Brian Fitzgerald

Firefox 2 alpha 1 is available. At the time of this posting, it is not yet on the mozilla site, but TechCrunch has managed to find a link to it.

Here’s a few tips that will help you keep your CSS in order

What is meant by web 2.0? What was web 1.0? Read all about it here…

This is a list that showed up on digital-web magazine over a year ago listing those things that a modern site should be doing. While it's hard for most casual developers to incorporate these into a homegrown site, it shows that one should really consider some of the great content management systems available when building a site. Most good ones will take care of a majority of these items. In the end, you need to decide what is and isn't important to you and your visitors.

Offering regularly updated information (blogs, CMSs, etc.)

Increased efficiency in news and information distribution (RSS, ATOM, etc.)

Alternative methods of information distribution (email newsletters, RSS, del.icio.us, etc.)

Enhanced notification and announcement systems (pings, email alerts, etc.)

A place for your site's users to offer feedback and input (blog comments, forums, etc.)

Improved performance and code optimization (CSS, XHTML, etc.)

Multiple ways to access information (multi-faceted navigation, folksonomies, etc.)

Intelligent system to system communication (XML, SOAP, etc.)

Collaborative communication and documentation (Wikis, blogs, etc.)

On-demand support feedback (user-driven FAQs, click-to-chat, etc.)

Digital Web Magazine - News - Ten things your web sites should be doing

It’s been in beta for nearly five years and yesterday it finally it version 1.0. It’s not my favorite browser but it’s a fantastic browsing alternative on the mac and I’m sure it has a lot of great things on the way.

This morning I worked with two students from Cambridge, Nebraska on web development topics. Here are the links and other resources that I mentioned during that time.

h3. Downloadable Files

• "Completed _America_ Project":[www.brianfitz.net/america_f...](http://www.brianfitz.net/america_finished.zip)

h3. Web Sites

• "CSS Zen Garden":[www.csszengarden.com](http://www.csszengarden.com/) This site show what's possible with CSS by inviting CSS designers to contribute stylesheets to style a common html file.
• "CSS Vault":[www.cssvault.com](http://www.cssvault.com/) A showcase of CSS sites
• "Stylegala":[www.stylegala.com](http://www.stylegala.com/) Another showcase/magazine covering css
• "Layout-o-matic":[www.inknoise.com/experimen...](http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php) Have the basics of a css layout built for you.
• "List-o-matic":[www.accessify.com/tools-and...](http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/developer-tools/list-o-matic/) Have a css-based navigation created with a list built for you
• "Glish":[glish.com/css/](http://glish.com/css/) A source for solid, basic css layouts.
• "Digital-Web Magazine":[www.digital-web.com](http://www.digital-web.com/) IMHO, One of the best standards-based web design magazines
• "A List Apart":[www.alistapart.com](http://www.alistapart.com/) What some may consider the center of the standards universe, this is where you will find some of the best articles and information about standards-based design.

h3. Books

• "Designing with Web Standards (Jeffrey Zeldman)":[www.amazon.com/exec/obid...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735712018/qid=1114802761/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-1101931-0476668?v=glance&s=books&n=507846&id=1114802761/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-1101931-0476668?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) If you are serious about learning standards based design, this book is a great place to start. It won't teach you any particular skills, but it will give you all of the background you need to know why you are doing what you are doing?
• "Eric Meyer on CSS":[www.amazon.com/gp/produc...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/073571245X/102-4391777-8320103?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance) This is a good book for a beginning CSS developer as it takes web page elements that everyone builds like navigations and teaches how to build them with CSS using solid techniques.
• "More Eric Meyer on CSS":[www.amazon.com/gp/produc...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735714258/102-4391777-8320103?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance) An extension of the previous book.
• "CSS Pocket Reference":href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596007779/102-4391777-8320103?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance The other books are too large to carry everywhere you go. This one is small enough to bring with you and will remind you that you change font with font-family, not text-family.
• "Bulletproof Web Design":[www.amazon.com/gp/produc...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321346939/102-4391777-8320103?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance) A recent publication that, like the Eric Meyer books talks about how to create web pages using cascading style sheets that will be compatible with all browsers.

Some observations and thoughts from the first day at Macromedia’s MAX Conference:

Flex is awesome and the price may be right now. I’m frustrated that right now there is no way to develop flex applications on the Macintosh (that I can see). The code is just XML, but you have to have something that can compile the SWF file and that seems to be Windows-only right now.

Stephen Elop (Macromedia CEO) took quite a swing at Microsoft and their new flash-like features in Avalon. He displayed a big slide telling them to “try again”. Of course Microsoft has the money and resources to try again, and again, and again, and again.

Adobe’s Bruce Chizen (CEO) spoke at the end of the general session (many thought it was over and had left). He’s not a great speaker and stumbled over his points quite a bit. He flattered the developers some, but propped Acrobat and print. It will be a curious melding of philosophies when Adobe meets Macromedia. The first’s idea of digitizing content is to put replicate print formats while the other’s goal is to blow people’s minds with ways in which content can be delivered.

Macromedia’s XD development group has a series of sessions available in which they are discussing the way that they build applications. This is something that I thought was really missing next year – talk about how to build an application (beyond the code). The session I was in this morning talked about application design, brainstorming, cycling, etc. It got me excited and I hope to find more sessions like it tomorrow.

Tomorrow is going to be a loooong day. Morning starts at seven. General session should be a lot of fun as the different product groups take turns showing what cool and new. There will be a sneak peak session after the sessions have ended to show what may (or may not) be coming in future products. Finally, there is an event for attendees at Disneyland’s Paradise Pier. I may need to be dragged back to the hotel room tomorrow night.

Macromedia’s MAX Conference starts one week from today and I can’t wait. With studio 8 just out and the Adobe acquisition, there should be a lot of exciting things going on there. Five co-workers and myself will be headed down to Anaheim next Sunday to check it all out.

“Mozillazine”:www.mozillazine.org has announced the availability of “Firefox 1.5 beta 2”:weblogs.mozillazine.org/qa/archiv…

I’m in Hastings, Nebraska today to work with 16 victims willing participants on Dreamweaver, CSS, XHTML and other standards-based issue. It’s going to be a great day…

“View the Workshop Outline”:www.brianfitz.net

Wikipedia hosts one of the most complete browser comparison charts I have seen. In most cases however, it seems to be comparing the last or latest version of each browser, not breaking the features out by version.

Microsoft has been rumored to have a “flash killer” in the works for a long time and it seems that the newly announced “sparkle” program may be it, but is it designed to go up against flash? It really seems when watching the available interview/presentation that it is not meant so much to be a low-bandwidth internet technology as a way to add a ton of vector-based eye candy at desktop applications. Of course, it becomes difficult to separate web from desktop when you are talking Internet Explorer, Visual Basic and Windows and I’m sure that this will impact the web in many ways.

Here’s a good article from scottberkun.com about software design and why people call it sucky. What are they really thinking? What does this make the developer think? How can developers spend time more efficiently to create software that is user-friendly?

Today I’m nailing down the page structure for a new set of sites that I’m working on and a key part of that is asking “what gets denoted h1, h2, etc.”? I perused several HTML and design forums looking for discussion on the subject, but did not find answers that seemed practical. A model that kept coming up was that your h1 or h2 should mimic your title tag. If your title tag follows the convention of “site name - page name” this is problematic as these are two distinct elements that should be marked separately.

So… I started visiting sites that I know are marked up pretty well and have come up with the following convention. H1 will always be the site name, therefore h1 on every page will be the same. H2 will be the page name. I will have one h1 and usually one h2. I could see multiple instances of h2 where there are elements on the page that are not related to the page topic (navigation, etc.). From there on, the headers should simply be nested in a logical fashion.

I downloaded the new Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash last night and have had some pretty good opportunities today to use DW and Fireworks.

Regarding the previous post about folks bashing Fireworks, I’m not in agreement. They were obviously doing some things with Flex that I’m not doing, but Fireworks suits me very well and I do not feel like the product seems neglected, although there is not much new there.

Dreamweaver feels like it has gotten some much needed love on the macintosh. Parts of it feel a bit more native, the tabs are fantastic and I think that the file transfers seem a little snappier. That said, I have also had it hang on several file transfers and have resorted to force quitting and relaunching DW. I hope that I can figure out what causes this and avoid it in the future. I look forward to trying out the style sheet features in it, as well as the XML and XSL features.

Want to get your own copy? Grab it here…

Studio 8 has yet to be released for non devnet subscribers, but news is starting to hit the web and one of the first interesting critiques focuses on Fireworks' improvements, or lack of.

Subscribers to Macromedia’s DevNet service are reporting that they have been provided links today to download the parts of the new studio 8. Perhaps the rest of us will get it today also… (fingers crossed)

I'm three days late on this, but Macromedia announced Studio 8 (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, Contribute and FlashPaper) on August 8. 8 on 8/8. Great huh? Anyway, I'm quite a bit saddened that Freehand is not in the package as this almost certainly means that it's death is eminent. They have not said as much, but I'm not sure what else a person could think with the coming Adobe merger.

So what's new? One of the smallest new features, but one of the most exciting to me is a tabbed document interface in Dreamweaver for Macintosh. There is a new CSS panel that better merges all CSS work into a single place. You can now use Dreamweaver to edit XML and XSL documents. You can also now do "code folding" which allows you to collapse parts of your code that you are not working on. The product is scheduled to be released at the beginning of September.

As part of a new series of articles from Macromedia centered around the Studio 8 announcement, Marius Zaharia has written one titled "XML Overview" that does a very nice job of explaining XML, it's connection to HTML and XHTML, and XSL. If you are interested in these topics, this article is worth reading.

You know you want one

The "Giant-Ass Image Viewer" is a very similar project that is demonstrated and explained.