Jens Meiert

Win a Signed Copy of “Webdesign mit CSS”

I am giving away a free yet signed copy of my German book Webdesign mit CSS – and you know what’s in the 2nd edition :) Winning is easy even though I want to get to know you a little bit better: Just write down your favorite football club and your postal address, then email jens(at)meiert.com …

¶ March 10, 2008, filed under Web Development, Accessibility, Design.

The Secret of Maintainability

Keep it simple.

¶ March 7, 2008, filed under Web Development.

Compatibility and IE 8, Again

After massive, legitimate criticism and concerns, there is a happy end: Microsoft decided against the “opt-in to the browser version I tested with” strategy and had Dean Hachamovitch announce that IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode …

¶ March 4, 2008, filed under Web Development.

“helvetica, arial”, Not “arial, helvetica”

Unless Arial really is your standard font, please use the order helvetica, arial in your CSS font declarations, not the popular arial, helvetica. Why? Because Arial basically still means kind of a copy of Helvetica, and Helvetica is ubiquitous or popular enough so that one can actually reference it …

¶ February 20, 2008, filed under Web Development, Design.

Website Optimization Measures, Part II

Now that we talked about blog clean-ups, structure and element revisions as well as search engine verification in part I, here are some additional suggestions, small measures for improvement consisting of .htaccess stuff, SEO, and consistency checks …

¶ February 15, 2008, filed under Web Development, Design.

Website Optimization Measures, Part I

Permanent focus on QA includes more thorough website revisions from time to time, and that does certainly not mean a “redesign” or “relaunch”. This week I spent a lot of time analyzing, refactoring, and optimizing some of my private sites, and I thought I’d quickly share a few of these things …

¶ February 10, 2008, filed under Web Development, User Experience.

CSS: Selector Variables

Especially complex projects suffer from higher cost of selector changes, and long sequences of simple selectors do impact the understandability and efficiency of style sheets. One solution might be selector variables or “synonyms”, a concept I proposed to the CSS Working Group yesterday …

¶ February 7, 2008, filed under Web Development.

What Makes a Professional Web Developer?

I’m asking: How should novice web developers learn the craft to build technologically high-quality websites? As professional web developers, we might (finally) help by providing necessary preconditions and basic tips in order to lay the foundation for better web development education …

¶ February 1, 2008, filed under Web Development.

Compatibility and IE 8

You certainly already heard about Microsoft’s great “opt-in to the browser version I tested with” strategy introducing practically mandatory HTML modifications; at least you scanned Aaron Gustafson’s festive presentation over at A List Apart. However, please do not use this meta element …

¶ January 28, 2008, filed under Web Development.

Internet Explorer 8 Renders Acid2 Correctly

It looks like a great strategic move right after the “Opera incident” but it appears to reflect internal development: Microsoft will succeed in rendering the Acid2 test correctly in Internet Explorer 8, the IE team just announced. This step alone is not only just right but also a big one …

¶ December 20, 2007, filed under Web Development.