Table-less and Div-less too!
Yes, this is seriously, no joke. A guy named P.J. Onori one day decided to think outside of the box, and came up with this wild idea to create a web site without using tables, and not using any divs either! 
"Thats crazy" you say? Well look here.
According to P.J. using the ul and dl elements interchangeably as the primary element for a page's structure is really not much less reliable than using a div. And in fact, for backwards compatibility, is even better. As regards forwards compatibility, it doesn't choke the W3C validator either.
Here's some of the method behind his madness, in his own words:
The reason why the DIV degrades nicely with older browsers is that older browsers do not know what it is and it is therefore omitted. Thus, the DIV, while causing no negative effects to the structure of a website, is providing no positive effects either. XHTML list elements provide a natural hierarchy for all layouts, with or without CSS.
Continue reading Comments (0) Apr 10, 2008
SWFObject
SWFObject is the new (and probably best) way of inserting flash movies. Not only does it include a built-in mechanism to detect if the client has support for flash, but it is also the most efficient way to get around IE's Click to activate and use this control crap.
It was created by Geoff Stearns, and honestly, I think no one can explain what SWFObject is better than him. Here's a quote from his blog.
SWFObject is a small Javascript file used for embedding Adobe Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents*, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.
Some of you may be wondering, "Why should I care? What does SWFObject have thats better than using the good old <object> and <embed> tags?"
Continue reading Comments (1) Oct 15, 2007
Dissection of the anchor element
In everyday life, people probably click millions of anchors all around the internet. It's what connects web sites and web pages together. We often take this little HTML element for granted, but it's really in a way, the foundation of the entire world wide web.
And if your like me, you've been using the anchor; "<a>" element for as long as you can remember. And you've probably typed that little tag many countless times. And I'll bet, that you feel you've got a pretty good grasp of just how the <a> tag works.
But did you know that the <a> tag supports a type attribute? In addition to a rel, rev, hreflang, and charset attributes? What this means for us, is that there is more additional functionality here than first meets the eye.
Let us dissect the anchor tag, shall we? Here is the basic makeup of a anchor tag, in everyday use.
<a href="file.htm" target="_blank">new page</a>
In plain English, the above anchor tag, is given 1.) an href attribute with a value that will take us to the "file.htm" page and will 2.) open inside of a new window thanks to the target attribute value of "_blank".
Continue reading Comments (1) Aug 10, 2007
