Content with Style

If you’ve been creating sites with CSS for a while you may be getting frustrated with having to recreate and retest basic layouts on a regular basis. In this article I’m trying to illustrate a simple way of skipping the tedious startup on your average project, letting you get to the interesting stuff as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Wordtracker are looking for a front end developer to take over from me.

TechCrunch launch a jobs board.

Simon Willison recently posted to css-d asking for peoples’ thoughts on writing maintainable CSS and that got me thinking… Over the years I’ve had the priviledge of working on some very large web standards projects in small teams of other CSS/XHTML developers, but I’ve also spent a lot of time building little sites on my own for smaller clients. Maintenance on a small project involves being able to understand your own code when you come back to it months later. On larger projects it means your team mates being able to understand and edit your code as quickly and efficiently as possible at any point in the future. It’s a far more complicated objective.

Almost all of the benefits people normally attribute to CSS are actually down to the underlying (X)HTML. The better your markup, the better sense machines will be able to make of it – that includes both screenreaders and search engine spiders.

With AJAX-based applications still in their infancy there has been a tendency to disgard basic web behaviour in favour of slick functionality. In this article I am trying to rescue two of those ‘lost’ behaviours – bookmarking and the back button, using Javascript.

This isn’t a new idea but looking at people’s code it doesn’t seem to be a particularly widely used practice: modular CSS. That’s a poncy name for the very simple idea of grouping related styles into separate stylesheets. The same set of tasks turn up on project after project and a little careful thought can save hours of foundation work, allowing you to get on with the serious business of turning a flat design into a web page far more quickly.

Stopping your users from selecting a page’s content text.

AppFuse template design competition based on the CwS CSS Framework.

Ajax training from Clearleft, DOM scripting, Hijax and Web 2.0 accessibility.

Getting things done from emergent design and unit testing. The concepts all fit together quite nicely, once you get into it.