Funny, right at the moment where I am working on slides and examples for a training at the company here, maxdesign, the lovely bunch behind listamatic and listutorial, offer their slides: Basic Webstandards Workshop.
Very good collection indeed, and I now have to restrain myself not to copy and paste the lot :-)
Found via Jens Grochdreis
Dan Cederholm did it again: The author of the indespensable “Web Standards Solutions” delivered with “Bulletproof Web Design” a wonderful follow-up showing you how to use CSS and XHTML to create flexible web sites. One of the main reasons developers still stick to layouts using tables – their resizability without breaking the layout grid – has lost a lot of its punch after reading this book and following its advice.
Just like in his older publications, Dan is based deeply in our developer world and does not dwell in theory, but explains the issues we have to face daily and offers solutions to them. (more…)
I have the fun job at the moment right now to turn a lot of word documents into HTML, as the client does not have a CMS or want one.
The Homesite keyboard shortcuts are a real treat there (ctrl+shift+p to turn the highlighted section into a paragraph), and the right-click “turn into unordered list” helps a lot, too.
However, what was missing was a keyboard shortcut to turn a line into a heading. What is cool about Homesite 5 though is that you cannot only write your own toolbars, menus and containers with something called VTML, which is much like XUL) but you also have an API to completely script the editor itself. So what I did is write a small headings.js file and attached it to the keyboard shortcut ctrl+2 (ctrl+1 already replaces all special characters with numbered entities – another script I did) via the Options -> Customise -> Script Shortcuts dialogue.
When I now write something like
1Welcome to the last day of your former lifeand press ctrl+2 it turns it into
Welcome to the last day of your former life
the number defines the weight of the heading (1 to 6). The script is easy enough:
function Main()
{
var selectedString = '';
var weight=1;
// highlight the current line and store its content in s
Application.ActiveDocument.SelectCurrentLine();
s = Application.ActiveDocument.SelText;
// get the first character and add the tag brackets with that weight
// around the line
weight=s.substr(0,1);
var r='< h ' + weight + '>'+s.substr(1,s.length) +'< / h ' + weight + '>';
// replace the highlighted line with the new one
Application.ActiveDocument.SelText = r;
}
//Following is some textile bug: More Information about the API is available at The Macromedia Site.
I thought I had done well and created an easy to use, dynamic gallery with DOM and CSS. What it does is show pictures when you click them in the page instead of doing a reload. It also shows a “loading image” message. All feedback I got was positive and I was happy to have provided something slick and useful. Alas, I found out that it is not all like that. (more…)
I hate using CSS hacks and filters. I strongly believe it is not my job to cover up the mistakes of browser vendors, and I hate relying on things I cannot test myself. As I also cannot be bothered to hunt the web for every new hack and workaround I considered buying this title to put it on my desk and get it over with. (more…)