Sponge Project Blog

Brilliant idea from the guys at Opera called Opera Web Standards Curriculum, essentially:

a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics.

The biggest failing with many current courses and qualifications from universities and other education organisations, is they’re out of date. The web moves so fast, yet some courses are teaching theory and practise from 10 years ago! Let’s hope this movement will encourage these organisations into the modern age and start teaching proper web courses.

I myself will be following to help brush up on existing skills and hopefully develop new ones, specifically design theory and JavaScript.

…my blog and website that is! For those not in the know it’s the annual CSS Naked Day. Basically it’s all about the web standards and semantic HTML.

Websites will still retain a good structure and hierarchy without any visual elements. It goes to prove that is you build the website right, the ability to remove or change the style is an easy job and without visual guidance the content still makes sense.

Two help me I firstly deleted the main stylesheet to remove the look and feel on the main website; and secondly downloaded Aja’s CSS Naked Day plugin for Wordpress to do the same for my blog.

Contact Rob Mason for details on website design and build services in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.

This is a frankly genius idea. So simple, yet so effective.

Basically the Street Team over at Web Standards Project, ask you to print out a load of bookmarks. You then visit your local library and place the bookmarks inside any books deemed as breaking common crimes against the web, such as using table layout (shock!) or building inaccessible sites (horror!).

This way people ignorant of the wrongs outlined in the books will soon find out the right way of doing things. There’s even a Flickr group to record the noble cause for posterity.

Think I’ll swing by Tewkesbury Library and pay their IT section a visit!

I’m no fan of Microsoft, however I have to doff my cap to them. They’ve decided after all the flak and commentary they got, not just from me, from around the world, from big names in the game, to do a complete u-turn and do things right! No more IE-specific hacks. They’ve even released a beta version for us to test. Hurrah!

Contact Rob Mason for details on website design and build services in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.

I’m always on the look out for good, easy to read and detailed CSS related material. The latest one I’ve come across is the Sitepoint CSS Reference. Written by the greats Tommy Olsson and Paul O’Brien, it’s a very detailed, yet accessible look at what CSS can achieve. Sort of a reference guide and tutorial as it combines the detailed explanation as well as specific, relevant examples. I urge you to go and read it.

Contact Rob for details on website design and build services in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.