Mention on mikons

Regular readers may remember a post I made regarding the excellent mikons tool (click here if you missed it).

Well just as the article is about to disappear off the FFE front page they’ve given us a mention - click to view article.

Thanks a lot for the link.

Since my last visit to the site they’ve launched their mikons t-shirt service. Once I’ve made the perfect icon I’m ordering mine and maybe a few stickers. The clever boys and girls have also used Microformats (hatom) on their site - Which reminds me, I’ve got to get myself one of those Microformats T-shirts.

Responsibilities as Designers/Developers

This post was prompted by reading a feaure by Andy Rutledge in .net magazine. First let me start by saying - it was an excellent column. If you haven’t read it already I suggest picking up a copy of .net as it’s a particularly good issue this month.

I digress, the article discussed Back end Developers not keeping to standards or producing poor quality work. He suggested that developers that do not understand semantics and correct use of html and css should be fired! The entire article was very strong, but I think this was necessary to get the point across.

What I wanted to comment on was the admonition for front-end designers to report bad programmers to the boss if they are producing bad code or messing up your standards compliant code because they don’t understand correct mark-up. In fact Andy said we were obligated to do so.
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The Interviews

I am pleased to announce that from next week I will be starting regular interviews with front end heros/heroines.

The interviews will mostly be in the format of mp3 Podcasts which you can listen to directly on the site or download to you MP3 player etc.

Some interviews will be text only. I hope to add some video interviews or screencasts too.

I will try to announce who will be interviewed a few days in advance when possible.

Upcoming Interviews:

Reinette “Ray” de Villiers
Graphics: The Beautify of Design

Paul Boag
Design Principles, Boagworld and Podcasting

Also confirmed is Michelle “Mish” Maudsley (who will be joining Ray to discuss The Beauty of Design) and James Dose who will be giving on finding work as a freelance.

Still waiting on a few to confirm before posting.
If you are interested in being interviewed by FFE (From the Front End) Please add comment or email me.

Hacked to Death

Everyone working on the front lines (building for the front-end) will have likely encountered a page that despite being a coding piece of art looks great in one browser but falls apart in another.

If you don’t work for Microsoft you’ll know the problem is usually with the Internet Explorer browser. A lot of the time tweaking a style sheet a little can solve things but sometimes there is no other option but to add a hack.

No one likes hacks, in fact I go to insane lengths trying to find an alternative before I will use one. However, if it is necessary to ad a hack is there a good way, or is a hack always going to be ugly and we just have to face it?
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A Podcast Less Ordinary

This last week I’ve been re-discovering podcasting. In the past I’ve listened to gaming podcasts but until now hadn’t used the technology for anything but entertainment.

Now I’ve discovered a whole world of informative podcast featuring some of the greatest minds in web design/development.

I highly recommended checking out odeo.com - although not design specific it hosts many web dev podcasts including an excellent interview of Dave Shea (the creator of csszengarden) by Scott Fergette - check it out here.

The quality of the podcasts vary greatly from the surreal or outright nonsense to goldmines of tips and ideas.

I hope to start a podcast of my own once I get regular enough with my blogging. =watch this space=

Dave Long

Switching from Transitional to Strict

I’ve been using XHTML Transitional for while and been happily validating my code on the w3c website until I heard a podcast from Dustin Diaz. Dustin said he prefered HTML strict to XHTML Transitional.
Looking into the reason I used Transitional - because it’s a bit more forgiving - I realised that I should try and make the move to xhtml strict. Looking at my code I was pretty confident that switching to Strict would be fairly painless.

Overall I have to say it wasn’t too much of a headache but the 2 attributes I had to abandon were:
target=
border=
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