Veerle's blog

Maybe you don’t know who Jakob Nielsen is, he’s a usability expert with an ugly website called Alert Box. Some of you might have discovered this article, but for those who didn’t, I can only advice to take a look and read the story. Design and usability don’t always go hand in hand so prefectly. But now a team of web professionals has proven the oposite in a superb piece of kraftmanship on guidelines for visualizing links.

Andy Budd wrote a very enlightening article on his blog about CSS versus tables and why in some instances, traditional table based design can be as good, if not better than CSS and standards based design. It was one of the best articles about CSS vs tables I’ve read in a while.

It took you countless hours of research, blood, sweet and sometimes even tears when looking for a solution to build a standard website that validates and looks good in every modern browser. So now you want to add a little Flash movie as icing on the cake. Most people will use the code that Macromedia generates for this.

At first everything looks fine in your browser, that’s until you go back to the W3C to see if it validates. What follows is pure frustration grrrl… Your hard work down the drain because it no longer validates anymore because of Flash.  Look at this ‘bad’ example to see what I mean. Click on the link at the bottom to check the validation and see the long list of errors.

As I mentioned in my yesterday’s post, I’m still a bit of a newbie when it comes to advanced CSS. My blog is actually my first website made with CSS2. I learned this by exploring CSS blogs, analyzing their code, looking at online CSS tutorials, experimenting etc.

Finally I got my new blog online. It took a bit more time then I thought because of all the self-study that I needed to do to get things going. No more hassles with iBlog and it will render much faster too. I’ve used the newest techniques like XHTML 1 and CSS2 to achieve a “cleaner” result ;-)

This site follows the W3C guidelines and I’m very proud of it. It took some sweat and tears but it was all for a good cause since one of my promises to myself is that I’m going to use the CSS techniques I’ve learned as much as I can when building sites for clients. It will be my (small) contribution to a standard compliant web!

Don’t hesitate to become a member on my blog because members will get some benefits in the future ;-)