WYSIWYG editors for HTML are fraught with problems, as discussed in a previous post. This post is a quick look at why WYSIWYG editors would be important for content producers and offers some links to tools and research that people are doing. Continue reading
Explaining whitespace to clients is important. Sometimes people may want to cram everything into a small place. But the way you explain it to clients is also important. Continue reading
HTML, JavaScript and AJAX are not only used for normal web sites and web applications but often for general applications that happen to use these technologies as a delivery mechanism. This latter type of application is ideally meant to be a desktop app, but issues such as deployment, upgrading, and installation, especially in corporate-wide scenarios leads to use of web technologies instead. But HTML, JavaScript, etc were not built for these kinds of applications. So, what about Flash or even HTML 5? HTML 5 is still not meant for those apps, but Flash can be, if desktop apps are still not possible due to some of these constraints. Continue reading
HTML 5 is gaining increasing interest, with the potential to improve accessibility, make richer web sites more consistent and help make developing web sites that bit easier. A lot of new useful elements are proposed and some big companies are backing this. Yet, it will still likely be a long time before we see this. Continue reading
Ensuring the Expires header is set to the future for resources such as JavaScript, CSS and images helps increase the chance the browser will really cache those files, as research from Yahoo and Google have shown. This short post looks at how you can implement this in Apache and ASP.NET in a maintainable way. Continue reading
Client side web site performance can be as important as server side performance (maybe even more, from the user’s perceived download perspective). A number of tips and links for further information are provided in this post Continue reading
Simple things like using wider fonts (e.g. verdana instead of arial, or georgia instead of times), generous line height, and good use of white space (e.g. margins and paddings) can dramatically improve the accessibility, usability and aesthetics of your pages. Use them! Continue reading
Although this topic has been discussed many times before, and many people now use modern web standards and techniques, fixed width layouts are still prevalent. While sometimes necessary, it can often be less flexible for different users. This post briefly looks at various layout options such as fixed, fluid and elastic, describing the pros and cons of each. Continue reading
For professional web developers, WYSIWYG editors are usually inappropriate, because they may encourage bad practice; may not give the developer full control of the output they need to create; is the wrong paradigm when seemingly competing requirements for web sites are considered; and many WYSIWYG editors rely on Internet Explorer which produces poor quality markup. Fortunately, being able to hand edit your markup output is not only easier than it may initially appear, but gives you flexibility to get what you need. Continue reading