February 20th, 2010
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Web Design, Web Development
(Accessibility, CSS, Rants)
We’ve all seen them, most of us have used them, almost every CSS framework is built on one and you instantly know one is present when you open Firebug and see a hundred levels of CSS inheritance declarations. Reset cascading style sheets (a.k.a. reset.css).
The idea of the reset style sheet is to globally target every markup element and set all of its possible attributes to zero, default or inherit. This gives the developer a “clean slate” with no browser default styles. Many say that this is the first thing you should add when you start building a web page, but I firmly disagree.
I’m sure that I am one of the small minority of web developers who’s saying this, but reset style sheets are bad practice, and it’s time to stop using them.
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January 24th, 2010
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Web Development
(Accessibility, AJAX, JavaScript, jQuery, Rants, SEO)
I’ve written tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript code and I love the language. I have used it on almost every site that I’ve worked on in the last 10 years. It makes web pages and web applications so much better in every way. That is, if it’s used correctly, in moderation.
However, for the last few years it feels like I’ve had to spend more time explaining why we should not use JavaScript than I do actually writing scripts. This is a trend that I’ve noticed more and more as the web matures. An ever increasing number people believe that JavaScript is the solution to everything. Many take this idea so far that they believe it’s okay to say that we don’t support users without JavaScript.
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