Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards

CSS allowed developers to separate content from appearance; style sheets are like little notes that say to the Web server, “If youre sending a page to a PC, make it look like this.” There might be separate sheets for PCs, for a “printer-friendly” layout, for a PDA, and so on. For designers, CSS means that the page will appear as it was intended, no matter what the device. For developers, CSS means they only have to build the page once. And for users, CSS means, as Zeldman says, that the site works.

There’s a bit more info on this over at Zeldman.com

I knew I would link to this post after reading through just a few items, but I couldn’t pick just one (or just five) to quote here. There are just too many gems to pick from so I’ll leave it at this: go read the whole thing, now!

This article, Guidelines for creating better markup, isn’t telling me anything I don’t already know, but it’s always nice to review. People think HTML is easy, and for the most part it is, but that doesn’t mean it should be sloppy.

I’ve mentioned several times here that I feel writing markup (or any other code, for that matter) is a craft. I take pride in writing as lean and clean code as possible. From the looks of things there aren’t a whole lot of other Web professionals that feel that way, but we do exist.

The business case for Web standards-based development

Reduced bandwidth

• Massive (X)HTML markup reduction with cleaner code
• Styles and scripts are cached
• Some larger sites have literally saved terabytes in bandwidth costs

Yes there are many other benefits to developing with standards, but this is the one that makes the case.

Put Your Best Foot Forward: 19 Gorgeous Website Footers

A nice collection of well done examples of the most often neglected portion of a web page, the footer. I’ve been known to treat the footer as an afterthought myself so it’s nice to see this area get some attention. But I think some sites are taking it a bit far they put everything, including primary navigation, at the bottom of the page.

Update: PublicidadPixelada has more on footers.