"web development" in Weblog

Web Designer Depot have published my predictions for 2011 alongside a bunch of my favourite designers. Here’s what I had to say, with bonus hyper-linky goodness.

If 2010 was the year that mobile came of age then 2011 will see it move into its own apartment next door to the desktop and start throwing wild parties. Having started as the younger, slightly neglected sibling it’s now on the verge of shouldering the desktop out of the way.

The industry (as articulated by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures) is coming around to the idea that mobile could often be the primary platform for new apps. As web developers and designers we are in a great position to take advantage of this shift through infrastructure enhancements like HTML5 and Phone Gap, and frameworks like jQuery Mobile, Zepto and Backbone, along with a horde of others.

All of these are based on technologies we already know and can start working with today. Rather than clumsily reskinning our websites, 2011 will be the year we embrace the philosophy of mobile to produce context aware, task tailored, fundamentally handheld apps.

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 came across MIT’s Web Accessibility Guidelines while I was looking for information on colour contrast earlier on and I was struck by one of their ‘Audience for Accessibility’ entries: ‘Technology or bandwidth challenged’. I like that! I think they’re missing search engines from their list but I’ll definitely be adding ‘Technology challenged’ to my advantages of accessibility spiel.

The Future of Accesskeys from Derek Featherstone of WATS.ca makes for some interesting reading… I decided a while ago that accesskeys were poorly implemented - I approve of the UK government’s accesskeys system as an attempt to standardise keyboard shortcuts but it’s quite limited in it’s scope and therefore not incredibly useful. Derek’s article highlights the replacement of accesskeys in the XHTML 2.0 spec with ‘access points’. This means that the user can define their keyboard shortcut for ‘contact’ and that combination will work on every site that implements that access point. It’s consistent, simple and very far off in the future! At least it’s there though… In the meantime, it would appear that the W3C has reached the same conclusions as a number of web developers and dumped access keys. That’s that then. Long live access points.

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.

I keep losing this link so I’m storing it here for safe keeping: Combined font survey results. It’s an write-up of periodic font surveys across platforms with install frequency for 40 most popular fonts. Every time I start a project I need to remind myself what fonts I’m allowed to use and this is a great place to cobble together my font-families…

Dez has gathered together a couple of interesting articles on web readability: The Body Blow article concludes that it’s not what font you use but how you use it, while Selecting a Font gives you some good places to start when choosing a font.

There’s been a really good discussion of web standards and their uptake going on over at asterisk over the past few days. Keith called on beginners and pros alike to say what they thought the barriers were to the widespread adoption of web standards were and it appears to be something that everyone has an opinion on! It’s great to get so many different perspectives on what the issues are and how people intend to deal with them. The audience is obviously a bit biased - asterisk is heavily linked from the WS blog community, but there’s still quite a variety of views expressed…

Woohoo! My Zen Garden submission made it… I’m dead chuffed about that and more than a little bit relieved.

I was trying to do something a little bit different to the other hi-design submissions they’ve had lately… something organic, instead of my usual clinical/minimal layouts. I started out trying to do a hand-drawn design but as I was searching through my scans archive for hand-writing samples I found this 7” packaging I’d saved ages ago. I loved the number of labels the people at the other end had managed to stick on one small piece of cardboard! Looking at it, it occurred to me that it could make quite an interesting basis for a design. And here we are!

If this is what I think it is, it’s pretty damned clever… The Amazon site in pure XML using XSLT and CSS for styling. It’s a demonstration of what web services can do and the power of XML.