A good designer knows that tables should not be used for layout, but rather for displaying columns and rows of data. HTML enables the creation of well-structured, well-formatted tables, but they’re used infrequently enough to make remembering all of the different elements and attributes rather time-consuming and tedious. So to make things easier, here is a clean HTML5 template to speed-up development for your next project:
<table dir="ltr" width="500" border="1"
summary="purpose/structure for speech output">
<caption>Here we assign header information to cells
by setting the scope attribute.
</caption>
<colgroup width="50%" />
<colgroup id="colgroup" class="colgroup" align="center"
valign="middle" title="title" width="1*"
span="2" style="background:#ddd;" />
<thead>
<tr>
<th scope="col">Name</th>
<th scope="col">Side</th>
<th scope="col">Role</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tfoot>
<tr>
<td>Darth Vader</td>
<td>Dark</td>
<td>Sith</td>
</tr>
</tfoot>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Obi Wan Kenobi</td>
<td>Light</td>
<td>Jedi</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Greedo</td>
<td>South</td>
<td>Scumbag</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Ahh, gives me goose bumps just looking at it. You can use this code with any markup language, whether HTML5, HTML 4.1, or any flavor of XHTML. Here is how this basic template looks in the current web page 1 (using different data and with styles removed):
If you operate a website that features lots of code examples, you know how important it is to spend some quality time styling the <pre> element. When left unstyled, wild <pre> tags will mangle your preformatted content and destroy your site’s layout. Different browsers treat the <pre> tag quite differently, varying greatly in their default handling of font-sizing, scrollbar-rendering, and word-wrapping. Indeed, getting your preformatted code to look consistent, usable, and stylish across browsers is no easy task, but it certainly can be done. In this article, I’ll show you everything you need to create perfect <pre> tags.
First thangs first
Before getting into it, let’s take a moment to ensure we’re all on the same page. The (X)HTML <pre> element is used to display preformatted text, code, or just about anything else. pre tags are ideal for multiple lines of code or text that need to retain character spacing, display unformatted characters, keep inherent line breaks, and so on.
While browsing the internet these days, I see a lot of this:
<body>
...
<a name="top"></a>
...
<a href="#top">- Back to Top -</a>
...
</body>
There’s an easier, better and prettier way. CSS Signatures are all the rage these days. If you’re not familiar with a CSS Signature, it’s basically nothing more than an ID on your body tag, like this:
<body id="www-domain-tld">
The fundamental purpose of the CSS Signature is to allow a user to specify style adjustments to your site in their own user style sheets. Whether or not users are actually capitalizing on this is a discussion for another day, but doing this has other benefits like having an extra id to use when dealing with CSS specificity.
Additionally, we can use this to capitalize on a little known fact about HTML and anchors: you can use anchors to jump to any element on your page with an ID attribute.
..and so on. These directives all function in different ways, but they all serve the same basic purpose: control how Google crawls the various pages on your site. For example, you can use meta noindex to instruct Google not to index your sitemap, RSS feed, or any other page you wish. This level of control over which pages are crawled and indexed is helpful, but what if you need to control how Google crawls the contents of a specific page? Easy. Google enables us to do this with a set of googleon/googleoff tags.
Behold the ubiquitous list elements, <ul> and <ol>! These two sexy elements help millions of websites display lists of information in clean, semantic fashion. Without them, we’d be crawling around like filthy cavemen, eating dirt and howling at the moon.
But these list elements aren’t just sexy, they are also extremely flexible, enabling us humble designers to create robust list configurations that are semantically versatile and highly customizable. We all know how to throw down a basic list:
More people are surfing the Web via mobile device than ever before. It’s just so convenient to have that mobile access to anything you need. Sadly, most websites have not yet considered their mobile visitors, who probably move on to the next site before trying to make sense of a jumbled mess. Those of you who surf the Mobile Web know exactly what I’m talking about here: sites that “get it” are a joy to visit, but those that don’t are a total pain. What’s to get? Well, for one, if you do nothing else for your mobile visitors, take five minutes and implement a basic stylesheet to make your site readable via mobile device. This tutorial will show you how to retain visitors and reduce bounce rate with a super-easy 5-minute mobile makeover.
Web designers can do some pretty cool stuff with HTML 4 and CSS 2.1. We can structure our documents logically and create information-rich sites without relying on archaic, table-based layouts. We can style our web pages with beauty and detail without resorting to inline <font> and <br> tags. Indeed, our current design methods have taken us far beyond the hellish era of browser wars, proprietary protocols, and those hideous flashing, scrolling, and blinking web pages.
As far as we’ve come using HTML 4 and CSS 2.1, however, we can do better. We can refine the structure of our documents and increase their semantic precision. We can sharpen the presentation of our stylesheets and advance their stylistic flexibility. As we continue to push the boundaries of existing languages, HTML 5 and CSS 3 are quickly gaining popularity, revealing their collective power with some exciting new design possibilities.
In addition to your choice collection of “Share This” links, you may also want to provide visitors with a link that enables them to quickly and easily send the URL permalink of any post to their friends via email. This is a great way to increase your readership and further your influence. Just copy & paste the following code into the desired location in your page template:
<a href="mailto:?subject=Fresh%20Linkage%20@%20Perishable%20Press&body=Check%20out%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>%20from%20Perishable%20Press" title="Send a link to this post via email" rel="nofollow">Share this post via email</a>
Within the code, you will need to edit both instances of the string “Perishable%20Press” to reflect your own site name. Note that the “%20” is the encoded equivalent of a blank space, and is required to ensure validation of parameterized query strings. As is, the code will generate an email that is populated with the following information:
Here at Perishable Press, the number of posts listed in my archives is rapidly approaching the 700 mark. While this is good news in general, displaying such a large number of posts in an effective, user-friendly fashion continues to prove challenging. Unfortunately, my current strategy of simply dumping all posts into an unordered list just isn’t working. I think it’s fair to say that archive lists containing more than like 50 or 100 post titles are effectively useless and nothing more than a usability nightmare. With growing numbers of blogs building up massive collections of posts, finding better ways to display vast quantities of archived material becomes increasingly important.
One solution that seems popular involves breaking the archives down into various categories, tags, and time periods. This provides meta-context to each list of titles and usually eliminates the need for any hideously long post listings. This solution works well, especially when the different category lists are displayed adjacently in multiple vertical columns. For example, a blog with three categories would do well to display each category’s archive listings in its own vertical column. Something like this:
In the time of the dinosaurs, HTML authors controlled the way anchors opened by adding target="_blank" as an attribute on an anchor tag. Then the molten mass of Internet began to cool into the thin crust of Web 2.0, the continents began to separate and there came a great migration of pages from HTML to the shinier, new XHTML. Most authors didn’t know what that meant, but it had an “X” in it, so it must be cool, they thought.
Alas, there came a great despair as the beloved target="_blank" attribute was no longer looked kindly upon by The Great Validator. The new XHTML pages would not wear the Shiny Badge of Validation Love.
Ever wanted to provide automatic language translations of your web pages without installing another plugin? Here is a valid, SEO-friendly technique that takes advantage of Google’s free translation service. All you need is a PHP-enabled server and you’re good to go. Just copy and paste the following code into the desired location in your page template and enjoy the results. Once in place, this code will produce translation links for eight common languages for every page on your site. Grab, gulp and go:
When building web pages, it is often necessary to add links that require parameterized query strings. For example, when adding links to the various validation services, you may find yourself linking to an accessibility checker, such as the freely available Cynthia service:
With the explosion of social media, networking, and bookmarking services, there are a zillion ways to add “Share This Post” functionality to your WordPress-powered sites. In addition to the myriad services and plugins, we can also add these links directly, using nothing more than a little markup and a few choice PHP snippets. Such individual links provide full control over the selection, layout, and styling of each link without requiring the installation of yet another WordPress plugin.
This article shares SEO-friendly code snippets for ten of the most popular social media sites using completely valid XHMTL-Strict markup. All of the following code snippets feature:
Recently, I have been getting a lot of requests for multiple-loop configurations in WordPress. It seems that multiple-column, multiple-loop configurations are in high demand these days, especially ones that display posts like this:
First column, first loop: display posts #1-5
Second column, second loop: display posts #6-10
Third column, third loop: display posts #11-15
Using WordPress and a little CSS, this configuration is relatively easy to accomplish. Let’s cut right to the chase..
While writing my previous article on creating the perfect WordPress title tags, I deliberately avoided discussing the use of separators in titles. I feel that the topic is worthy of its own article, enabling a more thorough exploration of the details. Title separators are the symbols, punctuation, and other characters used to distinguish between various parts of the page title. For example, a title may include the blog name, post title and blog description, with each element separated by a hyphen. Any Google search will reveal that some of the most commonly used title separators include the hyphen, the dash, and angled quotes. Many others are used as well, and we will explore some of them in this article.
Consider the Google home page — arguably the most popular, highly visited web page in the entire world. Such a simple page, right? You would think that such a simple design would fully embrace Web Standards. I mean, think about it for a moment.. How would you or I throw down a few lists, a search field, and a logo image? Something like this, maybe:
NOTE: This entire article amounts to nothing more than an in-depth learning experience. After writing the article, I realized (painfully) that either format for the second iteration of the downlevel-revealed comment for XHTML is perfectly fine and displays no ill effects or unwanted characters in any browser. Thus, this article is essentially useless, but I am posting it anyway because I just hate deleting several hours of hard work..
As more and more people discover the flexibility, specificity, and all-around usefulness of Microsoft’s proprietary downlevel conditional comments, it behooves us to reiterate the importance of utilizing proper syntax. Specifically, for downlevel-revealed, or negative, conditional comments, the commented content will remain visible unless the associated if condition proves false. For example, if we were using XHTML and wanted to hide a specific CSS file from Internet Explorer 6, we could employ the following conditional comment to do the job:
In this article, I discuss the different MIME types available for XHTML and explain a method for serving your documents with the optimal MIME type, depending on the capacity of the user agent. Using either htaccess or PHP for content negotiation, we can serve complete, standards-compliant markup for our document’s header information. This is especially helpful when dealing with Internet Explorer while serving a DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.1 along with the recommended XML declaration.
According to the RFC standards 1 produced by IETF 2, web documents formatted as XHTML 3 may be served as any of the following three MIME types:
Alright, time for another “How’d-you-do-that-thing-on-your-site?” post. This question comes from the one and only Mr. Graham of ImJustCreative.com. In a recent email, Graham literally begged me to share my “secret recipe” for displaying my latest Twitter Tweets (wow, did I actually just say that?) right here on Perishable Press:
…Would be really really decent of you if you could let me know how to do it? Pretty please? How do you call the last twitter feed, what commands do you need etc?
In case you have no idea what we’re talking about here, scroll down to the bottom of any page on the site (using the current theme) and observe the savviness and sophistication of my latest Twitter post, updated automagically every fifteen minutes. Or, for those of you too lazy to “go there,” here is a screenshot demonstrating the perpetual Twitter display:
Recently, a reader named Donasked about this theme’saccessibility(accesskey) jump menulocated at the top of each page. Several people have commented that they like the way the jump menu “lights up” upon gaining focus. Whenever a user hovers their cursor over the region at the top of the page, all links in the jump menu change to a more visible color. Then, as the cursor moves over the various menu items, each jump link is further highlighted with an even brighter color and an underline. This progressive focusing is best seen in browsers that support the CSS :hover pseudo-class (e.g., Firefox, Opera, etc.), however the menu remains useful even in CSS-challenged browsers (e.g., Internet Explorer). In this article, I explain how the Perishable Press jump menu is built using Web standards via CSS and (X)HTML, and then provide the specific code required to emulate the jump menu as it appears here at Perishable Press.
Not too long ago, I played with the idea of releasing article content under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0) License. At the time, I wanted to host my own copies of the two associated CC license pages. During the process of uploading the pages to my own server, several minor adjustments (regarding image paths, etc.) needed to be made to the source code. After tweaking a few things in the XHTML code, I began snooping around in the pages’ CSS files. Eventually, I found myself rewriting the entire CSS and XHTML files for both documents. Although this sort of activity is not unusual for me to do, I admit that it is borderline obsessive/compulsive and perhaps even a bit paranoid. Nonetheless, the reworked CSS and XHTML documents are cleaner, less redundant, and better optimized (in my humble opinion) than the originals. Further, the remixed pages are fine-tuned with a hyper-critical design aesthetic. To my eye, they present much tighter than the original versions. But hey, that’s what the spirit of Creative Commons is all about, right? Sharing, remixing, and improving content? In any case, redesigning these pages was good fun and good practice, even though I have since decided against licensing any of my content via Creative Commons 1. So, rather than simply deleting these brief redesign exercises, I have decided to post them online and share them with anyone who might be interested in such esoteric dabblings. You never know who might find them useful! ;)
As some of you (e.g., Louis) may have noticed during the recent site redesign, I decided to switch the default doctype from XHTML 1.0 Strict to XHTML 1.1. Just in case you were wondering, XHTML 1.1 is different than XHTML 1.0 in three important ways 1:
On every element, the lang attribute has been removed in favor of the xml:lang attribute
On the a and map elements, the name attribute has been removed in favor of the id attribute
The “ruby” collection of elements has been added
Beyond these three differences, XHTML 1.1 is identical to XHTML 1.0. Personally, I chose to markup my current design with XHTML 1.1 because of its advancement of the web-standards paradigm: complete separation of structure, behavior, and presentation.
Beginning with this article, I am serving up a short series of unobtrusive JavaScript functions that I use to enhance the functionality of Perishable Press. In this post, I present a comprehensive JavaScript method of opening external links in new windows (or tabs, depending on the browser).
One way of opening links in new windows is to insert the HTML target="_blank" attribute into all necessary anchor elements (<a href=""></a>). This method works well, but generates validation errors when used with XHTML-Strict doctypes.
A better solution is to employ some unobtrusive JavaScript to progressively enhance your documents with “blank-target” functionality. Using the following code, 99% of your visitors (those with JavaScript) will enjoy external links opening in new windows, while the remaining 1% of your audience (those without JavaScript) will enjoy your site without even realizing they are missing out on those wonderful blank-targeted links. It’s a “win-win” situation ;)
Of the handful of these tips that I am able (or willing) to follow, number 6 — move scripts to the bottom — is definitely one of the easiest. The reason for doing this is at least twofold:
[…] it’s better to move scripts from the top to as low in the page as possible. One reason is to enable progressive rendering, but another is to achieve greater download parallelization. — Yahoo! Developer Network
Many people mistakenly assume that the <script> element (and associated contents) must be located squarely in the document <head>, however, this simply isn’t true. As outlined in the official HTML 4.01 Document Type Definition and also in the official XHTML 1.1 Document Type Definition, the <script> element is allowed:
The amount of time I spend surfing the Web from a mobile device has steadily increased since the acquisition of my new favorite mobile device. Unfortunately, many sites have yet to implement (or even consider) support for mobile devices. Without proper formatting, such sites are virtually useless, requiring unnecessary download times, displaying unreadable pages, and serving unusable content. Given the inevitable ubiquity of mobile access to the World Wide Web, providing reasonable support for handheld browsers is becoming increasingly important. Without it, your site is left looking incomplete and unprofessional when viewed from mobile devices.
So, with that said, today I am happy to announce new mobile CSS styles for Perishable Press. Before today, browsing Perishable Press via mobile device was a royal pain, as the default CSS screen styles would transform the content into an unusable expanse of scrolling text and links. Staying current with site maintenance, comments, and updates was very difficult and time-consuming thanks to the improperly implemented screen styles. If your site is loading screen styles instead of an optimized set of styles for handheld devices, chances are high that your mobile visitors are few and disappointed.
A good designer knows that tables should not be used for layout, but rather for displaying columns and rows of data. HTML enables the creation of well-structured, well-formatted tables, but they’re used infrequently enough to make remembering all of the different elements and attributes rather time-consuming and tedious. So to make things easier, here is a clean HTML5 template to speed-up development for your next project:![[ Electrical Surge ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2009/misc-chunks/html-css-power.jpg)
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In this article, I discuss the different MIME types available for XHTML and explain a method for serving your documents with the optimal MIME type, depending on the capacity of the user agent. Using either htaccess or PHP for content negotiation, we can serve complete, standards-compliant markup for our document’s header information. This is especially helpful when dealing with Internet Explorer while serving a DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.1 along with the recommended XML declaration.![[ ~{*}~ ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2008/jump-menu/access-deco.gif)
Recently, a reader named 