Clicks & Notes

456 Berea Street - The perils of using XHTML properly

• serving XHTML using the application/xhtml+xml MIME type leads to complications that don’t occur when you serve it as text/html
• (via Mezzoblue)

A List Apart - Pocket-Sized Design: Taking Your Website to the Small Screen

• creating a stylesheet for page display on handheld devices; includes a few tweaks specific to the Opera web browser

Builder.com - Use presentation layer table sorting to achieve a better user experience

• can be done via client-side, server-side, or combination client- and server-side implementations

Drunk Monkey - Print out HREFs on Links for Print StyleSheet

• code using DOM works cross-browser and is more flexible than a plain CSS solution
• (via paranoidfish)

Left Justified - CSS Negotiation and a Sanity Saving Shortcut

• dealing with cross-browser differences in handling padding and margin, among other things
• (via Asterisk)

SEO Chat - Internal Linking: Thinking Inside The Box

The number of inbound links from external websites only counts for part of a site’s search engine ranking; search engines also examine a site’s internal links. Consider:

• the site map – a well designed, clearly labelled site map, with related pages/directories grouped into themes, is not only helpful for human readers – search engine spiders will examine it too
• menus – although most spiders can and will crawl Flash links, HTML links are better (presumably the same applies to JavaScript links?)
• footer links – keyword-rich anchor links can boost rankings, especially for the ‘Home’ and ‘About Us’ pages – include the company name in the link text
• link text – wording should alway reflect the theme of the receiving page (again, a basic uability principle for human readers as well)

(via InformIT)

New Thinking by Gerry McGovern - Web content management: Top 10 predictions for 2005:

7. - As the attention span shortens, so too will content. It will become more and more difficult to get anyone to read anything over 500 words.

8. - As the need to get people to the right content as quickly as possible increases, the importance of writing quality metadata will grow.

(via InfoDesign)

Robin Good’s Latest News - A CMS For The Web-Enabled Organization: Marqui CMS Review - Part I Requirements:

A part of his review of the Marqui CMS, Robin Good has compiled a series of requirements checklists for selecting a content management system. Aspects covered include the following:

Content Management Requirements:

• Usability – “The system should not require the study of extensive documentation to understand how to perform basic operations like: creating new content, creating new categories for content, adding images and links, adding new contributors and external authors, validating content awaiting approval for final publication, etc.”
• Version control & archiving
• Workflow
• Security
• Integration with external systems
• Reporting

Publishing Requirements:

• Style sheets
• Page templates
• Extensibility – “The CMS should provide enough flexibility and easy-of-use as to make it extremely simple to integrate code “snippets” to provide additional publishing functionalities.”
• Support for multiple formats – including HTML (Web), PDF, RSS, XML, and text
• Personalization – “The CMS should provide the ability to customize the type of information presented to different types of users based on user profiles, roles and access rights or even based on specific metadata in the source content.”
• Usage statistics

Accessibility Requirements:

• Accessibility – “should be able to conform to one or more accessibility standards such as the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)”
• Cross browser support
• Support for client-side functionality
• Speed
• Valid HTML
• Effective navigation
• Metadata – “should conform to a standard such as Dublin Core”
• Support for multiple languages

Business Requirements:

• Training
• Documentation
• Warranty
• Maintenance agreements
• Resources required – any pre-existing hardware or software that the CMS must interface with, or run on, including specific operating systems, databases, web servers
• Skills required to customize and maintain the system.
• Scalability
• Reference sites – a portfolio of successful implementations where the CMS software has been effectively implemented