"html" in Weblog

I’ve just done my Building Better Webapps presentation at the Spring Experience in Miami. I it went pretty well, as far as I can tell, but I realised that there were a whole bunch of links I wanted to give out that weren’t on the slides. For anyone who’s interested here they are, and for anyone who dragged themselves out of bed on a Sunday morning to come see me speak: Thanks, I really enjoyed it! Many thanks also to all the Spring folk who’ve made my weekend thoroughly enjoyable.

Introduction

Don’t bet against the internet

Web standards

Progressive enhancement

Graded Browser Support

A-Grade Browser Support Chart

HTML

HTML Mastery Links

CSS is Worthless

Microformats

Bill Gates: “We need microformats”

CSS

Div Mania

Modular CSS

A CSS Framework

Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids

CSS: Specificity Wars

Specificity

How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup

hasLayout

Javascript

A DOM Ready Extension for Prototype

The JavaScript Library World Cup

Notes on JavaScript Libraries

Javascript and Accessibility

AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work?

Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers

FlashAid

Bringing new life to applets with Ajax

Web 2.0: Is Converging Towards the Desktop Good?

Unobtrusive Javascript

RailsConf Presentation Slides and Example Code

Hijax

The Enron Explorer

456 Berea Street have written up what appears to be the definitive guide to marking up data tables. Luckily for me I’ve never been lumbered with the dubious honour of coding massive tables but I thought I knew pretty much everything about it. Nope, I was wrong - I had no idea that there was a ‘header’ attribute. I doubt I’ll ever use it but still… The rest of the article is a great how-to.

I had my first real brush with XML and XSLT transormations last week and I am very very impressed. The CMS I’m working with generates XML transformed with XSLT to spit out the navigation elements so I had to give myself a crash course in what it was all about. I still don’t entirely understand the syntax but I can get basic things done thanks to the wonders of the web community.

I started with the W3C Schools’ XSLT Tutorial, with a quick detour through their XPath Tutorial and finished with a handy article from Pascal called XSL: the other way of styling up content. Nice one mate! An hour or so later I was writing my first piece of XSL…

So far I like XSL enough to consider sacking off my planned site migration to TextPattern and instead rewrite it as XML-XSL-CSS… The further separation of style and content just makes sense. Why embed your layout into your ASP/PHP logic? I could redesign my site comepletely and not have to touch the back-end code - I’d just tweak the XSLT and CSS. Now that appeals to me.