Suppose you have a table in your database filled with data about books: title, author, and so on. Every book also has a field for its genre; in that field you put the genre_id corresponding to the genre-table. That’s the easy part. Now, what is the best way to make it possible for every book to have multiple genres?
I’ll admit it: I am not an idea man. I am a problem solver. Sure I have the occasional stroke of “genius”, but on the whole, I’m the guy who gets things done.
Usability, design, accessability are key for the user. For the developer, we worry about productivity. My time is valuable, just like the users. I don’t have precious minutes to waste on hunting for files, rewriting whole sections of code, or find a hack for a (free or
not-so-free) CMS. I’ll try to lay out a few ideas that have helped me save time in my production work, as well as personal work.
Thanks to a tip from Rodney McPhail, I’ve squashed a Mac/IE5 bug that made the menus at the top disappear when you hovered over them.
I just finished reading Eric Meyer’s post about his switch to Wordpress, and I thought I’d throw in my two cents on the subject.
This marks the official launch of OrderedList.com
One of the key points of web standards is the separation of content and presentation. Now, some may call me nit-picky, but if we’re going to separate the two, lets keep them completely separated. I’ve seen too many excellently designed, well known, validated and accessible websites that contain one flaw: There is still presentation information in the content.
In the world of development, organization is key. Web standards themselves are meant to keep things in a unified system, so updating and editing is easier, and understanding the code is faster and more straight-forward. In my opinion, a good naming convention can be the root of all file organization, regardless of the type of file or its usage.
Whenever I bring up the subject of valid HTML/CSS code, inevitably I get asked "As long as the page works, what does it matter if it validates or not?" To this, I usually roll up my sleeves and begin a 45 minute sermon on the benefits of web-standards. But in the back of my head, I still can’t completely shake the question.
Steve Smith