Web Coder Plus

Well it’s 2006, and I think my body may have recovered from the non stop partying of the last week. And reading all the feeds it seems that every bloody blog in existence has a list of 10 things (for various values of 10) that I’m going to do with this blog this year.

Sounds like a new years resolution to me. So I figured maybe I should do the same, except I haven’t made a new years resolution in over a decade. You see I always found that something I tried to force myself to do, just because it was something I said on new years eve, would never get done. It would be half done, I’d waste a ton of time/willpower/effort on it while many more efforts that I might have spent my time on got postponed until I forgot about them.

So anyway, since I’m writing this post, I may as well make one prediction for 2006: Stuff* will happen.

*Stuff is subject to change at any time, most likely just after you think you have figured it out.

The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users is an interesting, if perhaps common sense filled, article on how to make the most of del.icio.us.

When I first signed up for del.icio.us, I did so thinking it might be a cool little diversion that would last no more than a week. Yet here I am many months later using it more than I do Google. Through it, I have found more sites that I constantly return to than from any other source.

The Web Standards Project points out that the new Yahoo music does not support FireFox; and if you try to watch a video, suggests that you need upgrade to Netscape 4.7 (on the mac) or 7.1 (on the PC)!

I attempted to listen to one of the radio stations with FireFox 1.5, and got this:

So it seems that it is IE or nothing on some parts of the site, I guess I won’t be going back there. In the past one could almost understand how, when FireFox made up less than 5% of users, you could get away with this from a business perspective. Yet today, even on some of my websites aimed at non technical users, IE holds 85% at most, and Netscape holds nothing.

Business Logs has a very interesting article up right now on writing lean CSS and XHTML.

I’ve tried many different ways of formatting my CSS over the years, and have always found myself coming back to ordering it in exactly the same way that the logical blocks are ordered in the XHTML. I definitely am a firm believer in keeping the XHTML as simple and lean as possible, always attempting to keep any CSS hacks to a minimum as well.

Of course I also have this horrible habit of losing the will to keep the lovely neat XHTML later on when I begin to add little things here and there. Soon I end up with a mess that just screams for a refactoring that usually ends up becoming a redesign. I guess the problem with having web development as a hobby rather than a job, is that when it comes to doing the right thing, or doing the fun thing, fun wins every time.

So what is your preferred method of ordering your CSS and XHTML?

Read more at Business Logs.

While I feel AJAX isn’t something you need for almost any page, if you do feel you need implement AJAX, there is a great article over at IBM developerWorks on mastering AJAX.

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