A perennial question on discussion lists, and in fact at work, is how to handle heading hierarchies in pages and title structure across sites.
While there's a fair bit of opinion to be had, when people focus on creating a valid document structure the same rules consistently appear. These rules not only match up to the high-minded ideals of specification, but also serve the prosaic requirements of the daily development grind.
On Friday Canberra welcomed an influx of web geeks, inviting them to mash up government-supplied data in interesting and useful ways. I'm not sure anyone really knew what to expect, least of all the hosts!
In the tradition of my "big stonking posts", these are my notes from WDS09 - basically unedited (expect typos ;)), unfiltered for the most part (so they are a bit liveblogish in tone). Stuff [inside square brackets] is an aside, my own thoughts rather than something the speaker said. Sketch notes taken from Waferbaby's awesome sketch notes (under CC license).
When we get new toys, we use them... and use them... and use them... Sometimes the problem with new toys is reminding ourselves when not to use them.
Web development is no different. Support for new CSS features means we can start using things like rounded corners, font embedding and proper transparency/opacity - straight from our stylesheets.
Ask web developers about the tools they use, and it’s likely they’ll start talking about hardware, software and web applications. That’s understandable, but it’s not the whole picture.
I believe things like software pale in comparison with the most powerful tool available: coffee.
It's CSS Naked Day, is your markup showing?
There's a certain purity to seeing content with absolutely no CSS applied. Raw structure, a focus what the page is really about. It pares away all possible distraction, shows the heirarchy of content. Plus, it kind of reminds me of the early days when my net access was text-only ;) (vt100, dialup).
Running good semantic HTML without any CSS is perhaps the most levelling thing you can do - everyone can use it. Desktop browsers, mobiles, Lynx, screen readers... the Googlebot is pretty big on text, too.
Good structural markup is the foundation for a solid, flexible and maintainable website. You should always pay attention to your markup!