Welcome friends, if you're anything like me, you came into web development and the world of html from a side door... I started as a graphic designer, (who started as a Corporate Communications Writer), and needed to move from Photoshop to the web. I still haven't met anyone who went to school for web design and got more than a certificate that showed they knew Microsoft Publisher and what FTP stood for... (although I know people like that who then continued in the real world and became an object of respek).
Thusly, text edit entered the scene and so the characters I have written by far more than any others "<" and ">".
Other code monkeys may have come in from the programming doors (or windows). Yet others start off with smarmier things like FrontPage and are soon stunned that it cannot work in the real world.
But since that time when we all (most of us anyway) learned html, and how to view source, it has evolved in structure and evaluation. Forget tables and font tags - They are flatulent old grannies, gone the way of floppies and Zip drives.
There is are new measures of web pages that make any idiot with Firefox and a web developer plugin an expert...
...No not an expert - a critic, (Experts offer solutions).
Anyway, if you are like me, a mid career web page goon, you have an impressive body of work in web design and a variable grasp of reality. Impressive that is, or was - right up until the "Web Developer Toolbar" entered from the left. The amiable velvet curtain is gone.
The king has no clothes, and the tiny plugin now reveals the soiled and spoiled undergarments of coding faux pas, and workarounds, with which you improvised - to get the once beautiful photoshop mockup page to display somewhat like it did when you made it, in a variety of half thought out adherences to standards, aka browsers.
Very ugly all of a sudden! Red Xs and Faileds every few lines... So now what?
...Well, if you are more than a lucky graphic designer who works in phoshop and hands your daVinci-like page layouts to html coders, (you're as common as a car designer that works in clay and hands off the design to real engineers), you now must re-learn html and the NEW words used to measure the worth of your pages... [Or there's always a career in real estate]...
Anyway, you'll know these words from listening to those who wear black turtlenecks and wear colorfully rimmed glasses. They know.
They know these words are power, and throw them around to garner your bosses favor in lieu of any actual skill.... Words like: proper symantics, human factors, heuristics, and information architecture.... Well you're in luck. Because this site will attempt to become a cheat sheet for you. You can pretend to be one of these sexual orientationally ambiguous, modern day web gurus, and not let those with the W4s and big hourly rates see what you are, which is some moderately creative person, who has enough to worry about getting a design to look the way it did in your photoshop mockup...
...and then getting it to look that way all over again in IE x.
The golden words and secret handshake of big ticket non-technical web gods In later posts I will attempt to define them:
- Semantics
- Nielsen's Alert Box
- Human Factors (Went to a web usability design course and they spelled my name wrong on the certificate, then asked if I really wanted them to re-print it.)
- Heuristics
- DOM Object Model
- Flow
- Information Architecure
- Validity
- Container
- Quirks
- Hacks & Conditionals
