Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Full-Day Seminar, 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Roadmap to Markup Success: Understanding Structure & Style
Eric A. Meyer, Complex Spiral Consulting & Molly E. Holzschlag, Molly.com
Do you want to know how web technologies affect content creation and management? Do you want to know how to create consistent user interfaces across browsers and platforms? Do you want to know how XML is improving the best practices of web design? This session is ideal for anyone involved in the creation of web pages or the content in them and wants to know the technical and conceptual issues surrounding web technologies.
SGML, HTML, XML, XHTML, CSS. These choices make it very confusing to decide how best to implement web sites. Top that off with the problems caused by today's incompatibility between browsers and platforms, and you've got a real headache for anyone trying to build something that works everywhere for everyone. Headaches for developers who need to be aware of how they can streamline site creation and maintenance, for designers who need to know how they affect user interfaces and coding practices, and content creators need to know how they affect the display and management of content.
To help you work your way through this maze of code and content, we've asked two premier experts, Molly E. Holzschlag and Eric A. Meyer, to show you how structured markup and CSS can work for you and members of your web team.
Molly has been deemed one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women on the Web . There is little doubt that in the world of Web design and development, Molly is one of the most vibrant and influential people around, with over 20 Web development book titles to her credit, including, Cascading Style Sheets:The Designer's Edge.
Eric is an internationally-recognized expert on cascading style sheets (CSS) and HTML, one of the creators of W3C's CSS Test Suite, and the author of three books on the topic of CSS, including Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide and Eric Meyer on CSS.
In talking about how to work through the issues surrounding different markup alternatives, Molly told us this:
“Addressing cross-platform and cross browser concerns is huge because this has been the bane of the Web designer's existence for so long. Ironically, the ideas that are being expressed via current recommendations are old ideas, but we've not been able to implement them until very recently because of such poor browser support for CSS.”
When we asked Eric what excited him most about teaching this seminar, he told us:
“The fact that the same web content can be restyled, often in radically different ways, simply by changing the CSS is an exciting capability. This permits authors to stop worrying about how the document is written and concentrate on improving presentation to help users of all accessibility levels.”
“The power that lurks in CSS and how it might be used to artistic effect is limitless. Even after all this time, there are still ways to use CSS that nobody has though of or demonstrated. After six years, it's still capable of surprising even the most expert among us.”
Case Study: Deconstructing & Reconstructing Excite.com
This hands-on, interactive seminar has been a highlight with past User Interface Conference attendees. In just one day, Molly and Eric will take an existing web site (Excite.com) and deconstruct the site by removing the complex markup. They will then restructure the markup and rebuild the page using CSS. Attendees will come away from this exercise understanding the benefits of a transitional approach with minimal tables and CSS.
Molly and Eric have created an insightful seminar for anyone familiar with HTML, whether hand-coded or generated by tool, and somewhat familiar with CSS. They will get into deep technology, so you should prepare for discussions that are highly technical, but absolutely inseparable, from visual design.
You'll learn:
- How to understand structured markup and how browsers interpret it. This gives the developer the control, rather than the browser. You'll learn the proper structure and syntax of document markup.
- How XML has influenced HTML to give us XHTML. Eric and Molly will show you XML is improving markup practices.
- How to write HTML and XHTML more effectively. You will see how to effectively use the tools you like ? or the tools you're told to use in your organization.
- How to make better choices between methods of design based on demographics. You'll look at when you should choose between style sheets and tables for page layout for certain audiences. You'll also see how to gracefully degrade style sheets.
- How to use CSS in design. You will see how CSS can simplify your interface maintenance and authoring.
- How to use CSS with structured markup to create eye-catching effects and useful widgets.
When you're done, you'll have a complete appreciation for the respective roles of the different markup technologies. You'll also have immediate solutions to the many problems with cross-browser, cross platform design. Eric and Molly will focus on document structure and understanding how proper structure is a freeing force for the designer, not a limiting one.
This seminar is ideal for web designers, developers, and content creators who work with markup and style sheets. Whether you are using contemporary development tools such as Dreamweaver, GoLive, FrontPage or marking up documents by hand, if you're involved in the creation and presentation of Web pages, you should be at this seminar. Attendees should have at least intermediate HTML skills and some CSS skills to get the most out of this session.
UI10 Seminar Recommendations: If you're interested in Molly and Eric's full-day seminar, you may also want to attend Hagan Rivers' seminar on Deconstructing Web Applications.