Blog
Jens Meiert (Google, W3C, O’Reilly) on professional web design, web development, accessibility, and usability. Researching and describing what makes the perfect website since 1999.
Compared to What?
… is probably one of the most important questions there is. “Compared to what?” is the question that should be answered everytime it is about data, be it presented in graphs, in newspapers, on websites, or when just talked about. Yet it is rarely answered, rarely asked, …
Me on Swiss TV
For those curious about me supporting Germany during the EURO 2008, there is a short interview available that Blick.ch recorded at Seebad Enge during halftime of the finals against Spain (and after Fernando Torres scored the only goal). Even though I cannot point directly to the video …
10 Measures for Continuous Website Maintenance
Website maintenance and quality assurance mean the backbone of high quality offers of information, and they represent the difference between an amateurish or professional approach to web design and development. Consequently, guidelines for quality web design define maintenance …
When Validation Becomes Unimportant
Validation becomes unimportant once you’re ahead of the game, and not a second earlier. Even then, truly mastering HTML and CSS, it will usually be best to stick with valid markup and styling, but fighting latency might then mean a by all means legitimate reason to stretch a little bit …
Thoughts on Email
Email was, is, and will stay the web’s true killer application, but spam, top-posting, incompetent use of newsletters, and the HTML email problem mean serious challenges. I can’t but get rid of …
Web Design: 10 Additional Research Findings You Should Know
Following up on last year’s post on web design research, here’s a new collection of research results, this time featuring further reading as well. It happens that I still watch the work of Association for Computing Machinery, Human Factors International, and the like …
Optional Tags in HTML 4
For convenience and in order to allow for additional bits or bytes being saved in your markup, here’s a list of all optional tags according to the HTML 4.01 Strict DTD. Finally …
Über-Semantics
Premasagar recently published a great demonstration of what can be considered “über-semantic” code, thanks to the microformats community’s approach to never rely on the semantics of HTML elements but instead use non-defused classes for everything …
Tip: vi Config Modification
Long story short and assuming this is not too well-known: You can easily modify vi editor’s apparent standard configuration, and the most useful changes probably affect UTF-8 encoding and display of line numbers. In order to do that, simply …
Less Is Still More
How much time and money gets spent on making things worse is something I find absolutely fascinating. Allow me to elaborate, starting with HTML newsletters: People (let) spend hours on writing supposed content, create and decorate mockups, work around ridiculous email client implementations, …
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