Responsive design shouldn’t be just about checking screen width and removing stuff on mobile devices, even though this is what it often amounts to. I also admit to doing this myself. Designing with a mobile first approach is sensible, but we run into problems with the typical wireframes/photoshop/html pixel-perfect workflow.
Stephanie Rieger made this excellent presentation on pragmatic responsive design with lots of good points:
You should check out her other presentations too.
Solid, semantic and accessible HTML markup matters. When most people look at a web page, it doesn’t make much difference to them whether headings are coded with proper <h1> and <h1> tags or <span style="font-size: 20px">. Still, for someone using a screen reader, not to mention search engines and feed readers, it can make all the difference in making sense of a document. Luckily this specific issue is now rare, but in a world of plugins and cool themes that generate semi-adequate markup, we’re often not using HTML and CSS to their full potential in building solid, accessible and search engine friendly sites.
By we I mean me of course. WordPress is awesome, and it’s one of the few CMS’s around that has committed to accessibility on the admin end (I’m not saying it couldn’t be improved). Unfortunately tight schedules and the very fact that its so easy to whip up a site using a few plugins and occasionally ready-made themes means its very tempting to be lazy.
So here goes: I hereby promise to continue to build usable sites, with a renewed commitment to good semantic and accessible markup. Because the web should be for everyone (and there’s nothing like some sweet, elegant HTML is there?).
This is a follow-up to last week’s post, Should we design for wider screens?. In this post I’ll demonstrate with a simple example how easy it is, with CSS and a bit of jQuery, to make layouts that adapt to the many different screen sizes out there.
Continue Reading →
I decided to experiment with some of the new elements in HTML 5 and built my blog theme from scratch (with the help of the Carrington framework though). I’m now rolling article, section, header, footer and other stuff. Because IE needs a Javascript hack to enable support for these elements, I wouldn’t consider doing this in any client work, but hey, this is MY blog! Continue Reading →