Davin's blog

Tag: HTML

  • The problem with the line break (BR) tag

    We’ve got the <br /> tag all wrong. It’s time to make it right. We all know the <br /> tag is used to insert a line break in HTML. But what we’ve been missing is that we were too often after something else. Let me explain. Common reasons to use line breaks Why would…

  • Google Analytics for WordPress (version 4.09) trips HTML validation when tracking outbound links

    When I write HTML, running code through the W3C Validator is part of my process. If the code doesn’t pass the validator, there’s a slim chance I’ll consider that code ready for anything. So after I upgraded this blog to WordPress 3.01’s Twenty Ten theme, I was mildly irritated to find that I had a…

  • Newsweek’s Spring 2010 Website Redesign

    I don’t know when it happened, exactly, but Newseek.com was recently redesigned. There is so much to say about it, and it is mostly good. I’ll start with the most obvious: the design. In short, the home page is easy to scan. There is a clear visual hierarchy. The lead photos and articles have been…

  • Marking up breadcrumb navigation

    Breadcrumb navigation is a secondary navigation system that usually represents a site visitor’s current position in the site, showing other pages above the current one in the site’s hierarchy. In some sites, like those built with Dokuwiki, breadcrumbs actually show the history of the user’s session instead of the hierarchy of the user’s current position…

  • HTML form fields that, when not selected, do not even send a field name upon submit

    Checkboxes and radio buttons that have not been checked and multiple select lists that have no selection submit nothing upon submission of the form. It’s as though they aren’t even there. At first, this may seem obvious (Well, yeah, you didn’t select them, dummy!), except that it runs counter to every other form field. If…

  • Clean XHTML of shooting ranges data

    My goal is to upload a comprehensive list of shooting ranges to Google Maps (see prior posting). So, to accomplish this, here are the steps I’ve thought of.

  • We need a “credit” attribute in XHTML

    The XHTML 2.0 draft document by the W3C includes some promising attributes for elements. For instance, a navigation list could have a role with a value of sitemap. I.e.: <nl role=”sitemap”> That’s cool. Think on that a bit, o ye of semantic persuasion. The potential benefits of this type of specificity in standard markup is…

  • Diagram of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript as types of code in a web page

    I’m thinking of using this diagram in an XHTML class I may be teaching in a couple weeks. The idea is to put XHTML, CSS, and Javascript in context with each other—yet to also illustrate that they are separate types of code and often are actually different files altogether.

  • Semantic vs. valid markup

    Scott Pennington of Matrix at Michigan State University emailed an interesting link to me. The SimpleBits blog has a post and discussion of semantic markup of a page heading. A fairly elementary quiz starts it off, but the range of perspectives in the discussion starts to show the complexity of semantic markup. On the one…

  • Visual description of an HTML element

    Click on the words above to see the differences between an element, element content, attribute name, attribute value, start tag, and end tag. This is the first version of this “diagram,” so bear with me. Let me know if you have any feedback on it.