The Beauty and Business of CSS

Building designs with CSS is no longer a fringe activity practiced by standards geeks and early-adopters. Creative pioneers and highly skilled designers are bringing CSS to the mainstream. The explosion in popularity is ushering in a new wave of possibilities for web design. CSS provides greater design control, allows more flexibility, and enables sites to become attractive, accessible, and faster-loading, all at the same time.

Bowman, Douglas. Stop Design (2004). Presentations>Web Design>Standards>CSS

Pushing Your Limits (and Other Secrets of Designing with CSS)

What do you do when you feel like you’ve hit a brick wall? When it seems your creativity is limited by how much CSS you know how to beat into submission? How do you resist the temptation to give it all up and go back to tables? Why does it feel like the pros are constantly inventing new techniques each week, when you’re still struggling to keep up with the stuff you read about last year? Understanding how and where CSS fits into the design process is key to knowing how to push your own limits. Reviewing the principles of existing techniques — and learning why or how they came about — can extend your capabilities and help you gain confidence in solving future problems on your own.

Bowman, Douglas. Stop Design (2004). Presentations>Web Design>Standards>CSS

The Effect of Web Standards on Users

The current crop of web standards (XTHML & CSS) have had a dramatic effect on the work of the web designers who have adopted them. Writers of the best kinds have trumpeted the benefits of these standards over the coding practices that had become second nature to most (image spacers, anyone?).

Porter, Joshua. Bokardo (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards

Who Cares How Pretty Web Sites Are?

A few weeks back, I wrote about why I think web standards are difficult to learn. I wrote that because I was spending 80% of my time getting my code into XHTML 1.0 and styling it with CSS so that it rendered consistently across 5 or 6 browsers. What was I doing the other 20% of the time? Creating content, of course. I was putting together what a huge percentage of my site visitors come for. When I thought about it in these terms (time spent), I felt like styling with CSS was a lot of work for comparatively little gain. After all, people will still be able to find the site, read the content, and click on the links, whether or not I’ve styled it.

Porter, Joshua. Bokardo (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Usability

Some Reasons Why Web Standards Are Difficult to Learn

It seems like the box model shouldn’t be difficult to learn, but it is. I’m not sure why, but I think it may have to do with complexity that arises when you have boxes within boxes. At that point, it becomes an exercise of adding margin here, taking away padding there, and setting margins and paddings to 0 over there. Combine that with floating and positioning: relative, absolute, fixed, and it gets hard to know where the spacing between objects comes from, even when you’re working in standards-supporting browser like Mozilla. On top of this you have the box model hack…which only complicates things further. Even browsers get the box model wrong.

Porter, Joshua. Bokardo (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>CSS

Are Designers Focused Enough on User Needs?

I find that many designers give much more of their time to learning the latest standards trick than learning the latest “designing for users” trick. Here are a few reasons why this may be so.

Porter, Joshua. Bokardo (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>User Centered Design

The Sagacity in Validation

In one of my introductory articles I stated that I do not care much for validation, yet I use well-formed XHTML 1.0 Strict (no less) as my preferred standard and CSS for layout purposes. If so, why on earth would I claim not to care about, or ignore, validation?

Hilhorst, Didier P. Nundroo (2004). Articles>Web Design>Standards>XHTML

Web Design Going in the Wrong Direction?

There’s way too much talk about CSS and XHTML and Standards and Accessibility and not enough talk about people. CSS and Standards Compliant Code are just tools — you have to know what to build with these tools.

Signal vs. Noise (2004). Articles>Web Design>Standards>XHTML

Web Development Mistakes

When I visit a website, especially if it’s the site of a competitor or a prospective client, I like viewing source and take a look at what’s under the hood. It’s one of my not-so-secret obsessions. And I am way too often absolutely disgusted by what I see. The web is overflowing with sites that use horribly invalid, broken, and inaccessible markup.

456 Berea Street (2004). Articles>Web Design>Standards>XHTML

Web Standards For Business

This article highlights the benefits of using Web standards for business sites (Internet, intranet and extranet sites). It is aimed at stakeholders from the marketing, communication and IT departments.

Nonnenmacher, François. Web Standards Project (2003). Articles>Web Design>Standards

Les Standards Web Pour L'Entreprise

Les standards du Web apportent aussi leur lot d’avantages aux sites d’entreprise, Internet, intranet et extranet. Voyons comment les décideurs marketing, communication et informatique pourront tirer parti de l’utilisation des standards au sein de leur entreprise.

OpenWeb (2003). (French) Articles>Web Design>Standards

Why Standards Harmonization is Essential for Web Accessibility

This document introduces the concept of harmonization and causes of fragmentation in the area of Web accessibility standards, and examines the impact of harmonization and fragmentation on Web developers, tool developers, and organizations. It also suggests action steps for promoting Web accessibility standards harmonization.

W3C (2006). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Collaboration

UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding

Character encoding and character sets are not that difficult to understand, but so many people blithely stumble through the worlds of programming without knowing what to actually do about it, or say "Ah, it's a job for those internationalization experts." No, it is not! This document will walk you through determining the encoding of your system and how you should handle this information. It will stay away from excessive discussion on the internals of character encoding.

HTML Purifier (2005). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Language

Creating Bulletproof and Easy to Complete Web Forms

Effective form design is a great way to boost conversion rates. Jason Fried and Matthew Linderman share with us the secret of how to create attractive and functional forms.

Fried, Jason and Matthew Linderman. Peachpit Press (2004). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Forms

Standards Schmandards

Here you will find articles about web standards, accessibility and usability. Occasionally there will be articles where we digress from these topics. My hope for the future: web accessibility will not be around as a topic anymore. Noone will be able to make a living as an accessibility expert because all web sites will be accessible and accessibility will be an integral part of all development efforts. All authoring tools will comply with the ATAG recommendation and editors will only have a vague memory of how difficult it was to publish accessible information in the early 21st century.

Krantz, Peter. Standards Schmandards. Resources>Web Design>Standards>Blogs

Using Ajax for Creating Web Applications

In the past few years, developers could choose between two approaches when building a web application. The first approach was to create a screen-based system with very rich interactions using a sophisticated, powerful technology such as Java or Flash. The alternative approach was to create a page-based system using easier-to-learn core web standards like XHTML and CSS whose more basic capabilities force less-rich interactions. A new technological approach, dubbed Ajax, might just be the right mix between the two.

Porter, Joshua. User Interface Engineering (2005). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Ajax

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.

Caldwell, Ben, Michael Cooper, Loretta Guarino Reid and Gregg Vanderheiden. W3C (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards

A Personal Reflection on the WCAG 2.0 Publication

Let's work together as a community to make WCAG 2.0 a unifying force for web accessibility. There are so many websites and exciting new web applications being created today with accessibility barriers that make it difficult or impossible for some people with disabilities to use them. Let's change that, with WCAG 2.0.

Henry, Shawn Lawton. W3C (2008). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards

WCAG 2.0 Checklist

A simple checklist that presents the principles and techniques of WCAG 2.0 in a user-friendly, understandable format. The language has been significantly changed and simplified from the official WCAG 2.0 specification to make it more easily tested and verified for web pages.

WebAIM (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards

DOM, SAX and Standards - Where Now?

It's been 7 years and three "levels" since the first W3C DOM activity. XML and the way it is used has changed vastly over that time. DOM itself has moved from an API to access and manipulate an in-memory tree with no concept of namespaces, to an end to end XML technology, where parsing, modification of the tree (with the ability to check for validity with a schema as you go) and serialization are all specified.

Reakes, Gareth, Alberto Massari, Lucian Holland and Neil Graham. IDEAlliance. Articles>Web Design>Standards>XML

Five Ways to Instantly Write Better CSS

Sure, anyone can write CSS. Even programs are doing it for you now. But is the CSS any good? Here are five tips to start improving yours.

Davis, Trevor. NETTUTS (2009). Articles>Web Design>CSS>Standards

When Can I Use...

Compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies in the most popular web browsers.

Deveria (2009). Reference>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

What Are Web Standards and Why Should I Use Them?

Standards have so much to offer that we at The Web Standards Project (WaSP) consider it necessary to help you learn more about them. This document is merely a starting point; it will give you a solid understanding of what standards exist, why they do, and why you should care about them. Every time we create a piece of the Web, we contribute to the common information space that is the Web. We can build it up, or we can add weight that will tear it apart. The choice belongs to us; the consequences belong to everyone.

Web Standards Project (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Education

Browser Problems with the XML Prolog

Some browsers have difficulty upon encountering the XML Prolog. In some cases, the browser will render all the markup as text. In other cases, when a browser has some XML support, it might attempt to render the document as an XML tree. To avoid these problems, many practicing web professionals prefer to leave the prolog off. This table will help you make that decision by showing you which browsers have known problems with the XML prolog.

Web Standards Project (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>XML

The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types

Here's a dirty little secret: browsers aren't actually treating your XHTML as XML. Your validated, correctly DOCTYPE'd, completely standards compliant XHTML markup is being treated as if it were still HTML with a few weird slashes in places they don't belong (like
and ). Why? The answer is MIME types.

Pilgrim, Mark. XML.com (2003). Articles>Web Design>XHTML>Standards