It seems that half of the panel was unable to make it at the last minute.
Marc Juneau - Nolagraphics.com
Gives his background - started at GoDaddy and now has own company.
History of Web
- 1 site to 160 million - Web started as text base - Along came graphics and flash
Problems started in about 1996 - sites were built of just flash and images
Why does this make it hard? - search engines only see html - many different ways sites were being coded in html - in many cases there was more code then content
W3c Gets Noticed
Why validate? Clients will never notice.
- 2 schools of thoughts - make it look good no matter what the html looks like - design to a standard
*shows a bloated code sample*
Advantages - helps when multiple people are working on something - everyone knows the standards
Ted Ulle - The MEWS Group - CSS and HTML Today
XHTML - what he considers a misstep
There are a lot of reasons we should not use XHTML - there is a thread on WMW that goes into great detail and should be looked at it.
HTML - the M stands for (the audience yells Markup)
Semantic Meaning vs. visual Rendering
HTML - semantic CSS - visual
Under used CSS
- common elements deserve their own default style rules (p tag, h1, and so on)
-
Whats the deal? Its a CSS Toolkit and allows you to be very flexible - .c - text align center - .s - is a small font - Line-height - it matters - set radio (1.25) not px or pt - improves readability and comprehension - plugs Usability News and how it is a must read - its from Wichita.edu and only comes out a few times a year
Abused CSS
- Hiding Anchors - Dont let aesthetics trump communication - Removing underscores? - Use redundant link cues - color/background-color - font variations - hover behaviors - Links are the core of the web
- Span tag - should be rare, very rare - it exposes weak CSS planning
- H1 and H2 - Do not use just for presentation - use an imitation style for H1 and H2
A guy does a stand-in as a presenter and uses a presentation from last year.(didnt catch his name)
Shows what is a "standard way" for CSS menus.
Shows a dynamic sample that can be written in PHP, Perl, ASP or any other language.
Advantages - less code - less storage - faster download of css
Q: What is a difference between an ID and a Class
A: ID is for something that only appears once on a page. Marc puts in that he uses IDs for layout and class for everything else.
Q: Image replacement - any techniques?
A: Tester: Some of the old ways (putting text 950 pixels over) looks like spam. SWF Object is the best way for replacing flash. He is suggesting that Adobe and Flash do it for you - that it creates the alternative text on the fly.
Contributed by DaveR.
