Mark DuBois Weblog

I have been meaning to write this post for some time. Just too many things going on as summer draws to a close. At one point, I was considering purchasing an iPad. However, I realized that it doesn’t support Flash Player. That got me thinking – just how important is it for me to have access to Flash Player? I decided to conduct a day of observation. I chose yesterday to track all the sites I visited in the course of doing my job (professor at a community college). I recorded the URL (so each site would only count once if I visited it multiple times during the day). I also recorded whether Flash Player was needed to experience the content of the site. These are simply my observations for one day of my browsing habits. As a professor I am always looking at a variety of sites (since I teach web technologies). I had a fair number of meetings yesterday so I probably did not visit as large a number of sites as I typically would. The results are shown below for the 29 sites I visited during the day.

Personally, I was rather surprised at the results. The darker green slice (above) means that Flash Player was required to experience all the content of the site.  A full 69% of the all sites I visited yesterday required Flash Player to fully experience the site. Some would have been incredibly difficult to navigate without Flash Player (for example, Total Training). Others have alternatives to using Flash Player (such as Lynda.com), but I would have had to change my established player preferences at that site (which I chose not to do).

The bottom line (based on my single day of observation) is that today (August, 2010), I need Flash Player to effectively do my job (and fully experience the sites I visit on a daily basis). Unless a device supports Flash Player, it is highly unlikely that I will consider a purchase as I will be restricting my ability to get my job accomplished. I encourage others to make a similar observation for a day. Perhaps we can compare notes as to whether my observations are skewed or average for a typical professor.

A number of photos have been posted online from the AEL Summer Institute. Here are some of those.

These photos should convey some of the sessions I experienced during the AEL 2010 Summer Institute in San Jose. I had a great time and learned a lot.

As the AEL 2010 Summer Institute was coming to a close, we spent some time at the Technology Museum in San Jose. Most of us spent a fair amount of time riding Segway’s around an obstacle course. Yes, I did the entire course backwards at one point. I think there was a 2 drink minimum before we could ride those devices *grin*. We all had a great deal of fun.

These are some of the sights around downtown San Jose. I was there while participating in the Adobe Education Leader Summer Institute. Hope you enjoy these. I places some brief descriptions at flickr and encourage you to view this set as a slideshow.

As I think about the national web design contest WOW is sponsoring next week in Kansas City, Missouri and have been reviewing some tutorials on Lynda.com, I decided this might be an appropriate time to post some ideas concerning the structure of CSS files (to make them easier to maintain). When we develop CSS files for use on web sites, it is important they be easy to maintain. At a minimum, it is a good idea to include some structure and consistency within the file. For example, we might want to make certain all the properties are listed on separate lines and that the opening and closing curly braces are on separate lines (as below). We might also want to alphabetize the properties to make them easier to find in any selector (simple example below).

body
{

background-color: #ffc;
font: arial, tahoma, sans serif;
}

However, one can do a lot more in the overall structure of the CSS file. For example, assuming the CSS may contain special characters, one should consider it a best practice to include a character set declaration at the beginning of the CSS file.

@charset “UTF-8″;

This must occur before any comments or other information in the file. More details can be found at the W3C site.

One should then have copyright (possibly creator) and version information to identify the CSS file. There should also be some sort of table of contents (especially as the file grows in size to hundreds of lines). To expedite searching for information, one might preface each entry with a unique character string which will not directly be used anywhere else in the document (for example, a tilde).

So, a template CSS stylesheet should have the  following characteristics;

@charset “UTF-8″;
/*
copyright 2010. Mark DuBois. Some rights reserved.
version 1.0
modified:
date:
changes:

Table of contents (to jump to a specific part of this document, just search for the unique characters at the start of each line).

~1 Color guide
~2 Reset values
~3 Global constants (identifiers)
~4 Global classes
~5 Home page (items unique to the home page)
~6 Other pages throughout site
~7 Sidebar
~8 Footer
*/

Within the CSS, one would then place specific comments so the individual sections can be easily located, for example:

/* ~1 Color guide
#ffc – light yellow – used for background
*/

Obvously, your mileage will vary with a specific site. It is not as important to have a specific section (such as footer) as it is to be consistent throughout the sites you create. This should vastly improve maintenance of the sites. I recall a quote from an individual at Howest University (Belgium) during a webinar I recently attended – “develop your code as if it will be maintained by a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” While most of us will likely never have this specific problem, it is always a good idea to make your code as maintainable as possible. As a minimum, following the above suggestions should make it much easier to locate specific items.

I know tools like Dreamweaver CS5 make it much easier to work with CSS, but even with those tools, well structured and well documented  CSS should be encouraged. Your comments are most appreciated (due to the vast number of spam attempts, I have to moderate all comments – sad, but this is the world we inhabit). If you post a legitimate comment or insight I will approve it (regardless whether you agree with these thoughts above or not)?

Here are a few photos from the Illinois, WOW/ SkillsUSA web design contest. Thanks again to Lynda.com for the prizes. The winners were thrilled. Thanks again to Jonathan Worent and Shari Tripp for their help with this contest.