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› September 5, 2002

Re-configuring our approach

  • Reported by Nate

This year I started a two person web and print outfit and have been very busy getting it off the ground. Now that we have a head start (although not even a website yet!), we are evaluating our coding pracitices and design approach. We are inspired by the messages and ideals presented by The Web Standards Project. We have given ourselves the task of evaluating one of our first medium size sites which we are completing now. The site will validate, however still uses a bit too much tableage, the code is not as optimized as it could be. Zeldman recently wrote 99% of websites are Obsolete (from his upcoming book) and Table layouts revisited which perscribes a commercially viable method of using minimal table code for structure and advanced CSS for refined style, this seems like a well thought out approach to the goal of standards compliant and clean code. Thanks to the WaSP and particularly Zeldman, my longstanding desire to bring optimized, standardized, and efficient markup proccesses into my commercial work is begining to take shape.

Comments

1. September 5, 2002 01:37 PM

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Bob Posted…

Congratulations!!

2. September 5, 2002 01:47 PM

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Nate Posted…

Thanks Bob. As we move forward, (probably our own website will be next) I’ll be refining the resouce links found on the web-graphics homepage, as well as adding some helpful tidbits of our own.

3. September 7, 2002 12:59 PM

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James Posted…

Nate, you’ve been going through exactly what I, as well as hundreds of other designers have been wrestling with these last 6 months. Pretty interesting isn’t it. I wasn’t around for the first big switch in web presentation. Text to rich media. It’s exciting to be around for the second big switch. Standards compliance, and later full CSS based sites. Sorta cool isn’t it? ;)

4. September 9, 2002 12:40 PM

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francois Posted…

What I’ve been doing on the last couple of freelance sites I’ve done, was use a table only for the main page column structure. Everything else formatting-related is CSS, including margins (I don’t use empty table columns for margins anymore). I almost never need to nest tables. So that’s halfway there, at least. Incidentally, I’ve just discovered this all-CSS corporate site.

5. September 9, 2002 01:52 PM

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Nate Posted…

Francois, that seems ideal. Right now, our websites validate, which is perhaps a big step better than they could be. The goal though, is to create well structured XHTML files which take advantage of the markup language and use only one very simple layout table, just like you mentioned. Hopefully with these clean documents we can start taking advantage of the simple structuring and save time when modifications are needed.