My Year in Cities, 2008

As per Anne… I couldn’t resist.

Post from December 31, 2008, filed under Adventure.

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…

Post from December 19, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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 quite 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…

Post from December 11, 2008, filed under Web Development.

The Greatest Secret in Web Design

Alright I cheated, this isn’t really a secret. Or an open secret. Or whatever. It’s that web design is a process. Good web design is an ongoing endeavor…

Post from December 1, 2008, filed under Web Development and Art and Design.

WDR #2: Web Developers Needed for a Website

The Web Dev Report, issue #2, this time featuring a classic situation.

Post from November 25, 2008, filed under Web Development.

How to Uncover Pseudo-Standardistas

There’s a growing and annoying group of developers that don’t quite help healthy attempts for more accessible, faster, more maintainable, and best practice web development: pseudo-standardistas. There are several ways to expose pseudos…

Post from November 20, 2008, filed under Web Development.

WDR #1: Versioned Style Sheets

Ladies and gents, all I present’s… the Web Dev Report, issue #1.

Post from November 15, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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.

Post from November 11, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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…

Post from November 8, 2008, filed under Everything Else.

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.

Post from November 3, 2008, filed under Web Development.

Thoughts on Disclaimers

How awesome that these are particularly popular in Germany: disclaimers on both 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…

Post from October 28, 2008, filed under Everything Else.

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.

Post from October 21, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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.

Post from October 16, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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…

Post from October 13, 2008, filed under Everything Else.

Code Responsibly

Exactly: Code responsibly. And contribute if you like to.

Post from October 9, 2008, filed under Web Development.

Accessibility Heuristics

Just having updated my German article on accessibility heuristics it looked useful to share the guidelines over here as well, albeit in a short form. It’s a hat tip to respective documentation by the W3C and IBM.

Post from October 7, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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.

Post from October 2, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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.

Post from September 26, 2008, filed under Web Development.

When Guidelines Should Be Descriptive or Prescriptive

Every time I’m putting up guidelines and standards one of the decisions I need to make is whether or not 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”…

Post from September 13, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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…

Post from September 8, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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…

Post from August 28, 2008, filed under Everything Else.

To Be Clear (on Conditional Comments and Resets)

My articles on both Conditional Comments and “reset” style sheets belong to the most popular contributions regarding that matter not just on this site, but apparently on the Web. I appreciate the discussion…

Post from August 24, 2008, filed under Web Development.

Best Practice 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.

Post from August 12, 2008, filed under Web Development.

A Few Words on HTML/CSS Frameworks

Public, or open, or external, HTML/CSS frameworks are never 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…

Post from August 5, 2008, filed under Web Development.

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.

Post from July 29, 2008, filed under Art and Design.