CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

I’ve talked about web career job titles in the past, and how confusing they can be. However, yesterday on Unmatchedstyle’s first monthly design panel podcast (vidcast?), Jason Beaird used a word to describe himself that I’d never heard before: designeloper.

I immediately liked it.

(I also liked the fact that he read a quote from my Cuddling With Cufon post. It made me all warm and sappy.)

I liked the title so much, with its jackalope-like nature, that I tweeted about it. Immediately Jin Yang fired back with the fact that Jason was wrong, and the proper term was devsigner.

As a skills-hybrid (granted, very developer-heavy and designer-light in my case) I like the idea of fun terms to help describe those of us that simultaneously try to comprehend typography use as well as learning the newest AJAX trick. So the question that remains is what term is best? Designeloper or devsigner?

Obviously the only way to know for sure is to put the terms in a cage match on a deserted isle where they’ll determine the fate of two dimensions in a tournament to the death. But since we don’t have that option, I’ve made a poll. Please consider taking the time to answer on it.

(Poll after the jump.)

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I’m currently at Web Directions North 2009. Unfortunately I’m writing this on my iPhone, so this will be short to prevent me from going insane. Here’s my thoughts so far:

1. RDFa – Yes, the syntax is complicated at first. But the next phase of the web is symantic, and microformats, though convenient, are only a stopgap issue, and RDFa will be a powerful way to express relationships for computers.

What really irks me is that HTML5 won’t support RDFa because Ian Hickson opposes them, and he functions as the sole gatekeeper to the standard. This annoys me on a number of levels: why is a web standard that will effect billions of future sites being controlled ulimately by one person; and why would someone seriously think the leading semantics format we have not be needed for a web that is clearly and rapidly heading towards a Semantic Web?

I’ll rant more on that in the future.

2. Accessibility – there’s a lot of things that I’ve been doing right for accessibility, but Derek Featherstone pointed out a lot of potential pitfalls with AJAX that I need to start payingca lot of attention to.

Ok, the writing on my phone is driving mad, so I’m going to sign off now. More later!

Although recently the trend seems to be more towards fixed widths or flexible percentage-based width layouts, from time to time I’m tasked with building a site with a liquid layout. Thanks to the demands of appropriately-ordered content and the challenges of having one column stay fixed in width while the other flexibly expands to fill the remaining space, these types of sites haven’t been the cleanest to make with CSS. One common technique that I’ve made a lot of use of was written in A List Apart called Creating Liquid Layouts with Negative Margins by Ryan Brill. It does the job, but it’s a semantic mess with a ton of divs.

I decided to try to find a method that pares down the div count, and makes the CSS a bit cleaner and more appropriate to the task. Lightning struck, and my mind put together a technique that feels like a decided improvement on accomplishing the desired task. I wrote about it over at Mindfly’s blog. Go check it out at Get Refreshed: Liquid Layouts with Simpler CSS and Without A Semantic Mess.

Today I followed an innocent little Twitter link from Jeremy Keith that led, unbeknown to me, into a virtual bloodbath. What was the battlefield? Get Satisfaction. And the cause that people were raising banners to? The password anti-pattern, and Get Satisfaction’s unwitting support thereof.

What is the password anti-pattern? In short, it’s the behavior of teaching people that it is safe to enter their password information from one website on a different website. In the modern digital world of phishing attacks and identity theft, it’s a very dangerous habit to help people form.

How dangerous? Well, how attached are you to your personal information?

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It’s trendy to brand a site redesign as 2.0 (or 3.0, 4.0, etc.), so much so that I don’t think I want to go down that path. But as of Monday, October 20, 2008, CSSquirrel is operating under a new redesign.

A major annoyance I had with the previous incarnation of the site was that it looked entirely too much like a Wordpress-powered blog.

And yes, it is one. But it’s more than that. It’s become a sort of rallying point for my identity on the massive nest of tubes called the Internet, and I needed it to reflect more than a weekly blog entry about obscure CSS styles. As I’ve been absorbed into more and more social pieces of Web 2.0 (see, even the web can’t avoid that numbering system), I found myself having more and more of a challenge of directing people to various bits of me on the Internet.

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