Who You Calling A Jesse?

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.

I am slowly working in PHP includes in the header and footer of my pages. It is a great may to manage content across sites but today I learned something. Save yourself a load of headache and trouble of having to switch file types and add this ditty your .htaccess file:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .phtml .html

That way your .html files act like PHP and you can use PHP includes. Not satisfied with PHP? How about shtml…

AddType text/html .html
AddHandler server-parsed .html

Now back to fixing my muck up this morning an remember kids – do not change file names unless you really really really have to. Here is a good .htaccess tutorial that you can refer to as well.

In the XHTML template that has been proposed to the UW Web Steering Committee there is a recommended document structure that bascially goes like this:

• Header 1 is the department title in the top left-ish area and currently is an image in the template.
• Header 2 is the ‘title related to left nav’ which doesn’t have to show up on every page and it doesn’t on the home page… it is just an option.
• Header 3 is the top level in the content.
• Header 4 is the top level for the right column and can be used in the content area.
• Header 5 to whatever is for document structure at the content creators preference.

Basically what happens now is that Header 1 and 2 are not to appear in the content. I realize that could cause some difficulty with the few people that are actually using H1 and H2 in their content right now and I don’t think there is anything wrong with using the H1 and H2 in the content. In Heading Elements, Semantics and the Spec according to Andy Budd, I think, H1 and H2 used as they are is fine.. and using H1 as your first content header is probably better.

If you go through the comments and the article, there are some interesting points brought up. With a University web space how do you approach it? Is each department and faculty a volume of the larger book collection or a chapter? Or are academic support departments (Registrar, etc) a chapter of the University of Waterloo site, Each Faculty a volume and departments within the Faculties a chapter of those volumes? You could really get into splitting hairs and pulling them out if you tried to classify this place.

How would I apply it here?

My thought is this: Each site is folder that collects many stand alone documents under a general heading that should be structured as proper documents. This will help search engines rank pages at UW better and ultimately help the people that are looking for information on your web site. That is not to say you should not approach each page with the thought ‘is this a document or a series of pages within a larger document?’

Which I think means that if a page is a document in itself then it should be structured with H1 as the most important header in the document, then H2, H3, etc. If it is a collection of pages that are part of a larger document than the only page that should have a H1 is the first in the series. I am not 100% sure that makes any sense. I am very interested in hearing thoughts on the topic.

This is a ‘why didn’t i think of that’ moment in time. Seems Dave Shea has a fix for the insane annoyance that is min-height in his min-height: fixed; entry. Putting it here for my own benefit and perhaps others would appreciate it. One thing to note to the CSS builders on campus is the number of bug fixes and browser tricks required… yuck.