2008
My Year in Cities, 2008
As per Anne… I couldn’t resist.
HTML vs. XHTML: Why HTML Wins
Document types are cool, and there are plenty of them. There are plenty, countless discussions about the “right” document type, too. Alas, these discussions often deal with irrelevant details or miss the point. A decisive factor is performance…
5 Tips To Deal with Right-to-Left Projects
Know what goes into your markup and what goes into your style sheets. It’s actually simple: When available, you should always use dedicated bidi markup to describe your content. CSS may not be available, and the specs actually say that…
The Greatest Secret in Web Design
Alright I cheated, this isn’t a secret. Or an open secret. Or whatever. It’s that web design is a process. Good web design is an ongoing endeavor.
WDR #2: Web Developers Needed for a Website
The Web Dev Report, issue #2, this time featuring a classic situation.
How to Uncover Pseudo-Standardistas
There’s a growing and annoying group of developers that don’t help our attempts for more accessible, faster, more maintainable, and best practice web development: pseudo-standardistas. There are several ways to expose pseudos…
WDR #1: Versioned Style Sheets
Ladies and gents, all I present’s… the Web Dev Report, issue #1.
5 CSS Tips Every Web Developer Should Know About
Of all the many tips this site already shares, the following ones may still be special. Let’s scan what might be essential for every web developer to know about CSS. Main focus: maintainability, differently.
Merged RSS Feed for German Readers
A new merged feed featuring all entries of my site, English and German, is now available through Yahoo Pipes. Since both parts of my site are different in several regards, including separate feeds, English-speaking German readers tended to subscribe to two feeds…
Website Optimization Measures, Part V
Almost half a year since my last article it’s about time to present version 5 of random website optimization measures, hopefully of use for your site as well. Short and crispy, to use a random German saying.
Thoughts on Disclaimers
Disclaimers are popular in Germany, both for websites and emails. Recently I came across the German Wikipedia article on disclaimers which talks about the topic in detail, and I could not but go for yet another “thoughts” post…
An Exercise for Emerging CSS Experts: Avoid IDs and Classes
To gain more expertise with CSS, there’s a great bonus level: Try avoiding IDs and classes altogether. That’s right, write your markup without any IDs and classes.
The Most Annoying Yet Most Important Task in Website Management
…is link checking. There are tools out there, en masse, so it is just annoying to run after professionals who either don’t know online basics or how to set up redirects, and with that waste other people’s time.
meiert.com Survey Results
It’s one and a half months since I asked for your feedback on meiert.com, and I finally decided to publish some of the results. I also wanted to reply to some responses I got via the “comments and suggestions” field. First, however, I like to thank everyone…
Code Responsibly
Exactly: Code responsibly. And contribute if you like to.
Accessibility Heuristics
You can keep your accessibility knowledge sharp by internalizing heuristics and ground rules. Review the guidelines and rules provided by the W3C and IBM.
Web Standards at Google
As an exception, I’m writing as a Googler here: At Google, we care about web standards. Officially, that’s no news, but given repeated criticism for the code of our pages, maybe it is.
The Most Important Thing Is to Get the HTML Right
Why? Because it’s the markup that makes for the most code of a site and is hence key to cost efficiency and maintainability, because it carries meaning and is important for accessibility, because it often has an impact on performance, and because it is the prerequisite for online success.
When Guidelines Should Be Descriptive or Prescriptive
Every time I’m putting up guidelines or standards one of the decisions I need to make is whether the guidelines, or which parts of them, should be descriptive or prescriptive. For coding guidelines this could mean the difference between, say, “the markup should be valid” and “the markup must be valid”…
How to Share Code with Users
If you share HTML/CSS code with users: Make sure that the code is valid and that ideally, it works in both HTML and XHTML. Focusing on valid code—a step towards quality code—should be obvious. “Invalidating” other people’s sites isn’t nice…
Asking for Your Feedback
I’d like to ask for 15 seconds (meaning exactly 15 seconds) of your precious time to take a really short survey related to this website, to learn about your perspective and ideas…
To Be Clear (on Conditional Comments and Resets)
My articles on Conditional Comments and “reset” style sheets belong to the most popular articles on the respective topics not just on this site, but apparently on the Web. Now, it looks like I could still clarify my standpoint.
Best Practices for ID and Class Names
I’m working on another article for German Dr. Web mag, this time covering recommendations for IDs and classes, an issue likely as old as the Web itself. Taking a different approach than usual I’m feeling free to publish a “guerrilla sneak preview” in this place.
A Few Words on HTML/CSS Frameworks
Public, or open, or external, HTML/CSS frameworks are rarely a good idea. Why? Because those framework developers are outside of your organization and cannot know your needs. This simple fact, the inevitable ignorance of a third party…
Updating a Definition of Art
When I once tried to define art, design, and decoration, I described art as: “Art hides. Art has a meaning, and it hides it, on purpose. Art delivers a message, and that message is hidden, on purpose. It is an art to create art. Art is unusable, by definition.” Continued.
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Perhaps my most interesting book: 100 Things I Learned as an Everyday Adventurer (2013). During my time in the States I started trying everything. Everything. Then I noticed that wasn’t only fun, it was also useful. Available at Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play Books, and Leanpub.
Perhaps my most personal and also most unusual book: Journey of J. (2015). A freestyle documentary of 557 days of travel across 6 continents and 48 countries. Available at Amazon.