Having worked in web development for 19 years has its advantages, but there are plenty of disadvantages too. Gray hairs and wrinkles are a topic for another post. I’m talking about all that useless knowledge (table layout, anyone?) you still carry around and how you can get stuck in your ways. Of course, by “you” I mean me.
Images on the web can be a brilliant user experience enhancement. Or they can be a serious impediment to users trying to load your pages. Don’t frustrate your users with gigantic image files. With just a couple of small, free apps for your Mac, you can process images before adding them to a theme or uploading them to your site as content.
From the presentation I gave this weekend at the Phoenix Desert Code Camp. You can also view and download the notes at http://bit.ly/cssforlayout
Cascading style sheets (CSS) allow us to separate content from presentation.
After coding a few dozen or more forms, it finally occurred to me one day that I was going about form creation the wrong way. Writing the code from scratch for every new form was a pain. So I created a list of the most common form elements that I can copy-n-paste for quick-n-easy forms.
I recently spent a great deal of time on the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site, combing through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 working draft. There's a lot of very fine material in that document. Unfortunately, for the average designer it's pretty much, well, inaccessible.
