Archive for the 'webdev' Category

There are no Flash websites

Published on December 13, 2006 in advertising and webdev. 11 Comments

Never say “we have a Flash website”; there is no such thing. You might say: we have a website and it features, amongst a lot of relevant information in HTML pages, a Flash movie and/or application. You might say: we did buy a domain and we decided that a real website would be too accessible for our customers, so it only has a Flash blob on the ‘homepage’.

Flash is to websites what airconditioning is to a car: you might call it luxury, you might call it indispensable, but you cannot call it a car. It’s just airco.

For some reason, people that have experience with creating Flash applications also think they can make websites. “Just throw some Javascript on the homepage and it plays beautifully”, right? Wrong! If you have never heard of proper markup, SEO, the limitations of Javascript and Flash, you should leave making websites to professionals. If you insist that your branding cannot be properly expressed with just HTML/CSS/Ajax, you can add a Flash object to your site. But on its own, it’s a sorry excuse for a website.

Case: Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles
Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles
Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles is a new brand of singlets (‘wifebeaters‘ in English, or ‘marcellekes’ in Bruxellois). The idea is good, the branding is beautiful, the advertising is top-notch (not surprisingly, since the founder is also one of the founders of the ad agency LG&F).
Continue reading ‘There are no Flash websites’

Styles should not be referenced by a <link>

Published on September 14, 2006 in webdev. 3 Comments

(If you don’t work with HTML, this next post will be of no interest to you.)

Rant: the way external CSS stylesheets are included in HTML now is not logical nor convenient.
So: <link type="test/css" href="(...).css" rel="stylesheet" /> is wrong,
it should be <style type="text/css" src="(...).css" />.

Why?

css Zen Garden
Because src is for now, href is for later

In a HTML page, there are a number of files (URLs) that have to be fetched to display:

  • any text in the document, within <h1>, <p> or <div> tags or not
  • any images, specified as <img src=”" /> (always external)
  • any iframes, specified as <iframe src=”" /> (always external)
  • any javascript, specified as <script src=”" /> (external or in-line)

There are also links to other URLs that are not for now: maybe one click away, maybe just there to be interpreted by the web browser:

  • anchor links, specified as <a href=”"></a>
  • links: prev/next, archive links, feed link, specified as <link rel=”" href=”" />

So: you need the src="" referenced files immediately, and the href="" ones not. The way stylesheets are referenced now breaks this logic.

Because <style> is for stylesheets

Why can you embed in-line CSS style information within <style> tags, but not external stylesheets? Compare that to Javascript:

Inline JS: <script>...</script> and
External JS: <script src="" />

That makes sense. The same should be possible for <style>. The way it works now is counter-intuitive and antiquated. So please add it to XHTML 1.1.

Flickr: combining ALT and TITLE for images

Published on September 12, 2006 in webdev. 1 Comment

If you want to embed one of your own Flickr pictures into your blog, the Flickr photo page gives you the HTML code for easy copy/paste. They require you to link back to the photo page, so obviously in the HTML they provide, they give your an image with a link, i.e. an <img> tag in between a <a> </a> anchor tag pair. A typical example:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/(...)" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/(...).jpg" width="600" height="1200" alt="(image title)" /></a>
As you can see, they combine both an anchor title (always “Photo Sharing”) with an image alt text (Flickr uses the photo title for that). Both fields give more info about the objects they refer to and are very much loved by search engines. It should come as no surprise that the #1 Google result for “photo sharing” is Flickr.
Flickr: img alt vs. a title
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Rails Conference in London – who’s coming?

Published on May 10, 2006 in Web2.0 and webdev. 3 Comments

RailsConf Europe
Who wants to join in for the September Rails Conference in London? Let’s set up a nice Belgian delegation!

We can get a group discount:

  • 5 or more delegates and get 10% discount
  • 10 or more delegates and get 15% discount

This is the reason why I’m asking this now:

  • May 15th and pay just £400/delegate
  • May 30th and pay just £425/delegate
  • June 30th and pay just £450/delegate
  • July 30th and pay £475/delegate
  • August 30th and pay £525/delegate
  • September 10th and pay £575/delegate

So: leave your details here if you want to join: if we get to 5 people by May 15, we take the 10% discount (£360 = 526 euro), if we don’t, but we get to 10 people by May 30th (Barcamp Brussels might help), we take the 15% discount (also £360), if not, it’s everyone to themselves.

Confirmed speakers:

The conference is already packed with exciting speakers, including the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas, best-selling author and passion maven Kathy Sierra, Rails core developers Jamis Buck, Marcel Molina, Jr., Thomas Fuchs, Rails authors and trainers David Alan Black, and Chad Fowler, Rake author Jim Weirich and many more to be announced.
(from europe.railsconf.org)