SiteCrafting, Inc.

It is an unfortunate fact of internet life that not all browsers are made equal. Pages viewed in Firefox may look completely different in Internet Explorer or Safari. Most developers consider this a very frustrating part of the development process, and often wish there was an easier way to test things out. Enter Adobe's BrowserLab. Given a publicly accessible URL, BrowserLab will generate full-size images that depict how a given page will appear in various browsers.

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WebKit, the muscle behind both Safari and Google Chrome has recently added CSS animation support to its nightly build. While a long way from being supported in any widely used browser, this does give a bit of a preview for what we can expect in the future. It's hard to say whether these new animations will be widely adopted, and if they simply become the new "blink tags" of the modern web world.

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So, whenever I meet up with good friend of mine, Scott Schiller from Flickr, we often talk about geeky things such as Web Semantics and the "proper" way to mark up different things. I know there are a few of you out there who enjoy this topic so here is my question to you.

What do you think is the "proper" way to markup a blog comment in this image?

gotAPI.com is one of the most useful online resources I've come across, primarily because it places resources spread all over the internet into one simple site. I've been using this for quite some time, and have for the most part I have taken its usefulness for granted. Then it occurred to me that I might not be the only one that could find this tool useful (I know, it was a big 'DUH!' moment). So now I will share this gem with others...

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Some really large forms can be a bit of an eyesore especially to the people filling them out. One thing that always bothered me was how bulbous most textareas had to be just to make enough room for a user to feel they could type what they needed. So I set out to figure a good way to clean up my forms a bit while still allowing the multi-line input of textareas.

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One thing that we frequently build in conjunction with new websites is a tool for sending out email newsletters.  For the most part, we stick to XHTML/CSS and try to stay away from using "old" layout techniques (i.e. tables) for the newsletters.  This allows the greatest flexibility between the large number of email clients (e.g. Outlook, AOL, Yahoo!, Eudora, Thunderbird, Pine, etc.).  Businesses love being able to quickly communicate with their customers, and email newsletters are a great way to do this.  But things are changing, and if you use HTML newsletters, you'll need to make some changes too.

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I ran across a neat article from Sitepoint via Stylegala that you all should read on how to make your HTML 'perfect'. In the world of design, the concept of perfect is non-existant. There is no solution that will work for solving every problem, and there are exceptions to every rule. This article is no different. Read the full article, and then check out my comments.
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foreach ($left_elements AS $le) {
    ?>
    <table class="leftnav_<?=$le['class']?>">
        <tr>
            <td class="leftnav_<?=$le['class']?>">
                <a href="<?=$le['target']?>" class="<?=$le['theme']?>"><?=$le['name']?></a>
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>
    <?
}

Nobody wants to see that. Especially not seven different times with seven tiny variants covering seven different if conditions.

Each higher 'class' number is a deeper indentation. Apparently it's necessary for this class identification to be repeated for the table, table cell and link. Converting this to a nested list format (part of my current task) is going to be an adventure.

Well... at least it's indented nicely.

While I was taking some time to evaluate a 3rd-party application for a customer I took a peak at their site's HTML. I was pretty shocked when I found some very strictly organized code that contained gobs of nested tables. At one count I found a structure that was 10 tables deep! I suppose since enjoying creating clean mark-up and mostly table-less designs for the last few years I've forgotten my roots.
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