Archive for the 'nerdclass' Category

Cyberduck is a free FTP (file transfer protocol) client for use on your mac. Not as easy to use as transmit or as venerable as fetch, but usually gets the job done.

A porting of Robert Bringhurst's indispensable reference and guide to typography for use with CSS and (X)HTML. Sporadically updated, but worth reading.

Useful tool integrating onscreen rulers and measurement with Firefox.

Comprehensive addition to Firefox which allows for troubeshooting, CSS writing, and information gathering all within your browser.

Web development can theoretically be done with TextEdit on a Mac or Notepad in Windows, but it's sometimes easier when you're using a text editor built specifically with code/markup in mind. Textwrangler is such an editor, and is free to download.

HTML, like every other markup language and programming language that I know of, uses common keyboard characters as part of its spec. Those characters need to be "escaped." Also there's a wider range of characters available than are just on your keyboard.

The best single resource online for finding usable legacy browsers, including standalone versions of Internet Explorer, which usually overwrites older versions upon installation.

A good overview of ways to make your site more accessible to a larger number of people. It's worth noting that many of these methods are also just basically good practice as far as building well-formed sites goes, and that makes search engines happy.

A longstanding website devoted to tracking the various quirks and workarounds of the different browsers w/r/t their implementations of CSS rendering. Always a good place to start if your layout looks screwed. Origin of the Hollyhack.

Comprehensive and easily navigable interface for the CSS2 spec. As such, it's somewhat outdated (CSS3 is beginning to be adopted by modern browsers), but contains the bulk of the CSS properties that you will end up using.

CSS allows for almost complete separation of content from presentation, a common ideal for web designers. It allows for greater flexibility and simplicity in development and accessibility. CSS is simple to write but syntactically distinct from HTML.

XHTML is an implementation of HTML using the XML spec. It is stricter in its syntax, more easily parsed by both software and people, and is in many ways easier to learn because of its strictness.

A level of abstraction above HTML, XML is a "specification for creating custom markup languages." XML's predecessor (SGML - Standard Generalized Markup Language) predates the WWW and provided some of the basis for HTML.

Another comprehensive article on the concept and implementations of hypertext, including Vannevar Bush's theoretical Memex, Ted Nelson's coining of the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" (at a conference at Vassar), historical wikis and Hypercard.

Comprehensive article on the history, syntax and varieties of HTML. Of particular interest is the "Hypertext features not in HTML" section.