paulhazel.com

As I mentioned earlier (Fun With CSS2) I’ve spent the last couple of weeks building a website for paying customers. It went live today here. Lots of goodies on it: 15 audio tracks and three YouTube hosted videos.

The excellent photographs were by Gareth Jones at Eden Digital. The audio player was originally built by Elliot Lemberger aka Asiabackpacker and I got it from FlashKit. I only changed it minimally, although I did come up with the idea of stacking them, which I love: very flexible and updateable.

It’s been a challenge, but I’ve learnt a lot. I’m pleased with it. The customer is pleased with it. We’re all happy. Hooray!

I’ve been very busy this week: back at work and building a website for a paying client at the same time. This is the first time I’ve properly attempted a full-on web standards-compliant CSS2 site and it’s been, er, fun. Designing and building slick pages certainly seems a lot easier than it used to be: thankfully the days of hacking huge tables when formatting is over. However, up to a point all we’ve done is swap one set of problems for another, the main cause of which remains browser incompatibilities. And, yes, we’re talking about Microsoft as the obligatory bad guys. Why can they not just join in with everyone else? I’m not going to go into the gory details, but a tiresome evening spent scouring the Internet was rewarded when a very nice Norwegian chap from one of the CSS mailing lists provided a suitable fix. Cheers Georg…

My constant companions this week have been:

1. Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards. An excellent book, containing a nice mixture of historical context and useful real-world examples. Zeldman is clearly a bit of a trainspotter when it comes to (X)HTML and browsers: it’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it! A Top Geezer.
2. Dan Cederholm’s Web Standards Solutions. Lots of down-to-earth practical help with the minimum of verbiage getting in the way.

Useful links:

• A List Apart
• The Noodle Incident
• Eric Meyer
• Jakob Nielsen

That’s it for today. Thanks for coming…