I Can Has Web

Aside from my studies and part-time job, I’m partaking in the activities of Cybernetisk Selskab [no], a student driven association working to improve the social environment at the Department of Informatics. As a member of the board, I’m frequently involved in the different activities arranged, and one of them is the CybWebDev.

Currently we’re focused on Aurora, the codename for a system which aims to be an array of tools supporting the organizational work in CYB. This, we believe, will be especially important when Escape opens, the student driven pub that will open along with the opening of Ole Johan Dahls Hus [no], the newest addition of buildings at the University of Oslo, which will be the base of most of the educational, academic and social activities concerning the students of computer science.

In doing the preparations for this development, we’ve discussed some principles/guidelines that we wish to follow when designing/coding, and I thought I would share them with you here.

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CSS is powerful in its own rights, but when it comes to large, complex websites filled with elements that doesn’t necessarily share styles easily, the styling quickly becomes messy and hard to navigate. Conventions, frameworks and guidelines help structure the code, and tools such as Firebug helps the process. But my eyes still get soar when scanning through code-snippets such as:

#header { ... }
#header .menu { ... }
#header .menu ul { ... }
#header .menu ul li { ... }
#header .login { ... }
#header .login ul { ... }

I like my html to be semantically good structured (or as good as it can get when keeping certain obstacles in mind *cough*IE6*snirk*). That means not overloading it with classes that doesn’t add meaning (such as clearfix, which I use in all of my projects). CSS doesn’t have a good way of reusing this code within the stylesheet, and this is a shame.

And then there’s the classic need for variables. When trying out different color-schemes in a design, it’s a pain if you have to update a color-code multiple places in the stylesheet. Even more fun if they’re scattered throughout the document. And what if you the color-scheme to front different colors, each related to a base-color?

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So it has started, my new blog. I’m not a productive writer per ce, but I hope to gain some momentum to my motivation with this blog.

I will blog about design for the web, with focus on front end, such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS. But I think I’ll also write about the layers below, since I’m currently a student at IFI, UiO. During my years as a student and part-time system developer, in addition to my general interest in aspects that drive production and consumtion on the Internet, I’ve written in languages such as PHP (my first love), Java, C, Assembly (never again!), C# and Python (my lastest endeavor).

I will base my writing on my experiences as a student, a system developer at SPS (whose pages are being ported atm), and as an eager participant in CYB. In addition, I’m a big fan of the work presented at A List Apart, adactio, Signal vs. Noise, Snook.ca and HTML5Rocks Tutorials, so I’ll probably gain influence through their words. For the norwegian readers out there, I also enjoy reading the words of NRK Beta, Logica UX and Kjøkkenfesten.

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Er det jeg som har misforstått Ikke interessert-funksjonen i Google Reader? Etterhvert som norske bloggosfæren fylles opp med rosabloggere, så virker det som om GR tenker at dette må være interessant for meg (WHY WHY WHY??? Jeg har da ingen abonnementer på lignende blogger i det hele tatt!). Håpet var jo da at Ikke interessert-funksjonen skulle være nyttig her, men neida… får fortsatt samme dritten.

Google, read my words: Make – the – frakkin’ – Not Interested-function – WORK!!!

(beklager på forhånd min bruk av engelske og norske uttrykk om hverandre ^\_^)

Eksamenstid fordrer en del prokrastinering, og for min del går det i å lese seg opp på html5. Jeg holdt en presentasjon om html5 og css3 på jobben forleden, og spørsmål kom som jeg ikke kunne svare på der og da. Det ga mersmak i min søken etter å lære seg standarden, og hvordan den blir implementert av de forskjellige nettleserne.

Jeg kom da over en ganske artikkel på Ajaxian, som jeg tenkte var verdt å anbefale, A second look at the “webbyness” of an “installable” Web App.

Kort og godt går artikkelen ut på hvordan man tenker seg offline-versjoner av online web apps, og mer nøyaktig transaksjonen mellom dem. Med HTML5 har man fått utvidet støtte for minnehåndtering i nettleseren, og 2 av dem er ment for offline bruk. Jeg anbefaler å lese artikkelen, da den i seg selv gir mersmak på diskusjonen, i tillegg til å henvise leseren videre til fora hvor diskusjonen tar sted.