.tag-cloud a:link:nth-of-type(3n+1) {
-moz-transform:rotate(2deg);
}

Do you know if

transform:rotate()

can be used on text elements?

I’ve been using Dreamweaver for a long time and haven’t seen a need to change yet. Let me clear something up about Photoshop… Adobe’s software does so much stuff that trying to spread yourself thin by learning more than a couple leads you to only be average in them. I’ve been working in Photoshop for 10 years so that’s what I continue to use. I haven’t found myself in a situation where Photoshop wasn’t able to do what I needed it to.

On a side note, my business partner who does all the graphic design uses Illustrator, because that’s what he’s been using for years.

The issue keeps popping up everywhere — Photoshop in web design. It’s an issue because it’s a photo editing software, not meant for “web design”, yet so many of those who call themselves web designers use it as their universal tool for everything they believe is design. It’s all about “slicing PSDs”.

Illustrator is a vector graphics app and would do a better job at designing graphics for websites. Fireworks can put it together to a prototype. Let’s leave Photoshop for our photos.

Thanks

Gareth

I just find it ironic that a site for such an awesome tool would look like that. You could probably manage to build a good website with Notepad++ however I didn’t see anything in there that would help with managing multiple website projects? Please correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the things that helps separate Dreamweaver is that you can easily manage hundred’s of sites with it.

There’s no reason why Notepad++ can’t be used to make the same sorts of sites that you can do in Dreamweaver. http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/ is not an indication of Notepad++’s ability, but rather the guy who made the site (he’s a C++ programmer, not a web designer).

First off, I appreciate the feedback and let me start by saying that this is my toolkit and it’s what works best for me. I stopped searching for web development apps once I began using Dreamweaver 8 and I personally think that Dreamweaver CS4 is worth the $399.

While I haven’t used all of the programs that you mentioned I have used some of them and they didn’t even come close to the capabilities and functionalities of Dreamweaver. If on a tighter budget then these might actually be worth looking into: Aptana, Coda, Textmate, Espresso, BBEdit

On the other hand don’t fool yourself into thinking these programs will get you by:
Notepad++ – Maybe if you wanna design a site like this: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net
Komodo – Actually it’s only free for 21 days then you have to pay $145
Textwrangler – not built for developing websites, only for editing an existing file.

I find that improving your website’s accessibility is really just abiding to a set of rules. Grea thing is this eveentually because part of your natural worklflow and – hey presto! We’ve accessible websites with ease!

Cheers for the article Ms. Swan!

Typo’s fixed! Thank you.

typos:
“In may countries”
; instead of ‘

Granted that 7 & 8 also include page zoom, but you can’t assume that everyone will use page zoom over the other text sizing option, particularly if the user is already familiar with how it worked in IE6.

Ian mentioning that in a two year development cycle for a website is very valid and raises an important point which is that when making sites accessible you want to consider how best to implement an accessible site depending on your business. So, for example, if you’re a large UK organisation with users based just in the UK then leaving behind flexible fonts makes sense. If your site has more of a global outreach you may want to think again (Korea is locked into IE, China uses it heavily for example).

WCAG are guidelines and not as prescriptive as we all think and should be thought about within the context of the site you work on.

Jamie – I am with you on autoplay completely. Both a usability and accessibility fail :(

The technology doesn’t have to be difficult to use and as Comet and other real-time web technologies become more mainstream we’ll see some well documented examples of how it can be used leading to its increased adoption.

Kind regards,
Jose

Great article, as discussed above i think EM and PX sizing is less of an issue than it once was. I think the WCAG has it right, its a good thing to have, though not anywhere near as important as it use to be. In recent projects i have returned to using PX sizing, i can’t say i ever completely got my head around em sizing and i do find it faster (and easier to code up design accurately!). A good example of this is recently with a large site, i was provided the CSS and HTML for the header and footer and was not allowed to change it on pain of death!

Along the lines of the same topic, much can also be said about the prevalence of full page zooming. Although a flexible layout which does not break when using text resizing is important, i feel that as more and more browsers default to full page zooming this will become less important.

Just to add what Henny has said about video, one of my frustrations with video relates to autoplay. If someone is reliant on audio output or is greatly disturbed or distracted by it, then auto playing video can be a very very painful experience!

Overall a great article and series, nice one to henny and thanks to anna for publishing it!

Cheers,

Jamie & Lion

Couple of points I wanted to add. Like Doug S, I’ve become less concerned about the px issue on fonts for IE. Defining standards for a project at work that will be up to two years in the making, I’ve dropped that requirement on the basis that IE6 in 2 years time will account for so many fewer users and you have to draw the line somewhere … that said, it comes with a warning. I’m reasonably comfortable specifying px sizes for fonts, but start to get nervous if those are anything under 20px.

The other thing was regarding the alt attribute. The images shows the street with the alt attribute, but that’s IE doing what no other browser does – displaying the *alternative* when the original is still there. It *might* suggest to less experienced readers that alt attribute may be used for hover text, which of course it isn’t so, perhaps an example showing a missing image with the alternative text might be slightly safer?

Anyway, minor niggles – always good to have an article that encapsulates the main points well (and I’ll also add that I really like the design of scrunchup -lots of nice CSS text treatments)

Along those lines, how to microformats like hCard fit in, if at all?

That said however there are still a huge amount of IE6 users out there. Many don’t have the opportunity to upgrade or switch their browsers as they ar locked into using IE6 in work situations and so on. I tend to still use relative font sizes so as to ensure these users don’t get left behind but agree that the landscape will have to eventually change. Bring it on I say!

My reason for this is simple: The ONLY people who will even know the difference are IE6 users. Anyone with a remotely recent version of Opera, Firefox or Safari or IE7 and IE8 can scale text whether it’s in %, EMs, pixels or points.

Since this measure only helps a fraction of a fraction of users your time would actually be better spent providing better accessibility to other users. What colors you choose, making sure everything is semantic and with the proper alt or title tags is a better use of your time, in my opinion.

I recognize that this is a separate problem and absolutely agree, but wonder if there really is a good way to measure this kind of thing.

It much better from everyones point of view.

We teach basic simple chtml using text based editors I currently favour Netbeans but we have used Jedit in the past and use the macrabbit app CSS Edit to do the styling.

Thats my story, but I agree many lecturers and most students come in only knowing dreamweaver and creating visual layout in a way that creates terrible code that they cant fathom at all anyway.

Here is some online material I created/used last academic year for the practical work of starting to build a content out, clean markup site (needs revamping and I am looking at yours and the wasp stuff to boost it up) http://wsa.wikidot.com/techguides:xhtml

Prior to this students do design work creating static designs and focus on design using current skills with PS and Indesign.

Here is one students work from the class http://wsadirectory.org/

On another note, the typography and readability of the blog posts are out standing, It’s actually a joy to read!

We (where I work) recently had an internal discussion about rounded corners, for example. Safari, Firefox and Chrome support rounded corners introduced in CSS3, but IE doesn’t… of course. So we thought that for IE we could just use a javascript solution. We don’t want people with REAL browsers downloading extra images and it really is a waste of time creating nested divs just for rounded corners. In worst case scenario, IE users with JS disabled would get regular corners.

But the aim should always be to create a similar experience for the majority of the audience.

I’m pretty sure it was Sergio Villarreal who wrote it.

I am wondering whether I should add something to this article, or just write a whole new article covering accessibility (or accessibility and law) basics….wow, there is a whole series we could do there.

When Anna makes the ScrunchUp millions, she can take us on as full-time writers (joke ;-) )

filter:shadow(color=gray, direction=100,
strength=5);

This:

filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(color=’#666666′, Direction=100, Strength=5)

Read more here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533086%28VS.85%29.aspx

I’m playing around with the transform:rotate; with images and I think it adds a nice touch to a page but do you have any advice about flowing text around a rotated image? At the moment I’m losing some text ‘behind’ the image once it has been rotated…

scrunchup is great by the way – I will be keeping an eye on it from now on :)

It’s hard trying to be a developer, designer, entrepreneur and doing it all satisfactorily! Maybe I just lack vision?

Keep up the good work :)

“The href*=’.pdf’ bit looks for anything that contains the string http://flickr.com.”

Should the href*=’.pdf’ be, in fact, href*=”http://flickr.com”?

p {font-size: 100%}

h1 + p {font-size: 150%}

This isn’t too foolproof, though – for example, if you have an image between the h1 and p, you need:

h1 + img + p {…}

but it’s a fairly nice alternate way to achieve that effect!

Want to be a web designer? Education or employment…

As above, I had to learn how to deal with late-payers, contracts etc.

If I could add to this, it would be about marketing. Don’t be sucked in by companies like Yell.com who promise to generate X amount of leads for you and position it like a completely worthwhile investment. There is no guarantee with advertising. Just do lots of networking, do great work, and make your clients excited about you. You’ll soon have return business and a growing clientbase.

Great article.

I cut my web design teeth, at college, early in the standards movement before it was in full swing and as such I have experience of using things like table based layouts, framesets and font tags. I don’t regret this though. In fact, I see it very much as an advantage. I have seen both sides of the coin and because I had this experience I got a real sense of just how important modern web standards are.

With that in mind I would advise people just getting into the industry to build a few practice sites the old way. Use crap code. Use tables and framesets. Use WYSIWYG editors in design view *shudders*. That way you’ll have hands on experience of the benefits of web standards and you can draw on that experience when progressing in the industry.

Using a hard-line approach on this, I’ve received over £1000 in charges and interest and my clients stopped being lazy about paying me on time.

Obviously, take into account the balance of power in your relationship. If this is your only client and you think it’ll be hard to find other work, you may wish to exercise your judgment.

Aaron

The article is great and as a 17 year-old freelance “website maker” I can really identify with some of these points.

Keep up the good work,

@Prydie

Plus I will be running some seminars and stuff ooop North along with some of my colleagues at Opera Software fairly soon. Watch this space ;-)

I’ve noticed that this article doesn’t really state very clearly what is covered in the next one. I’ll add a bit more description now.

I think the best idea in this post is the last one. Happiness is the key to success!

This was a pretty simple introduction to web standards however it didn’t touch on the benefits of them however it was still good and a great way for a complete beginner to get started. For those who want to know the main benefit of following web standards well it has to be that by building your site according to web standards it will work correctly across all browsers which implement the standards properly.

I’m still looking for some web related meetups in Manchester though. There doesn’t seem to be all that much up north for some reason :S

I think education is great even if you read around the subject. In the next few years I can specialize a bit more in web related stuff but at the minute I’m loving just finding out about stuff that isn’t related to the web at all.

I certainly intend to do some of these even now!