Sponge Project Blog

Apparently word is out about the design my this site, meaning I’ve been listed on all the following sites:

• ifoh designs
• CSS Based
• CSS Lounge
• dezinspiration

Thanks to anyone who voted or sugested me!

This is not a new debate and there are so many people commenting on it I can’t be bothered to link to any of them, they’re so prolific. Ranting aside I wanted to take the opportunity to dispel myths about table based layouts and say why semantic markup or web standards is the way to go.

Use the right tool for the job

This age old maxim rings true even in web circles, but is so often ignored. Semantic markup may sound complex and a bit techy, but is reality is very simple. The premise is to use the right HTML element for the right job. You wouldn’t use a saw to knock in a nail would you? For example if I want to display a paragraph of text, I’ll use the Paragraph element (p). This tells my web browser that the piece of text I’m adding into the page is a paragraph and should be treated as such. So my code will look something like this:

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.</p>

Less is more

The big benefit is leaner code. Using the example above again, I’ve written one line of code with one element for my text. If I’d done this in a table based layout I’d have to wrap it in a cell, within a row and maybe even add it as a table on it’s own. Quite quickly you end up with code bloat and a slow website, which is completely unnecessary.

Tables for tabular data

The table element and its children were created with one purpose in mind: the display of tabular data, or as the W3C state:

The HTML table model allows authors to arrange data — text, preformatted text, images, links, forms, form fields, other tables, etc. — into rows and columns of cells.

So the lesson for today is thus: “use tables for tabular data and the right element for everything else”.

It had to happen sooner or later, but all in all Silver Surfer Week seems like a good idea. The premise is:

a week-long campaign to help older people get in touch with the world through computer technology.

I particularly like their “Why use the internet” guide. Clearly some time and effort has been put into this and the other documents available.

It’s that time of the year again when A List Apart do their survey. This is our opportunity as web professionals to get together an share information on how we go about things around the world. Many improvements are promised over last year’s survey including a better categorisation for international markets - hurrah!

I covered last year’s survey and produced some results of my own which were a bit quick and dirty. Hopefully this year I’ll have more time to do a proper job.

So what are you waiting for? Take the survey now!

So it’s one year on from the floods here in Tewkesbury and life is almost back to normal for most people.

The recent Over the Rainbow* event sought to remind everyone about the dramatic events last summer, but to also try and put it behind us and move on. Sadly this isn’t the case across the town as there are still people in caravans waiting for their homes to be sorted out, so it’s not over yet.

Loads of residents banded together to march through the town to show solidarity. Some also went to Westminster to petition the government against building any new homes on the floodplains. Sadly the government still pushed through plans to build over 14,000 new homes in flood affected areas ensuring that if the weather conspires against us again, we’ll be in exactly the same situation! I’ll restrain myself form expressing my views on the government at this point as I don’t want the post to degenerate into a political rant.

Still it’s great to see the town pulling together and making a point. This is what a community feels like and I’m proud to live in Tewkesbury.

* Aside rant: I know the website was probably pulled together quite quickly, budgets were low and it’ll only be used for a limited time, but come on! Lacklustre design, invalid code, clashing text colour, no semantic markup, inline styles…the list goes on. It’s disappointing the production values couldn’t have been higher.