XHTML / HTML

Yahoo!’s Latest Performance Breakthroughs

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

The Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo! added 20 new performance rules and refined some of the original rules. I’m really excited about this; this performance goodness is just what developers need to accelerate the user experience even further.

  1. Flush the buffer early
  2. Use GET for AJAX requests
  3. Post-load components
  4. Preload components
  5. Reduce the number of DOM elements
  6. Split components across domains
  7. Minimize the number of iframes
  8. No 404s
  9. Reduce cookie size
  10. Use cookie-free domains for components
  11. Minimize DOM access
  12. Develop smart event handlers
  13. Choose <link> over @import
  14. Avoid filters
  15. Optimize images
  16. Optimize CSS sprites
  17. Don’t scale images in HTML
  18. Make favicon.ico small and cacheable
  19. Keep components under 25K [mobile]
  20. Pack components into a multipart document

Stay tuned, we’ve got more tricks up our sleeve. ;)

Candidates graded on technical savvy, site performance

Monday, February 4th, 2008

Perhaps you have always wondered, what is Hillary Clintons YSlow score? Who is the master of image optimization, and who has so much image-bloat that it weighed more than Mike Huckabees entire page? Check out the article I wrote on YDN.

Happy voting.

Semantics for Debutants

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Steve wrote an article about semantics. He does a good job of explaining his process.
We need to teach newbies to take a slightly broader view. Imagine, for example, an action list, which allows you to execute a certain number of actions relative to the context in which it is found. Think; “print”, [...]

Why are women not on the A-list?

Friday, March 9th, 2007

I’m not a proponent of lowering skill level for diversities sake, but is it possible that there are CSS Goddesses on the A-list in terms of technical skill, speaking ability, and vision who simply aren’t on the radar of the web development community?

Pourquoi des sites au design accessible ?

Monday, March 5th, 2007

Un site accessibles et un site inaccessibles peuvent paraître exactement les mêmes pour un utilisateur qui n’est pas handicapé. Il peut alors être difficile de comprendre les raisons de tout ce remue-ménage. Pourquoi est-il aussi important de tenir compte de cette accessibilité lorsqu’on conçoit et lorsqu’on met en forme des pages Internet ?

YUI announces free hosting at their birthday party

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

If your visitors have visited Yahoo! or another YUI using site today there is a chance the library will be in their cache since they are now offering free hosting of the library on their servers. This just rocks. It means that normal people get to take advantage of the lightning fast Yahoo [...]

A List Apart

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005

A List Apart has launched a new site design. They had a couple seconds of style-less content, and then boom, the new site was born. At first glance it is a 1000px wide, four column design based on ruby on rails. Take a look.
New design. New structure. New server. New publishing system [...]

Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) v1.0

Saturday, August 13th, 2005

bobbyvandersluis.com | Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) v1.0
A great article which explains a useful way to include flash content in your website without compromising standards.

WWW2005 - shameful name dropping

Saturday, May 14th, 2005

I attended WWW2005 in Chiba, Japan, just outside of Tokyo. It was a fun conference. I met lots of great people, and saw some people I hadn’t in a while.

Morgan and the Expanding Container Element

Friday, December 17th, 2004

I am working on a site for Mason where he can record his adventures rebuilding a Morgan with his father-in-law. The design is going alright, and I have only two gripes.

WYSIWYG Editor Accessibility Test Results:

Thursday, December 16th, 2004

Allowing writers to contribute to the creation of accessible documents.

The testing was based on the needs of non-technical content contributors; writers, graphic artists, editors, etc. The program had to shield the user from all the code and provide a simple usable interface.

It is reasonable to expect writers to be able to update documents and follow preexisting styles without substantially compromising accessibility. However, they won’t be able to create or change the overall look and feel of the documents. This type of change requires familiarity with CSS and XHTML, even in the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. With proper planning, this limitation can actually help insure consistency across large documents. . .

Accessibility for Writers: Software Manuals

Thursday, December 16th, 2004

One of the most important improvements that can be made to the accessibility of a site is a task that will often fall to writers.  Adding text to describe images allows blind and visually-impaired users to access your content, but writing it is not necessarily something that comes naturally.  The tips compiled here will help you get started and avoid common pitfalls.

Web Design Resources

Wednesday, December 15th, 2004

I became a geek by accident. I was a groupie for ages and then it just kind of rubbed off on me. I am eager to collect my links before they get lost.  The resources for learning to design well are out there, but hard to find and evaluate until you know the [...]

HTML Lite

Wednesday, June 16th, 2004

Approach:  For a long time I didn’t really understand the reason for CSS, XHTML, and standards in general.  I didn’t get that the reason for the separation of CSS and HTML was to separate content from presentation.   And even when I read that statement in Standards based design books, I didn’t understand why.  What are [...]