McArthur GFX

As a deadline approaches far faster than you can type, you're required to write some quick-and-dirty code to fulfill those feature requests.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, this is when there happens to be a flaw in your program's structure. It's an architectural problem: you did properly build the system to elegantly behave in an expected manner. Sometimes, it's a problem from bad planning at the start. In other cases, it comes from scope creep, where features get slipped into a system that previously was not going to have such features.

With web standards being all the rage, and accessibility being a major driving factor in people adopting standards, you might be surprised to actually check out the accessibility of web-sites.  After watching a video of a blind user using Jaws , I figured to give using a screen reader a try just to see if I could understand it any better.  I ran into a couple problematic areas; what caught my attention first was the use of forms .

As many have noted, there's many opinions on how to handle the Internet Explorer 6 monster.  For a beautiful web just suggested his solution: one stylesheet to rule them all . It's completely ridiculous, and I'm suprised to see other professionals agreeing.

I've seen several big name web-sites point out this argument about whether or not CSS is worse for making web-sites than tables were, and I'm honestly getting sick of it .  Some (self-proclaimed?) bigwigs in the web industry are even saying it's easier to use tables and that's what they're going to use for now.  I assume everyone knows the reasons for using standards, semantic html, cascading stylesheets, and the like instead of tables.  The benefits are enormous.  But is it really too hard?

Yes, everything.  All the fights, all the ugly words, all the bruises, all the broken keyboards, all the late nights.  They were your fault, IE6.  It feels rather liberating to be free of you.  At least, personally. (Sometimes my boss makes me work with you, but its purely professional at those times.)

Steve Webster recently wrote an article about how horribly standards-stupid SproutCore (the Javascript framework Apple used to make MobileMe) is. He kind of has the right mind-set, in that Javascript should be a progressive enhancement to web-sites, and they should still function properly without i...

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We see valid code popping up all over the place. And that’s great! Web standards should be followed by everyone. But, is it possible to make your code pass W3C’s validator without actually meeting the standards?

Valid vs Semantic

Standards were set for xHTML, and the validator can read thro...

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You: “My sites comply with current web standards.”
Potential Client: “Eh, ok? Don’t all web-sites? ’sides, what’s it matter?”

The above conversation has availed most freelancers. You know why they should pick you over that cheap-o that offered them work at 5 bucks an hour. Of cou...

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