Comments on: Correcting the 20 pro tips (.NET magazine)

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 19:57:44 +0000

@Brian: The .NET article is aimed at beginners and got a lot of exposure on big CSS sites. Since I find it slightly annoying with errors when I’m learning myself I thought that it might help someone else too. The things pointed out are things that I consider are best practices and I’ve not seen much complaints in the comments (believe me, people notice those things here ;) so I think they agree.

On inline CSS: I know what they where originally thought for, that doesn’t change anything :)

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:53:27 +0000

Why call these corrections? Aren’t most of these opinions, or suggestions? I appreciate your suggestions, but that sounds a bit presumptuous.

Re: the use of inline CSS. There is a very good reason why the W3C developed CSS with inline capability. In Dynamic web development, there are times when an inline CSS definition can be used to override an existing definition in the CSS file. This would (technically) also separate content from presentation, as the presentation data would be stored as a variable in PHP or stored in a database as opposed to being written statically in the HTML file.

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 13:28:52 +0000

@Nick Shaw: Ah, misstake on my side, I guess we all do them. I removed that correction. Thanks.

By: Nick Shaw

Nick Shaw — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 13:31:33 +0000

Point 6 Use simple PHP to build sites the article is right. It states the file CALLING the includes should end .php which is correct. The example (html) is the file being included in .php file.

By: Rowan Lewis

Rowan Lewis — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 11:20:23 +0000

Johan, I find that The GIMP tends to compress PNG images a lot better than Photoshop.

I now use both Photoshop and The Gimp, simply because Photoshop makes a mess of PNGs. So instead of splicing up my designs in Photoshop, I save them as a bitmap then open it in The GIMP :)

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 03:27:12 +0000

@Johan: You might be right about the small images there. I tend not to use GIF anyways though since mixing formats on one site feels strange.

About alt text: if you add it on both places you might end up with a screen reader reading your description twice, something you want to avoid. Perhaps leaving the alt text empty would be better in that case.

By: Johan

Johan — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 20:48:52 +0000

“why repeat the alt text?”

could be intentional since not all browsers show the alt as a tooltip ??

By: Johan

Johan — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 20:46:35 +0000

“Good points about image formats. Use 8-bit PNGs instead of GIF, it makes you smaller files. ”

Not always, small gifs (eg 4K) can be smaller than saving it as png (eg 7K), when the images get larger in fliesize I never see a gif being smaller than a png in filesize. This could be a fault of Photoshop or even Fireworks to not compress enough the pngs (png-8) that is

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:39:27 +0000

It seems like you’ve made some really good points here — I’ve just started browsing around the .NET site since coming across the article and I’m intrigued… it’s too bad you can only snag it in the UK. I’ll have to stick with what they publish to the Web.

By: Emil Stenström

Emil Stenström — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 17:44:26 +0000

@zcorpan: Thanks for pointing out that margin is not included in IE5’s width, I updated the text to reflect that.

Also good points about Photoshops handling of PNGs. I use Fireworks myself (they use PNG as their default format) and have not experienced any problems with it’s PNGs. Worth a note though is that the internal PNGs should not be put on the web directly, use the export option.

@Nate: Thanks!

By: Nate

Nate — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:12:35 +0000

I would agree with your revised list, and many of those were things I was thinking while reading through the previous article. It seemed too shallow – yours seems more solidified (practically – like NOT using inline styles and the align attribute – goes against using CSS in the first place).

And, as you have said – NS4 and IE5 are dinosaurs, and so each site should check to see if they have any users from those browsers. The site I work for has NO users from NS4, at all, and a few IE5 (some are IE5 on Mac from me – which his no longer supported by Microsoft or Mac – so I have stopped supporting it as well).

Nice revisions!

By: zcorpan

zcorpan — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:50:51 +0000

8) The margin is not included in the width/height calculation in IE5's box model, only the padding and border are.11) Photoshop's PNGs aren't compressed to the format's full potential, and it labels them which causes the color problems in IE. However, you can run your PNGs (and GIFs) though PNGOUT which compresses the image losslessly, and fixes the color labeling problems in IE (although not the gamma correction problems in old Safari).