Content management systems with WYSIWYG editors have issues with some templates using CSS for layout – effectively forcing the designer to cater both for the CMS and the final browser. This post proposes the idea of an editor style sheet to overcome these problems.

Good web developers should have realised by now that there are a lot of different user agents out there and the web does not only consist of Internet Explorer 6 users on Windows XP with a resolution of 1024×768 pixels. Therefore we test on different browsers and settings – as defined in the project scope document. Most of the time this does involve MSIE 6 and MSIE 5.5, if we are lucky even Firefox and maybe Safari. Personally I tend to develop on Firefox and then fix MSIE glitches and do some sanity testing on Safari and the newest Opera flavour. Lately however, I realised that we are likely to forget another user agent – for another user group – the content management system. (more…)

This morning Digital Web finally released the article I have been promising people at @media in July this year: 10 reasons why clients don’t care about accessibility.

The article describes reasonable facts that prevent us from reaching our goal to sell and maintain accessible web sites. I collected these from client interaction in the last three years with clients reaching from Blue Chip down to internal products.

Apart from the normal reaction whenever one of my articles gets released – groupies storming my flat, people offering their firstborn and donating thousands of dollars via paypal – I was also very happy to get lots of good comments.

Being yet another vain web publisher, I also checked who is linking to the article and to me, and found out about a phenomenon I had encountered earlier with other articles (insert thunder and lightning effect here):

Remote Commenting

What that is – and yes, I just made that term up – is the phenomenon that great comments about a certain publication tend to be made anywhere but where the publication lives. In this case, Roger Johannson’s blog got some really good feedback which would have been more beneficial at Digital Web itself.

It is not about the poor writer hunting for other feedback – or even accusations she cannot justify – it also is about the quality of the discussion.

Many a times an A List Apart article had the better solutions to the problem it discussed in the comments, and they are still available years later. If your valuable input was published somewhere remotely, nobody will ever find it once the article became old news.

Philipp Lenssen of google blogoscope has published a while ago truth I had known for a long time now Good programmers are lazy and dumb. I keep telling my developers that you don’t impress me by staying in the office late, you impress me by doing the 8 hour job in 6 hours with proper documentation. Then you can go home for all I care.

Most of my development happens because I don’t want to repeat things. EasyCMS was built to allow me quick changes to a prototype, EasyNav to allow clients using contribute to edit the navigation.

Working with Mint I was missing an option to collapse the different panes when I don’t want to read them.

Some hacking later, I wrote a script that automatically allows you to collapse and expand a table by activating its footer. As a visual indicator, the script adds an image to the footer (this also allows keyboard access).

It is a work in progress and I need your help to fix it for Opera and get rid of a weird Firefox issue.

See the collapsible tables demo

Shaun Inman is not only a well known blogger and developer who recently put my pathetic efforts in generating CSS constants to shame with his server side CSS constants , no he also developed a very much blogosphere-hyped stats tool called Mint, which is available at http://www.haveamint.com/.

Enthusiastic, as I was, I signed up for the preview and demo just to realise that is database seems to have gone boom. This was a bit of a shame, as I dislike buying cats inside the bag. However, this pussy purrs very much and one painless install later I have Mint running on icant.co.uk. The recent success of the CSS Table Gallery made my former free counter from http://www.statscounter.com not free any longer (more than 9000 hits/day), and I considered to go for Mint instead of dashing out a monthly upgrade (I bought one now, though).

Now, as you can see in the Mint screenshot it is a beauty and gives very much the information you want. However, statscounter does a lot more, including user paths, browser, OS, resolution information and which country your visitors are from.

With Mint being a no-nonsense approach and an extendable architecture I am looking forward to more bits to come. Job well done for now!