A to Z(ee) with P3P

When you build websites that rely on cookies and they are expected to work with privacy settings other than default, you’ll have to deal with P3P. Read on to find out about the cornerstones of the Platform for Privacy Preferences, and get your hands dirty with an example guiding you from empty hands to a complete basic implementation.

Willerich, Matthias. Content with Style. Articles>Web Design>Privacy>Standards

Clean URLs for a Better Search Engine Ranking

Search engines are often key to the successful promotion and running of your website. Read more on how clean URLs can influence your ranking and how clean URLs can be achieved for dynamic applications.

Opitz, Pascal. Content with Style (2005). Articles>Computing>Content Management>Search Engine Optimization

Comments on Comments

The right kind of comments to speed up the development process and enable a couple of interesting possibilities to generate documentations automatically. This article tries to reflect on the pros and cons of comments and to show some interesting possibilities for automatic comment parsing. Comment Basics

Opitz, Pascal. Content with Style (2006). Articles>Computing>Programming

Content with Style

Content with Style will try to find balance between specifics and inspiration and keep you on track with what we feel is a good approach to our daily business: Styling up information for the web!

Content with Style. Design>Web Design>Usability>Blogs

A CSS Framework

If you've been creating sites with CSS for a while you may be getting frustrated with having to recreate and retest basic layouts on a regular basis. In this article I'm trying to illustrate a simple way of skipping the tedious startup on your average project, letting you get to the interesting stuff as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS

CSS is Worthless

CSS does not make a site accessible. CSS does not make your site rank higher in search engines. Good CSS does not make you an elite web programmer. I don't code CSS. CSS is misunderstood.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content With Style (2007). Design>Web Design>CSS

Database-Driven Tree Structures with XML and XSLT

This article deals with the display of tree-structures that are driven by a database. There are actually a few approaches to transform a 2-dimensional structure into a tree, and it seems odd that most are unknown to many developers.

Opitz, Pascal. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>XML>XSL

DOM Scripting, or How to Keep the Code Clean

In this tutorial I want to show up the differences between DOM-Scripting and the 'traditional' JavaScript technique using event-handlers embedded into the HTML-code. I’ll show a way to have accessible popups, and by showing how to do those, I’ll explain the propper use of DOM-scripting.

Opitz, Pascal. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>DHTML

Dynamic Tables With XSLT

How to use the powerful dynamic features of XSLT for sorting and displaying table-data.

Opitz, Pascal. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>DHTML>XSL

Figure Microformats

An image, a caption and the image credit. That can't be hard to get the associations right, can it? Delve into the discussion about markup, semantics and microformats of a seemingly simple issue.

Willerich, Matthias. Content with Style (2007). Articles>Information Design>Standards>HTML

Find Your Node: Advanced XPATH Commands

All that XSLT does is applying code-templates on XML-nodes. In order to do this you need to find the right node. XPATH offers you an advanced toolkit to do that within an XSL-file.

Opitz, Pascal. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>Style Sheets>XSL

Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps

With AJAX-based applications still in their infancy there has been a tendency to disgard basic web behaviour in favour of slick functionality. In this article I am trying to rescue two of those ‘lost’ behaviours – bookmarking and the back button, using Javascript.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content With Style (2005). Design>Web Design>Usability>Ajax

Modular CSS

This isn't a new idea but looking at people's code it doesn't seem to be a particularly widely used practice: modular CSS. That's a poncy name for the very simple idea of grouping related styles into separate stylesheets. The same set of tasks turn up on project after project and a little careful thought can save hours of foundation work, allowing you to get on with the serious business of turning a flat design into a web page far more quickly.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS

MVC in Smaller Web Applications

MVC (Model, View, Controller) is an attempt to structure a web application into three components.

Willerich, Matthias. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes

Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids

Over the years I've had the privilege of working on some very large web standards projects in small teams of other CSS/XHTML developers, but I've also spent a lot of time building little sites on my own for smaller clients. Maintenance on a small project involves being able to understand your own code when you come back to it months later. On larger projects it means your team mates being able to understand and edit your code as quickly and efficiently as possible at any point in the future. It's a far more complicated objective.

Stenhouse, Mike. Content with Style (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS

Processing the Output Buffer with XSLT

This article shows an example of a technique mentioned in one of our recent articles. It uses the PHP output buffer in combination with XML as intermediate application layer. Ideally you should familiarize yourself with this concept first.

Opitz, Pascal. Content With Style (2005). Design>Web Design>XML>XSL

Templates from Babel?

Discusses the current way of rendering templates used in most MVC style rapid development frameworks.

Opitz, Pascal. Content With Style (2007). Articles>Internet>XSL

UTF-8: Documents With a Lot of Character

Did you ever built a webpage in Homesite and then you didn’t encode the html-entities? Then, probably when the client has a look on it, all the german Umlaut characters look awkward on a mac? And did you figure out why? It’s because of the charsets and the encoding of the characters in the saved file!

Opitz, Pascal. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>Localization>Unicode

XML as Intermediate Application Layer

In this article I want to share my thoughts on techniques for keeping our code XML-based - so there's no need to get your hands dirty in your application code to change the markup that is rendered afterwards.

Opitz, Pascal. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes>XML

XSL: The Other Way of Styling Up Content

Two of the best known acronyms around right now are XML and XSL, often being mentioned as 'the way to go' or some abstract technique that stands for a new direction within the whole web. Rather than dealing with the languages itself in detail I’ll try to give a pragmatic approach and to show basic examples how to transform data into browser-ready HTML.

Opitz, Pascal. Content with Style (2005). Design>Web Design>Style Sheets>XSL