Web Development

Went to sleep looking at new web template; Woke up noticing that one of the div's (i.e. sections) wasn't aligning properly; Reached over to laptop near bed and right-clicked for 'inspect element with Firebug', got information about the styling markup.

And then I thought: Is this what one million years of evolution has brought us to?

While preparing for next week's presentation on Responsive Design, I tried to recall my original uneasiness over the phone app frenzy. You remember -- that short painful period only a few months ago when either you were developing a phone app version of your site or you just weren't serious. You thought it silly? So did I. But it took me a second to remember why. I mean, this was before Responsive Web Design had sunk in as a possible solution. So why the initial uneasiness? And then of course I remembered: the notion that your average user was going to download a separate app for every site -- the equivalent of taking your collection of bookmarks and downloading a separate program for each -- was a complete absurdity. Thank God, we're beyond that. It's history.

Gearing up for a presentation on 'Responsive Web Design' that I'll be giving at the UIC Webmaster Brownbag next week. From the official announcement:

UIC Web Professionals,

Join us for a discussion about Responsive Web Design on Thursday, February 2, noon - 1 p.m. Leo Klein, Coordinator for Web Communications in the Office of Admissions and Records, will discuss Responsive Web Design as a significant development in how we approach web design -- what's got us to this point, the need to design for various platforms from PCs to tablets and smartphones. The session will include discussion of key topics including Media Queries and Mobile First.

Audience: all levels. Also, experience and thoughts from others on this subject is encouraged and highly appreciated.

Happy Blue Beanie Day - Standards now more than ever!

So the site I've been losing sleep over for the past couple of weeks months is finally up. I had set a deadline for the beginning of the year and, by golly, I made it -- even if the thing kind of put a damper on my holiday activities: http://oar.uic.edu

No break for me. Sometimes when people are off, it's the best opportunity to do big systems changes.

I'm redesigning the template for our site at MPOW and I've been telling everyone for months that I'll have the thing up by the beginning of the year. So it's time to put up or...

The 2009 'A List Apart Survey for People Who Make Websites' is available (link). Be one of the 30k participants to report how things are going in your neck of the Web.

Mark Pilgrim has put up a couple chapters of a book he's working on which eventually will be published by O'Reilly called, "Dive Into HTML5".

The material, still in draft, goes over a number of interesting features both major and minor from the coming standard. My current favorite is the "Placeholder text" for webforms.

Now that XHTML2 is officially kaput, I've noticed a number of very helpful posts attempting to get people comfortable with our new upcoming main-squeeze, HTML5.