforming a table based layout into valid XHTML/CSS.

Scrubbing up an Old Favourite Award

In November's edition of A List Apart there's an update of the old JavaScript style switcher routine. Andy Clarke and James Edwards have given it the once over and provided a different methodology that, using a single CSS file and a single JavaScript file, allows different media types to be targeted independently.

Helpful Tools Award

Over at Collylogic there's a nifty little Rollover generator that, if you input the elements you need to change, will happily spit out XHTML and CSS for you. Very useful.

Business Tip Award

It might not be rocket science, but basics like this little nugget at Signal vs Noise about getting budgets from clients may help your professional life go that much more easily.

Lifetime Achievement award

Joe Gillespie of Web Page Design for Designers is hanging up his virtual boots and December's issue is the last of the WPDfD e-zine. As acknowledged by the guys over at the Web Standards Project, Joe has done a tremendous job in making an e-zine that has made the topic of CSS accessible and friendly. Best wishes for the future Joe, and thanks for helping me to do my first CSS based site.

Well that's it for this season – I'd just like to wish you all a very happy festive season and hope you all have a successful and enjoyable New Year.

Ian Blackham

Ian BlackhamFollowing a degree in Chemistry and a doctorate in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, Ian spent several years wrestling with acronyms in industrial R&D (SEM with a side order of EDS, AFM and TEM augmented with a topping of XPS and SIMS and yet more SEM and TEM).

Feeling that he needed a career with more terminology but less high voltages, Ian became a technical/commissioning editor with Wrox Press working on books as diverse as Beg VB Application Development and Professional Java Security. After Wrox's dissolution and a few short term assignments Ian helped out with DMXzone's premium content section.

Ian is a refugee from the industrial Black Country having slipped across the border to live in Birmingham. In his spare time he helps out with the website of a local history society, tries to makes sure he does what his wife Kate says, and worries that the little 'un Noah is already more grown up than he is.

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