Ok, so maybe that title was a bit of a hyperbole, but this is one of my biggest pet peeves on the Web right now. Joshua Schachter has a comprehensive analysis of the concept of Short URLs and the myriad problems associated with it, but the biggest one for me is the fact that the true URL is… [more]
All posts in Standards and Best Practices
Using “click here” as anchor text is considered a bad practice because it doesn’t tell the user what the link will direct them to by itself, without users having to read the surrounding text; because “clicking” is irrelevant in many situations (assistive devices, smartphones, etc); and because it is meaningless to search engines indexing the page.
D Bnonn Tennant makes a good case for using larger font sizes , although I would probably vote for 14 pixels instead of 16. And of course it should be set in em’s instead of pixels.
WebMonkey has a good article explaining why hash-bang URLS are a bad idea . If you’re not familiar with them, they have #! symbols at the beginning of the path, e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/username. They rely entirely on JavaScript to parse and therefore make the site inaccessible to browsers without JavaScript (or those with it turned off by the user), assistive technologies that people with disabilities use, and… [more]
Nikolay Bachiyski gave a good talk at this year’s WordCamp San Francisco about unit testing WordPress plugins . His method uses PHPUnit , which is an additional PEAR package you have to install on the server. You can then use MockPress to simulate WordPress in the tests. Another option is the SimpleTest for WordPress plugin , which uses SimpleTest instead of PHPUnit, doesn’t require installing a PEAR… [more]
“The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles… If we want to track what government is doing, see what companies are doing, understand the true state of the planet, find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, not to mention easily share our photos with our friends, we the public, the… [more]
When writing a WordPress plugin it’s considered a best practice to only include JavaScript/CSS/etc files on the specific pages that need them, rather than on every page load. This speeds up page load by reducing the number of HTTP transactions and also minimizes the risk of unnecessary conflicts between other files. There are two popular… [more]
Bob Yexley turned me on to passphrases a few years ago when he linked to what became a seminal article on the topic by Robert Hensing. The argument is that passphrases (e.g., the future is unwritten) are both more secure and easier to remember than what are traditionally considered strong passwords (e.g., m?6t2E#A). The main source of their strength is that they’re much longer than… [more]
I’m thinking I should create a, ‘Duh, why didn’t I think of that?’ category for this. Instead of using conditional stylesheets or CSS hacks to fix Internet Explorer’s obnoxious lack of support for standards, you can conditionally set a class on the html or body tag and target that in your normal stylesheet. This is better for several reasons, including faster page load times and… [more]
