2008

My Year in Cities, 2008

As per Anne… I couldn’t resist.

Post from December 31, 2008, filed under .

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 .

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…

Post from December 11, 2008, filed under .

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.

Post from December 1, 2008, filed under and .

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 .

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…

Post from November 20, 2008, filed under .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

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…

Post from October 28, 2008, filed under .

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 .

The Most Annoying Yet Most Important Task in Website Management

…is link checking. There are tools out there, en masse, but it’s annoying to run after professionals who neglect online basics or don’t know how to set up redirects—and with that waste other people’s time.

Post from October 16, 2008, filed under .

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 .

Code Responsibly

Exactly.

Post from October 9, 2008, filed under .

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.

Post from October 7, 2008, filed under .

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 .

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 .

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”…

Post from September 13, 2008, filed under .

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 with 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 .

Asking for Your Feedback

I’d like to ask for 15 seconds (meaning exactly 15 seconds) of your precious time for a short survey related to this website, to learn about your perspective.

Post from August 28, 2008, filed under .

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.

Post from August 24, 2008, filed under .

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.

Post from August 12, 2008, filed under .

A Few Words on HTML/CSS Frameworks

Public, or open, or external, HTML/CSS frameworks are rarely a good idea. Why? Because framework developers are outside of your organization and cannot know your needs. This simple fact, the inevitable ignorance of a third party, means that—

Post from August 5, 2008, filed under .

Updating a Definition of Art

When I 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 .

If you like what you see here, check out 100 Things I Learned as an Everyday Adventurer for how to try everything, and Journey of J. for what it’s like to travel the world for one and a half years.