Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

Taking a moment away from a truly busy summer of client work and other fun projects to bring you this little announcement:

There’s now a permanent home on GitHub for PNHTagtest, a little piece code that I’ve had floating around for ages as an aid for building and reviewing CSS on a project.

I’ve been starting every web site project with a document containing a mix of HTML tags and common markup patterns like nested lists, links found in headings, tables, blockquotes and pre/code blocks. The contents of the test file are meant to be copy & pasted into an html document, added as a page or blog post in the CMS de jour, injected via server side includes.

Meant to sit along side of your style guides, widget inventories or whatever tools you’re using to organize the site build, this document provides a place to go to review the styling, typographic conventions, and readability of a site in ways that standard dummy copy, such as a headline followed by 5 identical paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum text, can’t. Those pesky forgettable tags like sup, dl, and abbr that may not show up in a site’s content until 3 months after launch are all well represented here so you won’t forget to style them!

PNHTagTest was previously posted on this blog way back in 2006.

I’ve been sorta quiet around here lately due to a busy summer work schedule, a book project I’m working on (more on that later!), and attempting to get outside with whatever free time I have.

Something else that’s been filling my time are the great lineup of shows and interviews over at 5by5 Studios. Long time web geek Dan Benjamin has pulled together some excellent cohosts and coverage of the tech business, web development, MongoDB, general geekery and even UFOs.

So while I’m not pushing much content out there head over there to fill your brain. And if you like what you find you can become a member and get a cool t-shirt like I did.

In a recent post over on the Web Standards Project blog I introduced the newest and first book released by the WaSP – InterACT With Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design.

This is a great reference teaching the craft and profession of building web sites, and not just a book about markup or 3 column layouts with CSS. Read more about it in the blog post or go straight to the book’s companion site.