Rikcat Industries

There is a great debate going on over at 37 Signal’s Signals vs. Noise blog. They flat out say designers should code their own HTML/CSS. I agree for the most part, but there are exceptions to everything.

I work for a very large company and it would be impractical for the visual designers to code all their work. At some point it makes sense to hand the coding responsibility off. I do think their needs to be a close relationship between the designer and the person who is doing the coding. Also the designer should get code approval. …

Email Standards

On the heels of my posts about email client standards in early October, Email Standards Project has launched with a website that features a list of email clients and the support for the Email Standards Project Acid Test. This project is being led by Freshview, makers of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. It’s great to see this getting off the ground and I hope it gains some traction. …

There have been a lot of XHTML/CSS services that have popped up recently. Seems like anyone with a text editor and a copy of Web Standards Solutions is setting up shop. I’ve seen a range of prices from $150-$300 per page, but I’m sure in this case the old adage is true: you get what you pay for. …

Currently, there are no standards for HTML e-mail and coding HTML e-mail involves reverting to the coding practices from 1999. Tables are a must for structure and this is limited CSS support for most email clients. There are so many different e-mail clients and testing for all of them is a nightmare.

Recently, there was a post on the Campaign Monitor blog about the need for standards in HTML e-mail. Having toiled with HTML e-mail for years, it would be a huge step forward if e-mail clients would render HTML to some standard. Even if it isn’t the exact standard that is used for web browsers, anything would be better than the current state of HTML e-mail. …

Interesting debate going on over at Jeffrey Zeldman’s site about the state of web standards. Just last week Jeffrey was profiled in an article in BusinessWeek with the title “Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards. It’s a great article showing the grassroots effort he co-founded to get the browser companies to follow the W3C’s standards.

As for a crisis in web standards, there is none. Yes, there hasn’t been a ton of movement on CSS 3 …

I exclusively use the Mac OS for all my development, with occasional forays into Windows via Parallels for checking in Internet Explorer 6 & 7. Some people like Dreamweaver’s integrated approach with FTP and editor in one, but I’ve always felt that Dreamweaver was a huge resource hog. I prefer using a couple of tools that are best in breed rather then the Swiss army knife approach. …

From time to time people ask me how I learned how to hand code HTML and CSS. I learned by reading a bunch of books and from lots of trial an error. Below are a list of books I recommend for someone who wants to start hand coding HTML and CSS. If I was just starting I would start with the HTML Dog book. If I had some coding experience and just wanted to learn proper use of CSS I would pickup the Dan Cederholm books Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. …