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Posts Tagged ‘HTML’

I’ve been studying CSS Grid Frameworks for the past couple weeks.  Here are some links to several CSS Frameworks that I found interesting, elegant, and useful:

• 960 Grid System – A mature and stable CSS Framework, that uses a fixed width page layout of 960 pixels, along with the flexibility of  12 or 16 columns.  (Created by Nathan Smith of  SonSpring)
• Blueprint – An elegant and complete CSS Framework that includes a CSS reset (similar to Eric Meyer’s Reset) that eliminates deals with the discrepancies across browsers, a solid grid that can support most complex layouts (without reverting to crazy HTML table-based design patterns), expert typographical principles, CSS form styles for great looking user interfaces, and CSS print styles for making any webpage ready for printing out on paper. (Created and maintained by Christian Montoya and the Blueprint community.)
• The Golden Grid – A simple CSS Framework for HTML web page design, by Vladimir Carrer from Italy

Book Review

FBML Essentials – Facebook Markup Language Fundamentals, written by Jesse Stay, published by O’Reilly Media, July 2008, 167 pages, ISBN:0-596-51918-6,  $29.99

FBML Essentials - Facebook Markup Language - book cover

Facebook is the world’s largest and fastest growing social networking website (with 132 Million unique vistors in June of 2008).

FMBL Essentials, the new book from O’Reilly Media, is all about learning the essential markup elements and fundamentals of Facebook application design.  FBML (like HTML)  provides the basic markup tags for building a Facebook application.

According to the author Jesse Stay, this book is essential for anyone who wants to be a part of Facebook’s future. “FBML is only the beginning of your adventure in Facebook Development. Reviewing and knowing what tags are available will help save you time as you develop on Facebook.”

Whaaoo there Jesse, let’s not go-a-galloping on that horse so quickly. Some people might need to sign-up for Facebook first.  Or maybe read Facebook, The Missing Manual,  and get familiar with the Facebook blog and FAQ.

Somewhere along your journey of joining Facebook — and finding your first 20 or 200 friends –  you might have started thinking about becoming a Facebook application developer.  Perhaps you stumbled across the Facebook application developer area, and said to yourself – hmmmm, that would be fun to try. You might be  a curious technology geek like me, or “social geek” like FBML Essentials author – Jessy Stay.

OK, cowboy! Are you ready to ride? Buy this book. Read it. Learn FBML fast.

You’ll discover:

• A sample Facebook application – with explanations of how it works
• Design rules for images, CSS, Javascript, and forms – related to FBML
• An introduction to FBJS, Facebook’s version of JavaScript
• Concise explanations of all the FBML tags – logic tags, user tags, profile tags, etc.
• How to create forms with FBML
• Dynamic FBML attributes, including MockAJAX
• Tips on testing your FBML code

You can tell Jesse Stay is a very sharp guy when you read his blog.  He wrote his first FBML application in just one week, and sold it 2 months later. Jesse has consulted for several of the top 100 applications on Facebook. Now Jesse’s working on an iPhone Interactive entertainment application that will help cowboys change gears faster, or something like that.

You can now follow the complete thread for Designing With Web Standards using the DWWS tag, which now includes a book review, a brief history of the DWWS group on Facebook, and some background on the original Blue Beanie Day.

While we’re on the topic of Zeldman (and DWWS) you should participate in (yes, if you are a web designer, you should take the survey too!) the 2008 Survey of People Who Make Websites.

Editors Note: Special guest author, Daniel Vos was invited to write a book review of Designing with Web Standards. Daniel is a graduate of Washington and Lee University (and also studied at Oxford.) Currently, he is an academic coordinator, budding web designer, and occasional writer for Roanoke area newspapers and business journals.

In my last post, I explained five reasons why Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman is a must-read classic of web design. In this post, I want to start a conversation about new developments in web standards since the second edition of the book was published two years ago.

As DWWS 2nd edition went to press in the second half of 2006:

• Internet Explorer 6 was the most popular browser, with about 77% of the market share; meanwhile, Firefox 1.5 ran a distant second in popularity, at 10.5% of the market share. (Source: Market Share).
• Internet Explorer 7 was just being released.
• Not long after its first birthday, Ajax was already (to quote Zeldman) “stealing the rich applications market from Flash and generating nutty and probably unsustainable excitement.”
• Microsoft was about to release Expression Web, a relatively standards-compatible WYSIWYG web page editor to replace its notoriously bad FrontPage editor and compete with Adobe’s standards-compatible Dreamweaver.
• Implementations of CSS across browsers remained inconsistent: Zeldman documented the Float bug in IE6/Windows, and other standardistas recommended the Simplified Box Model Hack to address different interpretations of the CSS box model.

Here’s where we stand today:

• Internet Explorer 7.0 has less than 50% of the browser market share, although IE still dominates nearly 75% of the market. But Internet Explorer use overall has been steadily declining as Firefox, Safari, and Opera continue to win more users. (Source: Market Share).
• Browser bug watchers are still at it, and still finding new bugs and workarounds: See, for example, Position is Everything.
• The Web Standards project has launched AcidTest 3.0, which tests CSS, DOM, ECMAScript, and XML compliance. Verdict? All browsers still have plenty of room to grow — some more than others, I’m afraid!
• Opera recently announced their Web Standards Curriculum, which they plan to complete by Sept 2008. Here’s hoping they finish what they’ve started. This could be a big help for those educating the next generation of web designers.
• Finally, the ability to separate content from presentation via semantic XHTML markup and CSS will continue to be crucially important as the mobile web browser market grows. The W3C Mobile Web Best Practices are worth a glance, given predictions that there will be 82 million Internet-enabled mobile devices within three years.
• Adoption of web technologies which promote greater interactivity continues to grow. Was Zeldman right about Ajax generating unsustainable excitement?
• Big software publishing companies such as Microsoft and Adobe seem to be making their products more and more standards-compatible.

Web standards remains an exciting field, because new standards are still emerging, and using them (rather than proprietary solutions) is still the best way to publish elegant, attractive, findable, and accessible content. Books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman got the ball rolling, and now it’s up to us to use the Web to market our products and services, target our audiences, and (perhaps most importantly) to build and sustain relationships.

I’ve said my bit. What do you think? What are some of the most important developments in web standards in the past 18 to 24 months?