Apparently price settings for telecom (broadband/mobile/land line) plans in Belgium are significantly higher than its neighbouring countries and our Belgian government has decided to do something about it.

I try to avoid posts about Belgian/Dutch subjects but this one is too big of a disgrace:

To increase competition between operators, our government has launched a site to compare different telecom offers (Dutch). I can only assume someone naively decided this is the cheapest way to get prices to drop without extra legislation and while one can doubt its effectiveness in case of (forbidden) price setting agreements between operators, it must have cost (or still costs) huge amounts of time to get up-to-date data in their application.

If you now doubt this is something a government should occupy itself with, you’re not alone.

But it gets even worse. As you may have guessed looking at the site, the underlying code is terrible. This is even more sad because, while very basic and a bit outdated, there are guidelines for creating sites from the government (Dutch).

With less work and more talented people, they could have built an application that could at least be user friendly (as an example: if you submit without some required field, everything you entered is reset) and it could have been an attempt to justify the budget spent.

Maybe it is best they just fire the one responsible for this decision. No motivation needed.

When creating an application, developers and designers tend to invest to little time in a proper semantic (X)HTML structure.

The layout of your project probably won’t benefit from this and while SEO will, what makes it so important is that it simplifies your work  (or someone else’s in your team).

A good example is the use of <thead> and <tbody> tags inside tables. You can easily apply a different visual style to a table header without adding a class to the first row (thead tr {background-color: #ccc;}).

Another one is the use of <button type=”submit”> tags over <input type=”submit”>. When applying CSS styles, you will be able to style buttons separate of input fields. Can you see the advantage?

With the launch of a new JavaScript XHTML WYSIWYG editor, Xinha, a quick overview of the competition.

Popular rich-text editors that support XHTML are:

• TinyMCE: one of the first and still very popular. Has almost every feature you can imagine (including resizing of images). Used by Wordpress and many other CMS’s. Liberal license.
• XStandard: despite the nice features, their licensing is a major issue. You pay per user and I assume for most that isn’t an option. It explains why their customers are large enterprises. The Lite version misses a lot of useful features you probably can’t do without.
• FCKeditor: probably the most popular but in my opinion, FCK lacks usability (some options aren’t as user friendly as they could be, e.g. creating tables). Also a liberal license.
• KTML: shined where TinyMCE and FCK disappointed, but sadly enough, Adobe decided to discontinue KTML. XHTML support was troublesome though.

The built-in ExtJs HTML editor is really promising, but it currently does not generate XHTML. However: it at least looks as clean and usable as an online editor should be: with just a few more features it will be unbeatable.

Unless I’m steadily becoming blind, there still isn’t a really awesome solution for online rich text editing. And I’m sure it is not a case of little demand…

As I went through the CSS related books I ordered first, here’s another one: The Art and Science of CSS.

Since this is the first book I ever ordered published by the famous Australian web design/development community I must admit I didn’t expect it to be of the same “level” as an O’Reilly book for instance. But that didn’t turn out to be an issue at all. On the contrary: given the books structure I don’t think they could have done a better job explaining the different subjects they picked.

While the structure is in some way similar to Bulletproof Web Design, this book describes a few different common scenario’s you’ll come across. Although they are not similar to the former, I find them better explained. Where Bulletproof Web Design is suited for a broader audience, this one touches the limits of CSS support in the current browser versions (pre-IE 8).

One section that I found particularly useful was the one about Forms. It basically tells you how to fine-tune to the default Zend_Form set-up many people have been struggling with.

My opinion

I think people new to markup – layout separation, should read one of the other SitePoint books first. After that, The Art and Science of CSS is one you should keep on your desk when crafting XHTML & CSS pages.

I recently bought 7 books on Amazon and I will try to write a review of each as I read them. Note: this could take some time because of my workload.

The first one is Bulletproof Web Design by (the famous) Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits.

“The book contains several guidelines to help prepare compelling designs for worst-case scenarios, increasing user control and readability for varying text sizes and amounts of content.”

It explains clearly (as clear as a book can ever get) what best practices are for some common web design scenario’s. It is not a bible nor a reference: it roughly takes 10 common problems you may have experienced (or will someday) and tells you how do to this in a bulletproof way. Personally, I could also see benefits in taking one “project” (website) and applying all best practices to that one subject (for continuity), but the author chose to do this with separate examples. I guess the book benefits from that by the very low prerequisite knowledge you need to read it.

My main intention when buying this book was to verify if my xHTML & CSS knowledge was up to date by comparing it to Dan’s preachings. You can argue that this book isn’t the most appropriate since it was published in 2005 (although this is the second version, published in 2007) with techniques that could be outdated. I hardly believe this is an issue though. For example: a layout made with web standards for IE7, FireFox 2 and Safari 2 should not break on IE8, FireFox 3 or Chrome (note the “should” of course).

My opinion

A must read for anyone writing (x)HTML & CSS. I guarantee you will learn at least 5 important best practices or improve your knowledge of them which makes it worth every penny.
Most certainly if you ever wondered how to get those floating containers to do exactly what you want on every browser!