Mad Web Skills

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.

That’s right. Apple has shocked-and-awed me by announcing that as of the current version (3 Beta), Safari is now available for download as a native Windows application. Well, when I say native, it still looks like it’s just a screenshot of an OSX app, gun-metal grey chrome and all. I wish it looked a little more like a windows app, especially with the way the Preferences window behaves, but for the first release, I’m quite pleased. Performance is good, and I find the HTML rendering to be very accurate. I don’t quite think I’m ready to switch from Firefox just yet, but it’s great to be able to test for Safari without firing up the Mac.

Technorati Tags: web design, safari

Over on Diary of a Website, karmatosed has ranted about so-called web designers who’s knowledge of code does not extent far past exporting slices from Photoshop/Fireworks. “Just because you can hit a button to create code DOES NOT make you a web designer. It makes you a button pusher.” Amen.

Technorati Tags: web design

Two chat bots, Alice and Jabberwacky talk about their day. Having dealt with chat bots in the past, I kinda get the impression that these choice snippets are culled from a long list of rubbish.