An Event Apart Responsible Web Design

Responsible Web Design:

• Staying current with standards and best practices
  
• Consistent display and behavior across browsers
  
• Custting-edge technology used ina degradable manner
  
• Constantly revisiting individual and group work flows.

The Purist's View:

• XHTML - Content/Data Layer
  
• CSS - Design Layer
  
• JavaScript - Behavior Layer

XHTML - Content Layer:

• Good semantics - solid foundation
  
• POSH - plain old semantic HTML
  
• No presentation or behavioral markup
  
• No bed adn breakfast markup (paragraph or break tages inserted to add extra white space)
  
• Always validate

Thinking Semantically

• difficult for people who "grew up" with everything together
  
• selectors used to precisely target content
  
• name elements for purpose, not for appearance 
  
• layout-specific markup can't always be avoided (example - div tag)

http://microformats.org - simple open data formats that identify types of information built on existing standards.

CSS - Presentation Layer

• Bad form: rules placed inline
  
• Not as bad form: styles in the document head
  
• Best form: styles in external files

Name for a style's INTENT, not it's VISUAL REPRESENTATION

Separate CSS rules by category: positional/layout rules; topographic rules; browser hacks

JavaScript - Behavior layer
Behavioral markup is now unnecessary - you can achieve true separation
Not so good form: functions placed inline
Best form: JS in external files, linked in by selectors
Progressive enhancement: increase page functionality as browser permits
Build solid baseline experience first, enhance it second.