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For the Developers in the Audience, a Scary Quote

rob — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:51:35 +0000

Dave Shea says:

"Did you know that you can nest your divs so deep that Firebug stops working properly? I do now."

From:

Personally, I'm surprised because I've seen some savagely nested divs produced by systems like Drupal and while it was a singularly awful environment to work in, it didn't actually cause Firebug to choke. Also, looking through his code, I see nothing that screams to me as being exceptionally deeply nested. I put a comment in. I'll update with more info…

Question: When is a CSS Class not a CSS Class?

rob — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 03:09:16 +0000

Answer: When it's a unique identifier.

Check out this class attribute generate by my beloved WordPress' upload feature:

class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4590"

See anything suspicious? I sure do. wp-image-4590 is a unique identifier being passed off as a class. Why? I actually have no clue as I'm not privy to the thought process behind that particular piece of code What I do know is pretty much demands to be an ID. When I teach this stuff to people, I say "If it's unique, meaning there will ever only be one of them, make it an ID. If there's more than one or it's a general descriptor, make it a class." So I look at that code block every time I upload an image and I frown. Then I blow away the whole class attribute away, since I use none of them.

This is just splitting hairs, I know. Using a class like that is basically harmless. But, truth be told, splitting hairs helps me solidify my ideas about the way these things should work. That, in turn helps me improve the way my crew and I do our thing. So? Hairs I split and everyone is happier.

I'm just doing my small part to make the web a better place one nitpicky, semantic post at a time.

Webmonkey Relaunches and I Flashback to the 90s

rob — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:29:15 +0000

For real! I ran through all of the primordial webmonkey tutorials* when I was starting out building sites (10-11 years ago now!) and if the newly relaunched site is half as helpful it will be a great boon to the community. Great info and a friendly, funny attitude made it the place for me to learn about the web thing back in the last century. Honestly, I owe a lot to the usefulness of those early tutorials. Looking back on it I realize that Webmonkey, coupled with the community that sprang up around Dreamweaver at the time**, was a great forge upon which to build up my web chops.

We're Back! Webmonkey Relaunches, Rejoins Wired

The original web developer's resource has returned. Webmonkey has been completely redesigned, and we're ready to rock once more. Also, our entire content library is now hosted on a wiki, so every tutorial, reference page and code example is open for editing. Come on in and show us what you've got!

Webmonkey: the Web Developers Resource

*Some still exist: like Thau's JavaScript Tutorial, which is over ten years old now.

**I've been a Dreamweaver user since Version 1.2.

A New Site I Made is Live: Invesra.com

rob — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:55:16 +0000

Check it out.

Invesra | Invest in your Future

The company is called Invesra. It's a financial services startup with backing from Village Ventures. I did a quick site for them to get their new brand* out the door for the FinovateStartup even in San Francisco this week. They've got a great team** and an interesting product so it's been a pleasure helping them out during a crunch period. As it always does, working with a startup makes me miss those startup days myself.

Then I think back to what working for two at once was like (Boston's Weekly Dig and Advisortech) and I like the agency life just that little bit more

*Tom O'Keefe's excellent work

**My lovely and talented girlfriend is Director of User Experience

Mark Pilgrim on Douglas Crockford's "Fixing HTML"

rob — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 04:32:48 +0000

The difference, of course, is that Crockford should understand that things are a little more complicated than that, but the ideas that he thinks are good enough to announce to the world are no better than the ideas a 5-year old has before breakfast. “No more iframes! No more document.write!” he declares, blissfully unaware that his employer’s home page uses both. “Strict entity parsing!” he demands… in a page with unescaped ampersands. “UTF-8 is the One True Encoding!” he proclaims boldly… in a page that declares itself as ISO-8859-1. “No more javascript: URLs! In fact, let’s replace Javascript altogether! And I’ll be back to talk about CSS!” It just goes on and on, the awesomeness gradually swelling until it all folds back on itself like a Möbius strip of self-parody. It’s the Bolero of trolls. Everything he claims is secure isn’t, and everything he claims would increase security wouldn’t. Everything he wants to add to HTML would make it worse, and everything he wants to remove would also make it worse. Please, please tell me he’s shooting the moon to make the worst proposal ever. It just doesn’t make sense any other way, at least not from anyone older than 5.

The Bolero of trolls [dive into mark]

The Fixing HTML page itself.