#32507
Guidelines for Creating Better Markup
I’ve mentioned several times here that I feel writing markup (or any other code, for that matter) is a craft. I take pride in writing as lean and clean code as possible. From the looks of things there aren’t a whole lot of other Web professionals that feel that way, but we do exist.
Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML
#32508
Good markup is accessible by default. As long as you’re using HTML elements in a semantically meaningful way—which you should be doing anyway, without even thinking about accessibility—then your documents will be accessible to begin with.
Keith, Jeremy. Adactio (2006). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#32509
Lame Excuses for Not Being a Web Professional
Excuses that may be valid in some circumstances are too often used to cover up somebody’s lack of knowledge about modern Web design or development.
Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Professionalism
#32511
Web Standards: It's About Quality, Not Compliance
In spite of the widespread acceptance of Web standards by a specific segment of the design and development community, hosts of professionals are working in direct opposition to these standards. A significant reason for why this is happening and how those not working with Web standards justify their activity boils down, I believe, to something regrettably simple: nomenclature.
Rutledge, Andy. AndyRutledge.com (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards
#32517
Accessible Context-Sensitive Help with Unobtrusive DOM Scripting
This article demonstrates two methods of calling context-sensitive help in a web form: the Field Help Method and Form Help Method, in which unobtrusive DOM/JavaScript is employed to achieve the desired result. It also serves to illustrate the separation of the Structure and Behavior layers of a web page. Graceful degradation is employed to make sure that the help information is accessible if JavaScript is disabled or not available in a user agent.
Palinkas, Frank M. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Help
#32520
Creating Accessible Data Tables
This article demonstrates how to code accessible data tables in (X)HTML, enabling visually impaired users who employ assistive technologies to interpret the table data. Two views of a tabular data table are presented and discussed.
Palinkas, Frank M. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#32526
The Seven Rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript
I've found the following rules over the years developing, teaching and implementing JavaScript in an unobtrusive manner. They have specifically been the outline of a workshop on unobtrusive JavaScript for the Paris Web conference 2007 in Paris, France.I hope that they help you understand a bit why it is a good idea to plan and execute your JavaScript in this way. It has helped me deliver products faster, with much higher quality and a lot easier maintenance.
Heilmann, Christian. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>JavaScript
#32528
CSS attribute selectors allow us to pinpoint the values of attributes of an element and to style that element accordingly. CSS3 introduces three new selectors that can match strings against an attribute value at the beginning, the end, or anywhere within the value.This provides powerful new ways to style elements automatically that match very specific criteria. In this article, I will put these new attribute selectors in action and create some clever CSS rules that attach icons to links based on the value of the href attribute.
Schmitt, Christopher. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>CSS
#32529
Semantic HTML and Search Engine Optimization
So what is POSH? No, it's not just some new clothing fashion hype amongst web designers - POSH is the acronym for Plain Old Semantic HTML. The term Semantic HTML is used for a variety of things, but it has it's origin in one objective: creating (X)HTML documents using semantic elements and attributes, as opposed to using presentational HTML.
De Valk, Joost. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Search Engine Optimization
#32619
Nowadays, broadband connections are widespread amongst the internet. Finally, video can be effectively added to website. But which player and video codec to go for? And how to get your video out there? This article features some tips and tricks for compressing and delivering video to the web.
Wijering, Jeroen. JeroenWijering.com (2008). Articles>Web Design>Video>Standards
#32620
The Rise of Flash Video, Part 1
Nobody really expected the stranglehold that Apple, Microsoft and Real had on the web streaming market in 2003 to be broken. Yet by Spring 2005, just 18 months after that presentation, that is exactly what had happened. Those three web video delivery technologies practically vanished, replaced almost entirely by Flash Video. This is not to say QuickTime and Windows Media are dead technologies. They aren’t by a long shot, but when it comes to putting video on the web, the Flash Player has rapidly become the only game in town.
Green, Tom. Digital Web Magazine (2006). Articles>Web Design>Video>Standards
#32647
Free Your Embedded Data With SearchMonkey
Arguing for web standards and semantically clean and rich websites is an uphill battle. For years we had to deal with browsers that needed us to mess around with HTML just to display a document in several columns and the visual outcome was much more important than the structure.
Heilmann, Christian. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML
#32661
Understanding Progressive Enhancement
Since 1994, the web development community has beaten graceful degradation’s drum. A carry-over from the engineering world, the concept was, at its core, about giving the latest and greatest browsers the full-course meal experience while tossing a few scraps to the sad folk unfortunate enough to be using Netscape 4. It worked, sure, but it didn’t really match Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for a universally accessible web. At SXSW in 2003, Steve Champeon and Nick Finck gave a presentation titled “Inclusive Web Design For the Future.” There, they unveiled a blueprint for this new way of approaching web development. Steve also gave it a name: progressive enhancement.
Gustafson, Aaron. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards
#32695
jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices
When used correctly, jQuery can help you make your website more interactive, interesting and exciting. This article will share some best practices and examples for using the popular JavaScript framework to create unobtrusive, accessible DOM scripting effects. The article will explore what constitutes best practices with regard to Javascript and, furthermore, why jQuery is a good choice of a framework to implement best practices.
Smashing (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>JavaScript
#32731
IE Version Targeting: A Neutral Perspective
Recently, there has been a lot of buzz going around about Internet Explorer 8 and plans to include in it a feature called "version targeting." You can scour the net for blog posts and articles about version targeting, but you'll get a lot of debate and several different views on this topic, and it's difficult to pinpoint just the facts. What is version targeting? Version targeting is a way to tell Internet Explorer how it should render a page.
Rodriguez, David. Web Page Design for Designers (2008). Design>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers
#32761
This document specifies Best Practices for delivering Web content to mobile devices. The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from such devices. It is primarily directed at creators, maintainers and operators of Web sites. Readers of this document are expected to be familiar with the creation of Web sites, and to have a general familiarity with the technologies involved, such as Web servers and HTTP. Readers are not expected to have a background in mobile-specific technologies.
W3C (2008). Articles>Web Design>Wireless Web>Standards
#32828
sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses
Over the last several months, a small group of web developers and designers have been hard at work perfecting a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics. The method, dubbed sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging.
Davidson, Mike. Mike Industries (2008). Articles>Web Design>Typography>Standards
#32871
WCAG and the Myth of Accessibility
Kevin Leitch explains why he feels that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have failed in their mission to ensure that web content is accessible to all.
Leitch, Kevin. Juicy Studio (2004). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#32876
Despite the nature of the Web and the vast change in its role from a structural medium to a visual media, it is still important that Web content be designed with proper structure. With better support for Cascading Style Sheets in recent versions of Web browsers, developers can change the appearance of structural elements to meet their design and visual preferences.
WebAIM (2006). Articles>Web Design>Standards
#32886
A customizable quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 requirements (success criteria) and techniques.
W3C (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
#32942
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call 'web standards', are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.
#32943
Introduction to Device Independence, Part 1
In the past three to four years the number of different kinds of devices that can access the Web has increased significantly. And they have a wide variety of different capabilities: smart phones, mobile phones, voice response systems, PDAs, and even microwave ovens can access the Web. The mission of the Device Independence activity of the W3C is to avoid fragmentation of the Web into spaces that are accessible only from certain types of devices.
Mikhalenko, Peter. XML.com (2004). Articles>Web Design>Standards
#32944
The term web standards can mean different things to different people. For some, it is 'table-free sites', for others it is 'using valid code'. However, web standards are much broader than that. A site built to web standards should adhere to standards (HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSLT, DOM, MathML, SVG etc) and pursue best practices (valid code, accessible code, semantically correct code, user-friendly URLs etc). In other words, a site built to web standards should ideally be lean, clean, CSS-based, accessible, usable and search engine friendly.
Weakley, Russ. Max Design (2004). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Semantic
#32945
I’d like to share some of the things I’ve done (and still do) to get the team I work with to start using web standards. Maybe it will help someone who is in the position I was a while back.
456 Berea Street (2004). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Collaboration
#32946
This document attempts to explain how and why using web standards will let you build websites in a way that saves time and money for developers and provides a better experience for visitors. Also discussed are other methods, guidelines and best practices that will help produce high-quality websites that are accessible and usable to as many people and browsing devices as possible.
Johansson, Roger. 456 Berea Street (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards
