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Web Standards
Book Review: Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook
May 26th
Book Review for:
Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook
5 out of 5 Stars for Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook
If you’ve read through some of my other posts, or even glanced at my Categories, you’ll know I’m a huge proponent of Web Standards. I also tend to buy my books based on other user reviews, as opposed to critic reviews. I like to get my review directly from the people using the book daily. This book current has a 5 star rating with 45 out of 52 5-star reviews on amazon.com and was a no brainer for me to rank it the same, for reasons I will get into later. This book was written in 2004 and a special addition was just released as well only 2 weeks ago.
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Decrease Your Web Site Load Times Using CSS Sprites
May 15th
I was working on a website recently when I came across an issue I’ve encountered a number of times before, I’ve just never really thought about in depth until just the other night. Here is the question that I posed myself:
Which will result in better web site performance and faster speed: Larger files and fewer server requests? or Smaller files and more server requests?
I posted this question recently at LinkedIn Q&A to get some insight on the topic. I enjoyed all of the answers and was able to take something out of each, and decided to post about a particular topic that was mentioned in a couple posts.
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Book Review: CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
Jul 12th
Book Review for:
CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
by Andy Budd with Cameron Moll & Simon Collison
5 out of 5 Stars for CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
This was the first CSS book that I purchased. I was always hesitant to purchase a book on CSS because most of the resources that I’ve found have been mostly beginner’s tutorials or instruction and I felt that I had at least a “beyond beginner’s” understanding of CSS. I wouldn’t go as far as saying I’m an expert at CSS, but at least mid-level to advanced. However, this book had some previous good recommendations from amazon.com so I bit the bullet and bought it. I must say that I was NOT disappointed!
This book starts off with a very quick introduction/recap of CSS basics including good code structure and organization, validation, DOCTYPES, common selectors including IDs and classes, pseudo-classes, and the advanced selectors such as universal, child, attribute and more, and some wonderful reference on the specificity and inheritance, or the “Cascade”, the core of CSS. Although this introduction is provided, it is relatively short at about 25 pages and I would suggest a good working understanding of these basics first, as it will help understand the rest of the book easier as opposed to trying to learn CSS for the first time from this book. The following chapter is another quick 15 pages with on “Visual Formatting Model Recap” including the Box Model and Positioning, two EXTREMELY important concepts to understand CSS properly. Although it is short, it is an extremely powerful section.
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Be a part of a world record attempt by downloading Firefox 3.0 on June 17th, 2008
Jun 15th
I was reading some science & tech news postings at google today and came across an article posted at ChannelWeb. The purpose of the article is to promote Mozilla’s efforts to set a Guinness World Record highest number of software downloads in a single day with the release of the new Firefox 3.0 web browser on June 17th, 2008.
For those of you living under or a rock, or hopelessly devoted to Microsoft, or if you just have never heard of it, Firefox is an award-winning open-source web browser from Mozilla. According to the W3C statistics, Firefox currently has a 39.1% market share of web browsers as of April 2008. When compared separately to the two major versions Internet Explorer (6 and 7), Firefox is the most popular browser in use on the internet. I can’t say for sure when I first started using Firefox, but it’s been at least 3-4 years, if not more, and I havn’t looked back since. I am a strong supporter of Firefox for a number of reason, most of which come from a web development standpoint. I thoroughly enjoy Firefox mainly because it has better support for web standards. (Read more about Web Standards in my post “We’re getting NAKED!! But don’t get too excited.“) Not only that, but as an open-source web browser, Firefox has a plethora of user-developed add-ons and themes available to customize your the look, feel, and performance of your browser. One of my favorites is the Web Developer Add-On (for obvious reasons). There are plenty of other add-ons for assisting with bookmarking features, managing feed subscriptions, toolbars, search tools, social networking management, and many more. See the full list of Firefox Add-ons.
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We’re getting NAKED!! But don’t get too excited.
Mar 31st
As anyone who was talked to me knows, I am a huge proponent of web standards and standards based design. For those of you who are unfamiliar with standards based design, here is a brief explanation.
Standards based design is web site design that follows and conforms to current web standards recommendations, as set by the W3C. According to their website, the W3C’s mission is:
To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
Some people may ask, why are web standards important? Same reason any set of standards are important: To promote continuity and uniformity. Think of all the standards in place in the world today: Standard Units of Weight and Measurement, Street sign colors/shapes, building/construction code, and even our state/local laws are all systems of standards. Without systems of standards, people would be free to do things as they wish. Ultimately, it would result in utter chaos. Unfortunately, that’s what happened back in the days of the browser wars in the mid-to-late 90’s.
Those of you who are fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to remember, know what I’m talking about. Different browser manufacturer’s did things their own way when it came to displaying web pages as web standards had not been published or were not widely known. Now, things are still far from perfect when it comes to browser support for HTML/CSS standards, but they are definitely better than they used to be. Browser manufacturers are getting better at their support for current design standards and W3C recommendations. A W3C Recommendation is the name for a current internet language standard and guideline, and over 110 recommendations have been published since 1994.
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