using the right technology at the right time
A lot of websites pursue XHTML as their document type, which is really cool. But a lot of them end up not validating with one little mistake. Even worse, with this mistake, documents that are made to run in “standards mode” are immediately thrown into quirks mode by browsers because web developers don’t know how to do their jobs.
Read on to find out how to avoid this all-too-common mistake.
This morning, I set up a GitHub account so that I could have some public repositories for my ColdFusion on Wheels plugins. Feel free to follow me and watch my repositories as I post them up. (Gotta learn how to do that first though!)
Read on for a summary of how I installed my local copy of Git on Snow Leopard.
For the ColdFusion on Wheels API documentation, we chose to do something a little unconventional (but pretty cool). Using some extra CFC attributes and CFML‘s GetMetaData() function, we wrote a pretty cool documentation parser for ColdFusion on Wheels.
Read on for an example of what we did.
I’m looking forward to playing around with ColdFusion 9 when I get some more time here in a month or so. One of the areas that interests me in particular is the ability to write full CFCs in CFScript syntax.
Read on for what I feel is the perfect blend of CFML features used in the different layers of the ColdFusion on Wheels framework:
I’ve become a fan lately of a small trend in breadcrumb design. Some sites are starting to put the page’s header (in <h1>) at the end of the list of breadcrumbs. It’s an interesting way to show how the site’s hierarchy leads up to the current page.
On Adobe’s site:
Read on for a couple more examples.
There is much truth in what martinibuster says about designing for IE6 in this Webmaster World discussion:
In my experience, when a site layout was blowing up, it usually took my site designer about an hour or two to fix the error and make the site display well for IE6.
So I am still not convinced that spending an hour, two hours, or even a single day is such a hardship, and less convinced that the minimal time typically required, about the time it takes to eat a sandwich, is going to impact sales to those who use more modern browsers. How could an hour or two spent upgrading a site for IE6 take away from sales? Is that a legitimate reason to throw away 10-15% of web traffic?
As far as the assumption that those who use IE6 don’t have money and correlate to trailer parks, I think there is absolutely no basis for that conclusion. Equally, I believe there is no foundation for believing that those who use modern browsers are more technically savvy.
The question should not be, Do you still design for IE6? The question should be, Why are you throwing away traffic by not designing for IE6?
This got me thinking about some of the assumptions that I’ve made over time. For example, I picture most IE users as grandmothers feebly trying to read the text on their screens. But would you be confident that your VP or CEO would not be the same?
I know of the pain and hardship that Internet Explorer 6 causes. I’m there often. But he has a really good point. Don’t get me wrong. I still look forward to the day that we can bid IE6 adieu.
My posting this is a seriously delayed reaction. But I must admit that I was using Wheels as a hammer and trying to treat a problem like a nail when I wrote about creating a Wheels partial for setting form focus.
Read on to see where I went wrong.
In case you missed any of it, here’s what I wrote about in September. Plus this becomes one freebie post each month so I don’t feel guilty about blogging too little. 
Read on to see what I wrote about in my sister internet marketing blog as well.
Over the weekend, I created a couple simple feed aggregators on the ColdFusion on Wheels Community page. I saved major time by using a mashup of Delicious, Yahoo! Pipes, FeedBurner, and the <cffeed> tag in CFML. This was far easier than creating my own feed aggregator by hand.
If you’ve been curious about any of these tools, I highly recommend reading this post.
Using some CSS voodoo, you can display a text link’s URL in parenthesis after the link text. This would be very useful for printer style sheets, where you can’t see where the links are pointing when the page is printed out.
Read on for more details and the code.
About MeI'm Chris Peters, and I'm a lover of web design and development. I'm based in Columbus, Ohio. Follow me as I have successes and struggles in this fast-moving technology environment.
