Semantic HTML

Cascading Style Sheets in themselves are semantical in nature. The whole reason why CSS is so powerful is due to their cascading nature. Rules lower in the CSS code are actually higher in value, hence the term cascading. And that means rules supplied in your inline style attributes will supersede those within an external style sheet.

Why?

Because of its “rule execution” format, those rules cascading from the top of your styles will not overwrite style blocks that are lower (after) them in the style declaration. But the last rule will carry the most value, or weight - thereby generating the final style.

So let’s say you have the following CSS rules in an external style sheet:

* {margin: 0; padding: 0;}

And you declare a h1 tag to present as such:

h1 {margin: 0 0 2em 0;}

So your CSS file looks like this:

* {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
h1 {margin: 0 0 2em 0;}

Do you see why the h1 will have a bottom margin of -2em? Good. Now what if you had an inline style (although you don’t do you? I mean, you want to separate content from presentation as much as possible, right?) for your h1 tag within your webpage:

<h1 style="margin-bottom: -2em">Heading</h1>

Due to the cascading effect, that h1 tag will have it’s bottom margin raised up to -2, because of its inline style. That’s the power of CSS, and that’s all for now!

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I have many web hosting horror stories I could tell you about. So much in fact that I’m going to create a site for web hosting reviews. Well, actually WebHostingGeeks.com has beat me to it. Once I get some time, I will begin to review the web hosts I have had, and submit them to WebHostingGeeks.com for all to read. I really like my current web host, and they actually have really great remarks an a high score on the reviews for them at WebHostingGeeks.com.

I wish I had found them sooner actually. At least that way I would not have made the few mistakes I have made in selecting a host, simply by reading the reviews for hosting companies, and selecting one that gets really good reviews.

Categorize Web Hosts Please!

They even review sites that offer free domain names with their registration. You can find a host that offers up to five free domain names. Or one that offers a free domain name for the life of your web hosting service with them. Or the option that hosts will sometimes offer you by way of multiple domain hosting, as the folks at WebHostingGeeks.com offer reviews of the hosting providers who offer that category as well.

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Just when I thought I had hacked every plugin on this site to validate the entire span of pages, it seems that Sphinn’s “sphinn.com code” is invalid HTML markup. Not that the small icon that is generated next to each post is invalid code. Because if that was the case, I would simply rewrite it to pass W3C validation, like I’ve done to the others on this site. But the problem lies with the javascript function that is called from the plugin. That JS plugin is sitting on the sphinn servers - and it generates styles in the form of <style type="text/css"> - at the head of the iframe it creates.

You see, it basically builds out a new page, but does not create a DOCTYPE declaration. It may be argued that one is not needed, but for semantic correctness, yes it does need one.

Popularity: 21% [?]

I have had a very bad experience with hosting I have had, but don’t really regret it. I mean, if I hadn’t had the troubles of loss of data, sites down for 4 days at a time, I wouldn’t be as wary or picky as I am now about who I host with.

Web hosting that comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee are all over the internet. Believe me, I had one that promised it. But if you read the fine print, you’ll find that what you expect and your web host expect out of that guarantee are two different things. I actually have considered ASP.NET Hosting, even though I’m a Unix host man myself, simply because of APLUS.net’s services and uptime promotion.

For the average webmaster, or ecommerce owner, the differences between Windows hosting and Unix hosting would not be a consideration, and for the great prices you can find on Windows hosting, I’d recommend them.

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Many designers have different conceptual ways in which they begin their web sites. When I create a site, I structure it as follows:

1. Create (X)HTML markup (separating top/content/navigation/footer areas with divs)
2. Create content for page
3. Use PHP for inclusion of common navigation areas (breadcrumb, sidebar, etc)
4. Use PHP for inclusion of header
5. Use PHP for inclusion of footer

Once it validates - then (and only then) do I create the external CSS file for it. Let me say that besides SEO’ing the markup (source order, meta, keyword densities, etc.), accessibility is integrated every step of the way.

Once the site passes the standard WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) checklists (A, AA, AAA) - I begin my usability testing. So this my simple test of usability. You can get very detailed in your testing, but for the sake of the
title of this post, let me ask you to run this test on your sites. And also, do you run any type of usability test for your designs?

Here’s what I do, and let me know what you do:

1. Load my page, and squint my eyes (Yes, I’m serious). Can I still read the content, and differentiate between background/foreground colors?
2. Next I move my mouse out of reach (like behind my desk). Now, just using my keyboard, can I navigate my entire site?

Of course, this is an extremely simple test…but what do you all do for your usability testing?

Popularity: 20% [?]