Abstract Sequential » html

Two steps forward, one step back

Stephanie — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:34:30 +0000

Tuesday I was a guest speaker at Mrs.A’s gifted class. She’s teaching a group of 9-12 year olds web design and asked if I’d come in an talk for an afternoon.

So I spent 30 minutes talking to them about the basics of user centred design and how the internet works. Then I helped them trouble shoot their table based layouts and font tags.

Finally figure out what my problem is.

Stephanie — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:18:38 +0000

I read John Resig’s article Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS a few days ago and found it to very useful information.

And then today I had an “ah-ha’ moment – this this is why I hate coding flexible horizontal navigation menus.

Missing table based layouts.

Stephanie — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 02:17:35 +0000

There’s only one time where I ever really miss table based layouts: when I’m trying to make a flexible horizontal navigation bar with centred links. Like this or this. *chews on keyboard with frustration*

Searching for an answer

Stephanie — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 01:02:09 +0000

Has anyone else noticed a bunch of really old HTML coding tutorials at the top of their search results when searching for answers to HTML coding questions lately?

I was trying to find out if legend was a required tag in fieldset and I got a tutorial that said not to use legend because Netscape 4 doesn’t support it yet but should soon!

This time it’s not IE.

Stephanie — Mon, 28 May 2007 21:14:48 +0000

Wow, FireFox does not play nice with styling legends.

FireFox, I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.

Styling Our Style Sheets

Stephanie — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:15:26 +0000

I’ve been wanting to seriously redo some of the HTML and CSS behind the BCIT site since I came on board here almost a year ago.

Well, I get my wish. We’re going to take some baby steps towards semantic HTML and CSS (POSH if you like) and despite my aversion to being in charge, I’m leading the project.

As a first step I’m trying to write a CSS coding style guide. I can’t necessarily clean up the current mess but I can try to stop any new ones from being made ;)

What I want to do is develop guidelines for:

if and how style definitions should be divided between multiple style sheets
what order style definitions should be listed in (I currently put all my tag definitions at the top of documents and then place my id and class definitions beneath them in the order they’re anticipated to appear on the page)
naming conventions for ids and classes
commenting conventions
what order properties should be arranged within definitions
if and when we should use shorthand properties
formatting guidelines

So far my research has turned up very few examples to help me with the development. This somewhat out dated post is the best I’ve found so far. Part of my problem is that searching for a style guide for CSS is just coming up with guides to styling with CSS.

Do you work with a CSS coding style guide or know any good resources for developing one?

Don’t judge me on my code

Stephanie — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:25:43 +0000

Just like the current BCIT site’s code is horrible thanks to our restrictive CMS I’m not happy with my current blog theme, please don’t judge me on it.

Something new today

Stephanie — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 20:20:32 +0000

So apparently we’re supposed to be encoding ampersands when we write them in the href part of anchor tags.

link

Border Collapse

Stephanie — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 04:13:22 +0000

I am, for the most part, self taught when it comes to HTML and CSS. I’ve take a few courses to get a piece of paper that says I can do what I say I can do but learned very little from them.

I spotted this little CSS tidbit in a presenter’s code at the Web Directions North conference a few weeks ago and now I’m wondering if this is the sort of thing I missed out on by being self taught:

table { border-collapse:collapse; }

There are quite a few tables I’ve designed where this would have been very useful.