Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

There are some interesting new things going on the world of web site layouts with CSS and JavaScript all the time. Tricks and tools to add to a client side developer’s arsenal for making flexible, content accommodating navigation, layouts and presentations. Though I wouldn’t give away any of our progress, I can’t help but wonder if sometimes the amount of work we ask a visitor’s browser to do is overkill. One way to shift this workload off the browser — without placing undo burden onto the site management staff or its budget by requiring a high level of technical expertise with each site update — is to move the it to an offline or backend CMS tool creating static code for publication. This is particularly useful when doing multiple site deployments with a similar theme or building different localized site versions where the need for flexibility in type doesn’t change from user to user, but from content update to content update or deployment to deployment.

Through the use of fairly simple to create build tools we can create ‘static’ CSS for deployment and consumption and trim the amount and complexity of layout code sent with each page.

This week saw the end of winter mixing with the first day of spring — in the northeast that meant snowflakes on the few flowers that have started poking out. There’s also been a flurry of activity on the net from site launches to reports from the SXSWi and MIX09 conferences and some other good stuff I thought needed to be called out.

This last week saw two big JavaScript projects debut with releases and live code. John Resig has released Processing.js and Richard Herrera has introduced the Flow library.

So here I am a couple weeks after the IE team announced through a variety of different channels their proposal to help cushion the blow of their next browser release through the use of a META declaration and HTTP header, “X-UA-Compatible” describing what browser(s) the page and its associated styles and javascript files target.

I’ve got plenty of thoughts on why vendor extensions and related adjustments to behavior are bad. I also have some concerns over this one in particular. Extensions, and more general workarounds and hacks of all kinds [vendor driven or not] get buried into code, reused, copy and pasted, dropped in application templates, removed by accident, and generally used by people who don’t know why they’re doing it, but instead just because it works. As anything other then a very temporary, one time use solution this doesn’t seem to me to solve any problems that are inherent with either web standards or an ecosystem where content publishers are open to who they let see their content. But let me not get too far off onto that tangent and consider first that the proposed solution goes through.

For the moment I want to focus on the practical — what does the additional rendering mode and the ability to switch to it via META declaration mean to me as a working web developer?

Don’t miss these!

• Joe Hewitt releases a script for Firebug for iPhone
• jQuery 1.1.3 released
• Abe Fetting blogs some other iPhone scripting findings including keypress and drag&drop related events.

I’m reading John Resig’s Pro JavaScript Techniques and really digging it. Expect a review in the coming weeks.

Bulletproof Ajax is a newly released book from New Riders and author [and fellow WaSP member] Jeremy Keith. Devoted to teaching the proper way to design for and use the technologies behind everyone’s current favorite buzzword. If you’re looking for a step by step guide on how to recreate your companies Flash application click for click this probably isn’t going to help too much (other then perhaps help push you into the direction of rethinking your approach, or just going back to your old friend), but instead it does a wonderful job of breaking down the systems that make Ajax work and putting them in context — that being a new dynamic way of enhancing, interacting with and manipulating web documents.

Read on for full review

Hey look, I did it!

After roughly six months of sitting on a design I was happy with I’ve found both the time and ambition to finish building an update to Place Name Here. Not quite sure what version of the site this is, but 6 seemed like a good number when I started.

Like with all previous versions of the site the new layout is fairly simple, and doesn’t use a lot of images or tricks to play things up. This site always proves to be difficult to rebuild in a uniform way because of the patchwork of different side projects, and technical demos that have been posted since the site first launched in late 1998. The new design and slightly rearranged navigation will hopefully help give a better perspective of what is hiding on the site.

Because I’ve been so quiet around these parts lately here’s a big ole list of links for the web builder in you!

• Microsoft IE7 RC1 is out
• On CSS changes in IE7
• WebKit Update News talks of recent changes including ”[m]uch improved support for HTML editing”.
• John Allsopp Explains the magic of microformats at Vitamin
• Technorati wants a professional front end person
• Ma.gnolia updates their APIs, and adds support for the del.icio.us API. I can only assume someone is madly working on Flock integration as a result.