OK, so you think you understand the four principles from last time. How do you build with them?
First, Catch Your Rabbit
The old saw applies to far more than cooking. Your website is meant to contain content. Yes, that seems obvious, but if it’s so obvious why do so many start designing before there is content?
Design From The Content Out
Even if you’re designing a template through which content retrieved from a database will be poured, you still need to start with the content. Collect representative samples of every kind of content that will be poured into this template, and start using (X)HTML to mark it up. Andy Clarke, whose book Transcending CSS should be required reading for every web designer, calls this process “Content-out design.”
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Been doing some playing around in the world of HTML5, and I have to say I like it.
The biggest problem with it seems to be the near-total lack of support from IE. I suppose in some part this stems from politics; after all, Google is the biggest supporter of HTML5, and the Apple and Mozilla web teams have been working on it for quite some time. MS hates to be seen as playing catch-up. Still, this lack of support is irritating.
But there’s a way to add some level of HTML5 support to IE, at least for the simple new tags from HTML5, and that’s with John Resig’s HTML5 Shiv.
Yet that only works if javascript is enabled. What if it isn’t?
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I’ve been rethinking my approach to web design starting from First Principles going forward, and I think it’s coherent enough to be exposed to the public.
Before I begin, I think I ought to tell you what it’s not.
- It’s not a checklist. I don’t believe in checklists for anyone beyond the apprentice stage in any craft. Between our ears is one of the better information processing and decision making engines on the planet; I firmly believe in using it to the fullest extent. If you need a literary allusion for this, try Nero Wolfe’s advice to Archie (on numerous occasions): “Use your intelligence, as guided by experience.”
- It’s not the be-all and end-all set of engineering principles for the craft. We don’t collectively know enough about the craft to presume to use the term “engineering” for it.
- While I consider the principles to be logically derived and valid, concrete expressions of these principles can vary, so I am neither prescribing a design/development methodology nor proscribing one.
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I’ve been getting more Joomla work thrown at me these days (one of the nice things, from a professional’s POV, about the Joomla community is there are so many amateurs building Joomla sites there’s never a shortage of installations that need fixed) so I decided I needed to get more familiar with MooTools, the javascript library the dev team chose for Joomla.
This makes the third javascript framework I’ve been working with (prototype/scriptaculous for Rails, and jQuery for my non-Joomla PHP and .NET projects) so while I certainly don’t hold myself up as an expert in frameworks, I’m not fresh from the farm, either. I’d already written the usual “cute effects” in MooTools (such as rearranging layout boxes, hiding boxes and sliding them out, etc.) so for the first “serious” project in MooTools I chose to implement the FontUnstack jQuery plugin. (from an idea by Andy Clarke as implemented by Phil Oye at GitHub.
The journey was interesting, to say the least.
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I sit here listening to yet another newspaper struggling with the idea of ceasing to publish the dead-trees version, and I get depressed. Not because I think there’s something noble being lost, or that there’s something special about the feel of newsprint (I do, but that’s not what gets me down).
What depresses me is the future of content generation. Or lack of it. (more…)