Hollidazed

As I mentioned last week in my ‘year of the web book’ post I’ve just finished reading ‘HTML Mastery – Semantics, Standards, and Styling’ by Paul Haine.

The book is both a good read and gives a good indepth overview of HTML (including XHTML and XML) as well as having a really good emphasis on semantics including a useful section on Microformats.

The individual chapters on both tables and forms in HTML were worth buying the book for alone and although aspects of these chapters are covered in other books I’ve read, like ‘CSS Mastery’ by Andy Budd, this book definitely gives the most comprehensive overview.

Like the other Friends of Ed books, HTML Mastery seems to be written with designers rather than developers in mind and therefore sits really well alongside the previously mentioned ‘CSS Mastery’ and also DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. Combined together these books give a great overview of the skills needed when working in standards based web design (CSS, DOM Scripting/Javascript, and (X)HTML).

These are only festive because I’ve just come across them but over the last week two great additions for Firefox have come to my attention.

First up is FireBug which I think has been around for a while now but came to my attention again when reading an article on Dave Shea’s Mezzablue site. I’ve now been test driving this for a week and it’s great for a whole range of things including CSS and Javascript debugging, editing HTML as well as useful stuff like monitoring network activity. I can see this becoming an essential tool in my web design work alongside the web developers toolbar.

I spotted the second extension yesterday on de.icio.us and I think it might be the Microformats extension I’ve been waiting for. Previously I’ve been using the Tails extension but this new extension called Operator is a Microformat detection extension that offers a more user friendly interface for discovering and exporting Microformats.

Hopefully this extension will be the tool that helps end users to start enjoying the benefits of the many Microformats that many developers have been incorporating into sites over the last year or so.

Last friday I attended d.construct 2006 at the Corn Exchange in Brighton. It was a really good conference and answered many of my questions about API‘s as well as addressing the usefulness of the various services to designers/developers working in real business situations.

Without wanting to review everything that happened in fine detail my highlights of the day were the Jeremy Keith and Jeff Veen sessions:

Jeremy Keith’s – The Joy of API – simply looked at having fun with web services and what is actually possible. This was the most inspiring talk of the day and he also taked about Microformats with great enthusiasm – something I’ve already begun to implement on the sites I work on. I agree that it’s a real benefit to open your data up as much as possible using Microformats. Unfortunately I didn’t make the Microformats picnic though as the call of the Gormet Burger Kitchen was too hard to resist.

My other highlight of the day, Jeff Veen’s session about designing the complete user experience, really helped put everything else into context and looked at making sure that we still focus on user-centred design when working with API’s and creating mashups. This session is especially worth downloading when the the podcasts of the event are released.

Overall the event was really well run and everyone I spoke to was really friendly – Brighton was even really lovely and sunny, something that never happened during the entire month of August. If your a web designer or developer and havn’t been to d.construct yet I’d definetly recomend going next year simply because of value for money for the quality of presentation.

Finally there’s also a really good podcast largely focused this week on reviewing d.construct and interviewing some of the key speakers (especially covering Microformats) by Paul Boag on the excellent Boagworld podcast.