Rob Larsen

Archive for the 'xhtml' Category

Google Doctype – First Pass? Very cool.

Google Doctype, as introduced by Mark Pilgrim:

The open web is the web built on open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and more. The open web is a beautiful soup of barely compatible clients and servers. It comprises billions of pages, millions of users, and thousands of browser-based applications. You can access the open web with open source and proprietary browsers, on open source and proprietary operating systems, on open source and proprietary hardware.

Google has built its business here, on the open web, and we want to help you build here too. To that end, we are happy to announce the formation of an encyclopedia for web developers, by web developers: Google Doctype.

Google Code Blog: Introducing Google Doctype

Personally, I'm excited by this development (both practically and philosophically) and will likely contribute wherever it makes sense for me to lend a hand. Looking at it quickly some of the HOWTO information is already very useful (the web security information especially) and it will only improve with time as more and more dedicated people get involved with the project.

I Might Have to Start Bribing People to Upgrade to Internet Explorer 7- Fun With The CSS :hover pseudo-class.

There's absolutely nothing groundbreaking about the following code sample. People (who are lucky enough to have more time to mess around) have been doing this sort of experimentation for a while now. Thing is, this one is so simple and so plainly useful I just have to toss it out there for your (my?) enjoyment.
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Searching for Just the Right HTML Markup- List With Lead-in

I'm constantly trying to come up with little markup patterns that make semantic sense and make it easier for me to create requested layouts without having to resort to a bunch of extra classes and IDs.

One common design element that I've been bothered by recently* but haven't sat down and figured out looks like this:

list-with-lead-in.jpg

Today I took a step back** and came up with this to represent it:

<dl>
<dt>Sessions focus on:</dt>
<dd>
<ul>
<li>Configuring, tuning and understanding hardware servers and software applications</li>
<li>Client side issues related to Mac OS X computing and management</li>
<li>Integration with PSx, UNIX, Telephony and other environments </li>
<li>Managing Macs in an enterprise environment</li>
<li>A Jump start for admin newbies</li>
<li>Best Practices for 3rd Party Tools IntegrationM</li>
</ul>
</dd>
</dl>

Which feels just about right to me- it captures the relationship between the lead-in (the lead in being the term defined) and the list (the list being the definition of the lead-in), and would allow me to style the whole thing with no additional markup.

I'll just go ahead and file that one away.

*I've seen it on four or five different sites I've built in the past year and not so often before that. So up until recently it was never enough of a recurring pattern for me to even worry about.

**amazingly, since this markup will end up on a Drupal site. It's a wonder I even bothered since Drupal is pretty much on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from my minimalist coding style.

I Worked On This:

I didn't actually build anything on this site, but in the couple of weeks I did work on it I did do some XML/XSLT work on the CMS part, a wee bit of JavaScript and mashed the CSS up to work correctly with the IE family.

This Is Cable – Cable Services And Providers

New site.

I built out a couple of xHTML/CSS templates for the FASTforward '07 microsite. Wicked.

Someone else put the thing into production so blame him for any errors (*looks over shoulder to see if anyone catches me throwing people under the bus Peyton Manning style*)