Mad Web Skills

I was going to give the live blogging thing a go this year, but due to the lack of wifi here at the Powerhouse Museum, I decided to just take a few notes from Andy’s workshop from time to time, then collate them into something to post at the end of the day. This worked out better actually, as I didn’t particularly feel like having the MacBook out the whole time.

By morning tea break Andy Clarke has just covered the general concepts for today’s workshop. It seemed like a tough crowd in that many attendees were finding it a little difficult to either accept or understand some of Andy’s concepts. He started off talking about an alternative to progressive enhancement, where instead of using dodgy browsers (I’m looking at you, IE6) as a baseline for design, then adding enhancements for newer browsers, Andy suggested that we should aim for the top, using all that CSS 2.1 has to offer (and even CSS 3 in some cases), forgetting the notion that the design should look the same in all browsers. Basically, Andy was suggesting that it was often better to use poorly supported (by IE) CSS rules rather than add extra cruft to your markup to achieve the same effect in IE6.

This is an approach that I’ve taken in a few of my designs, mainly in cases where I’ve over-estimated IE6′s capabilities and have been forced to remove certain design elements, such as using transparent PNGs for glow effects, etc. (eg. See how the Sheppparton Villages website’s content area’s light-bloom effect changes between modern browers and IE6. This is less to do with CSS and more to do with PNG-24 alpha support, but the concept’s the same.)

I guess it’s all about where you set the bar for what you’re willing to let IE6 go without. Some of Andy’s examples were a little more than I would accept (ie. I wouldn’t want anything to look out of place or wonky in IE6), but I agree with the general message that, hey, we’ve got these cool CSS rules we can use to make things look cool. Why wait for people to stop using IE6 before we use them to enhance a design for those using modern browsers. It takes a little lateral thinking, but like Andy, I enjoy the challenge that it brings.

I’m about to head out for a bite to eat and a bit of shopping. In a classic example of awesome preparation, I remembered to bring my camera to Sydney, but forgot a USB cable or a SD card reader.

Technorati Tags: wds07 css

It’s that time of year again when the ol’ weblog gets it’s yearly workout. I arrived in Sydney this afternoon, and after settling into my hotel room (with LCD TV! Yay!), getting all showered up (By the way, WTF? What kind of hotel has the hot tap turn on anti-clockwise, and the cold tap turn on clockwise?), I’m about to venture forth for bite to eat then take a walk to get my bearings to the Powerhouse Museum (the venue for tomorrow’s workshop with Andy Clarke. I’m really looking forward to this conference, as I’m not only a fan of Andy’s work, but also of his way of thinking. He’s very inspiring.

Also as part of the pre-conference buzz-building is all the social network web gizmos that go along with it. I’ve got the Flickr tagged, the Twitter feed, the Technorati tagged, the Facebook group, along with the official website, all bookmarked and open in my Firefox tabs. If I’ve missed anything, let me know

On a similar note, I’m a little saddened that last year’s Web Connections website wasn’t re-jigged for this year’s conference. Although, as illustrated above, there’s no shortage of networking apps linked to the conference, it was handy to have everything in the one place. Perhaps if the Facebook group was utilised a little more… Anyhoo, I’ll be kicking around Sydney throughout the conference, so if you want to catch up, give me a hoy-hoy.

Technorati Tags: wds07

I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life.

Recently there has been a bit of discussion about the ol’ separation of content and presentation after the release (and subsequent point upgrade release) of Blueprint, a most excellent CSS framework by Olav Bjørkøy (also based on the work of others) for the quick deployment of grid layouts and baseline typography. B

Among the voices heard was Jeff Croft who stood up for the framework, stating that in the real world of commercial web development, it’s less important to adhere strictly to keeping presentational class names out of the markup.

Where web standards and other best practices don’t provide great benefits, find solutions that do.

This, in turn, started a mini-barney in the comments between himself and Jeremy Keith (which has rightly been removed), highlighting that even the web-celebs are having trouble agreeing on the issue.

What I would love to see (and please enlighten me if something like this already exists, or is planned for CSS3) is something like definable style aliases. For example, instead of having the following in your markup:

<div id="header" class="column span-2 append-1">Content...</div>

… we just could use:

<div id="header">Content...</div>

… and then define something like the following in your stylesheet:

#header {
     alias: '.column', '.span-2', '.append-1';
}

This way you could keep the extraneous presentation-related classes out of the mark up and associate them to meaningful identifiers or classes in the stylesheet where they belong. From what I can gather, the problem most people have with the likes of Blueprint is not with having class names based on presentation, but the fact that they get all mixed up with the markup.

I’d love to know what you you think, especially if you know something I don’t.

Technorati Tags: web design, css

Ryan Nichols has written an excellent article on DWM about designing the websites and branding behind Carson Systems’ “The Future of…” series of conferences. It must have been a great experience for them to sink their teeth into a project like that, and then to see the fruits of their labour all over the web as well as the real world.