SEOTall SEO Tall

The Onderhond series on floatitis included Part 1: an introduction, and a rundown of some alternatives such as Part 2: using css text-align, Part 3: the margin/float combo, Part 4: the pos:abs method, Part 5: the fut

The W3C Validator is now offering experimental HTML5 Support either by selecting it from the DOCTYPE menu or by placing the correct DOCTYPE into your document so the validator can detect the version.

Meitar Moscovitz has an article about why the data: URI scheme could help save your slow site. It’s not supported by Internet Explorer 6 or 7 (shock horror) so isn’t a practical use at the moment, but with upcoming browser improvement from Internet Explorer 8 perhaps this will come in handy on larger sites that could benefit from embedding some images straight into the code.

Robert Nyman points out the benefits of avoiding inline CSS and JS in your HTML files. If there’s one thing that shits me no end it’s getting messy templates because team members don’t get the whole concept or value of maintaining seperation of content from presentation and behaviour.

Cheat Sheets for Developers come in handy whether you’re writing JavaScript, PHP or Ruby on Rails applications. Usually something is out there to help you remember the available functions and syntax.

Smashing Magazine’s artilce 12 Principles for Keeping your Code Clean includes using a Strict DOCTYPE, properly encoded characters and character set, human readable indentation, external stylesheets and JavaScript files, and properly nested tags. You should eliminate unnecessary divs, review your naming conventions, and leave the typography up to the stylesheets. Also, use ID on your body tag to help target pages and logical ordering of your content, and validate for consistency.

The alt attribute of an image allows you to provide a 6 to 12 word alternative description of the purpose of the image or a description of what it does. Roger notest that in many cases alt text actually needs to be empty. Writing effective alternative text can be challenging.

The Tantek Celik and Kevin Marks slideshow explains how to write semantic XHTML with the associated benefits.

On Boxes and Arrows the article Prototyping with XHTML by Anders Ramsay and Leah Buley explains how you can work more efficiently by adopting a layered methodology (often referred to as web standards best practices) and building on the underlying information architecture in the XHTML, rather than creating Photoshop mockups and then doing XHTML and then cutting up the mockups and pasting on the facade.

The Free Site Validator crawls your whole site and reports any errors or warnings but it also checks all your links and reports the dead ones.

Robert Nyman questioned why two CSS Includes with title attributes in his head section caused only one CSS file to be called. Roger Johansson answered that - specifying external stylesheets states that setting the title attribute makes that the author’s prefered stylesheet. Handy to understand.

Roger Johansson’s post on Multiple Form Labels and Screenreaders points out that when marking up web forms it’s perfectly legal to use multiple label elements that are associated with the same input element. That’s kind of cool because you can put your required or error message into that second label and style it.

Unfortunately, as he points out, screenreaders don’t support it. Very useful but accessibly out of the ballgame. Good to be aware of.

On whatwg.or there is a presentation called HTML 5 demos from September 2008. Lots of cool mouth watering stuff.

Dave Shea has a post called Anchor Buttons that refers back to the May 2007 Particletree Rediscovering the Button Element article by Kevin Hale. Handy reference if you need to style buttons and anchor elements to be similar across a number of browsers.

Understanding disabilities when designing a website on Digital Web Magazine outlines numerous methods you can use to make your web design accessible to people without vision, with low vision, without hearing, with physical impairment, and learning disabilities.