Who You Calling A Jesse?

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

Over the weekend I sat down and went through Dave Shea’s and Molly Holzschlag’s new book The Zen of CSS Design (which you can get at the UW bookstore). What a great book. It gives some good insight into what is behind the CSS Zen Garden and some design concepts. Really worth a read if you can squeeze it into those end of year budgets ;)

There were a couple things that did stand out while I read it though. The first bit is more of a ‘this is the code in the garden and why’ which has caused a bit of stir in places. One discussion that spilled over into emails to Dave Shea caused him to post a response on his web site about the AAA statement on the Zen Garden. Another one, The Zen of Disinformation brings to light some issues with the accuracy of some parts of the book. Molly and Dave have comments in the thread of that article. Interesting thread.

Even guru’s make mistakes and they really shouldn’t be tarnished too much for it… the book is about the Zen Garden and design, for that it is really good book. Just be sure to grab Web Standards Solutions or Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards (both should be in the bookstore here) if you are looking for more accurate and extensive information on web standards ;)

I have never been all that sure about using XHTML Strict for anything as long as DW did not support it. Why? Because you start of strict but as soon as you hand over the page to someone else there is no way to ensure it stays that way. Transitional languages are better suited for that scenerio. When my co-op student from term needed a way to learn CSS I told him to make a pure CSS UW home page .. and he did.

Today (until around 12pm) the current UW home page was XHTML strict and standard CSS. There are, however, some limitations:

1. The left nav is not ‘clickable’ in text mode
2. The search form is not accessible
3. IE 5.1 on OS X has some issues

We were trying it out until we got complaints, which I was certain it would happen by noon and it did. But it is an attempt to make the UW home page accessible without changing the design – which I am not entirely sure is possible.

The page can be found:

http://www.uwaterloo.ca/indexstrict.html

The first problem that was noticeable was the drop down navigation, it failed in IE 6. But what else is there? Other than the drop downs, was there anything else wrong with it? I am wondering if anyone can duplicate the IE 5.1 on OS X issues?