Tag Archives: css

Learn with the Opera Web Standards Curriculum

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In the deep dark past of the web, many programmers learnt about how to code HTML, CSS and Javascript by a mixture of books, other developers and hacking apart existing web code. This lead to some very messy outcomes with cut and paste solutions that allowed bad code to live on. Web development is now a mature profession, and has an abundance of quality resources available. For a new front end web developer the Opera Web Standards Curriculum is one of the best resources.

The site is a fantastic collection of 37 articles and counting that lead from a general web introduction through HTML, accessibility and CSS. There are great articles on colour theory and web typography. The site is aimed at students and educators in the hope they will teach their students the right way to do things on the web.
The W3C may publish the standards but the Opera Web Standards Curriculum is a great practical resource to learn them.

Web layout functionality and cross browser compromise

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Web browsers are a varied beast, and great ideas can become bogged down in frustrating hand holding and gentle coercion.

With an ongoing project – devReview(), a number of requirements for the site layout were put together:

  1. CSS based (and clean as possible)
  2. Cross browser compatible. [IE6+, Firefox 1+ and other Gecko browsers, Opera 8.5+, Safari 1.3+, Konqueror 3,4+]. IE 5/5.5 went in the nice to have bin. Given the site is for techos, the spread was wide but more modern.
  3. 3 column with a fluid centre for content
  4. Content to appear first in html.
  5. Viewable down to a min of 600px.

In the early development, a number of layouts were looked at, and trialled. Eventually it was settled to use the ‘In Search of the Holy Grail‘ layout from Matthew Levines ‘A List Apart’ article. It seemed to best satisfy all the requirements above.

So where are we today. Well if you look at the devreview site now, you will notice the 3 column layout is gone, replaced by a 2 column version. Some may call this failure, I call it compromise. With relatively simple content the layout stayed together, but once it needed to be pushed and extended, some of the browsers (IE6 mainly) became such a pain. Eventually it was much more productive to dump the ‘the holy grail’, lose a bit in layout, but gain extra in maintainability, and extendibility.

So of the 5 layout requirements, 4 have been kept. We could have selected a different 4 (ie dropping the content first or fluid centre), but the 2 column solution seemed the most workable.

Sometime in the future this can be looked at again. Old IE versions will not disappear straight away, but I am confident that the new browser wars are a good thing, and all web users (and developers) will benefit.

stylegala.com for sale

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I noticed recently that stylegala.com was up for sale. This is one of the sites I would check regularly and I always found it full of good info about web design issues, especially after years away from web programming (I remember the days of Netscape 1 and Lynx…….).

The opening price was $30K but at last look $40K. It started from 1 person but a community grew and grew around the site. So who would buy this site and what could they do with it? I see 2 possibilities:

  1. A corporate group buys the site. Naturally their focus will be a return on investment. Can more income be squeezed from the site without alienating its community. I would be surprised. And if the new owner doesn’t share the same passion for the site aims I believe many of the important users will drift away. Possibly 1 or more of these users will make the bold move to start a new community from scratch.
  2. A large group of users chipping in small amounts and owning it collectively. Could this ownership structure survive and prosper? I would like to hope so, but a few core users will need to take the lead with out upsetting the other owners.

Even though this site didn’t start out as a business, it has become one. Do businesses survive when the original passionate owner moves on? My guess is this one will be swallowed up, and much of its character will be lost. The upside is that someone else, somewhere else will replace it.