WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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Ian Lloyd runs Accessify.com, a site dedicated to promoting web accessibility and providing tools for web developers. His personal site, Blog Standard Stuff, ironically, has nothing to do with standards for blogs (it’s a play on words), although an occasional standards-related gem can be found there. Ian works full-time for Nationwide Building Society, where he tries his hardest to influence standards-based design (“to varying degrees!”). He is a member of the Web Standards Project, contributing to the Accessibility Task Force. Web standards and accessibility aside, he enjoys writing about his trips abroad and recently took a “year out” from work and all things web (but then ended up writing more in his year off than he ever has). He finds most of his time being taken up by a demanding old lady (relax, it’s only his old Volkswagen camper van). Ian recently wrote his first book for SitePoint, entitled Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way Using HTML & CSS (in which he teaches web standards-based design to the complete beginner).
184 A printing technique is born Saving the planet? What’s that all about? Well, I’ll be getting to that in due course. First, I want to take you back in time. OK, so it’s only a month ago as I write this, but it’s the point at which I got the inspiration for what you’ll be reading in this chapter. I was sitting at my desk at work, busy with something or other, when my colleague said to me, “Is there any way that you can get a web page to print only one specific part?” “Oh yes,” I replied, “That’s easy—you can use print CSS styles to do that. Which part of the page do you want to print and which parts don’t you want to print?” “Well, that depends,” he replied, preparing to throw the proverbial curveball. “We’ve got this great big long page of interest rates, but depending on the account the person has, they’ll want a different section to be printed.” I mulled it over. I remembered that on some browsers it was possible to select a portion of a page and then print just that section, an option offered in the Print dialog box, but this was hardly ideal, as it required the user to know that option existed. Also, it’s not available on all browsers. For the über-techy types, it would be possible to use a Greasemonkey 1 script to print a given selection, but that would probably account for 0.001% of our intended audience at a push. What my colleague was after was something that the browser simply did not offer in any obvious format. So I told him, “Sorry, you can’t do that. I’m afraid that unless they know about highlighting a section and then choosing ‘print selection,’ it’s not possible.” Then I got back to whatever pixels I was pushing around the screen at the time. However, the idea refused to go away, nagging at the back of my mind. I personally hate it when you want to print one section of a page and end up printing seven sheets of nonsense, six of which immediately get tossed. Couldn’t there be a way of solving this problem and cutting down on wasted printouts? And then it came to me: a mixture of print CSS; some good, solid, and semantic markup; and some unobtrusive JavaScript might just achieve what he was after. So I got started on a proof of concept. The basic idea Knowing that it was possible to dynamically change the appearance of a web page as viewed on screen using the DOM, JavaScript, and CSS, I wondered whether the same theory could apply to print. There was nothing to suggest that this could not happen. I recalled reading Aaron Gustafson’s article in A List Apart (http://www. alistapart.com), where he demonstrated a method for displaying footnotes, and I knew that there was some scope for this kind of behavior. I just wasn’t sure just how “dynamic” this could be. The only one way to find out was to try it. So, I began with this idea: For any given page that has specific sections that might need to be printed in isolation, such as the interest rates page that prompted my investigation, use JavaScript to dynamically switch the display property off or on (that’s to say block or none), but only for the print view. The other aims for this technique included The technique must be unobtrusive. 2 It should fit in the category of progressive enhancement, 3 and all the behavior should be controlled from a shared JavaScript file. It must look good, not just work. It has to be based on totally clean and valid markup. The purpose of the technique needs to be really obvious to the user. Thankfully, all of these aims are achievable, as I will demonstrate in the following pages. 1. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to bolt on extra functionality to the browser. For more information, a good starting point is Dive Into Greasemonkey (http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/install/what-is-greasemonkey.html). 2. Unobtrusive scripts do not require inline event handlers, such as onclick or onmouseover, in the HTML. All scripting is centralized, making site-wide management and maintenance far easier (in a similar way to how using a shared style sheet centralizes the management of the site’s presentation). 3. Progressive enhancement is an approach to web design that provides access to a basic version of your page to all, but adds an extra layer of behavior or styling (or both) to browsers that are up to the job. You can find out more about this technique and links to related articles at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Enhancement.
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CAMERON ADAMS ~ MARK BOULTON ~ ANDY
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Web Standards Creativity: Innovatio
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Contents About the Technical Review
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PART 2: EFFECTIVE PRINT TECHNIQUES
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About the Technical Reviewer Molly
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Mark Boulton I’d like to thank Kh
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Getting Creative with Web Standards
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Figure 5. The Zen Garden is still g
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Layout Magic Welcome to Part 1 of o
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Before starting Erskine Design in 2
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6 Figure 1-2. The completed Dirty P
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Dirty pretty presentation When buil
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Background Next, we apply the main
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Finally, the main content selector
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The markup is as follows. Note that
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Unless you study the end result clo
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Tables Descendant selectors are ess
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These very simple rules, and the fa
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Conclusion Of course, building the
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Dan Rubin spends his days blending
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Figure 2-1. On the left, the origin
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The CMS challenge It doesn’t take
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The next step was spending some tim
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Videos Photos Extras Links Forum St
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Ever find yourself getting lost in
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z-index:100; left:29px; top:39px; m
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By looking at the markup generated
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Creating the illusion of vertical t
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The first argument defines the CSS
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Figure 2-9. Before (right) and afte
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Such a #teaser After styling the #t
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When time is of the essence, hacks
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Ethan Marcotte has been designing a
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Getting started The article templat
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Structuring the CSS Looking above t
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Adding a layer of style OK, enough
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A quick preview of our code at this
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For our narrow, 190-pixel-wide righ
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Strictly speaking, these class name
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Our column’s “background” wil
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Figure 3-14. The exact same templat
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Figure 3-17. The anatomy of our nar
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So there we have it: a single class
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Figure 3-21. The text size can be i
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anchor.setAttribute("href", "javasc
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78 4 Designing for Outside the Box
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80 Worries? “Oh baby, what’s th
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82 Stop worrying, start with markup
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84 A third-level heading proudly an
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86 Adding divisions from the conten
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88 With the elements and appropriat
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90 Styling WorrySome.net Whereas ma
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92 Take a peek at how your design i
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94 The final result of your column-
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96 Each of the paragraphs of introd
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98 While floats and image replaceme
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100 Well, maybe you’re not quite
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102 This will be followed by a spec
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104 The result of this is that your
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106 We'll give you another look at
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108 5 Creative Use of PNG Transpare
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110 PNG, GIF, and JPEG The PNG imag
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112 The image that needs to work on
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114 Wilson includes his transparent
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116 Now I’ll create a 1-by-1-pixe
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118 In another creative example, de
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120 A bit of CSS is then used t
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122 And then the CSS: a.photo-conta
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124 I’ve specified #cc0000
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126 However, I’ve reversed their
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128 var div = document.createElemen
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130 6 Grid Design for the Web mark
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Page 151 and 152: 134 Ratios and the canvas Ratios ar
Page 153 and 154: 136 Beginning with the pen I like t
Page 155 and 156: 138 Designing the columns The wiref
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Page 159 and 160: 142 The masthead includes several i
Page 161 and 162: 144 Building the CSS I’m at the s
Page 163 and 164: 146 Setting the width of the column
Page 165 and 166: 148 Figure 6-16 shows the masthead
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Page 169 and 170: 152 Issues with the design The proj
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Page 176 and 177: The process Figure 7-1. Times New R
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Page 186 and 187: Figure 7-12. A cohesive text block
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Page 194 and 195: Small caps There is one more typogr
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Page 202 and 203: Preparing the foundations With a cl
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Page 225 and 226: 208 9 Creating Dynamic Interfaces U
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Page 243 and 244: 226 The markup The high-level struc
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Page 247 and 248: 230 Styling with CSS Now that we’
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234 function getPosition(theElement
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236 document.getElementsByTagName("
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238 ghostMarker.marked.appendChild(
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240 Keeping track of changes The te
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10 242 Accessible Sliding Navigatio
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244 The killer feature Admit it. Yo
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246 Accessibility and JavaScript Fo
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248 After the main link is clicked,
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250 Switching between CSS states wi
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252 Adding sliding behaviors Now th
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254 // set the height to a new valu
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256 When using a screen magnifier,
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258 If the user does repeat the “
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260 There may be unforeseen consequ
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262 Croft, Jeff, 109 CSS (Cascading
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264 max-width, 58, 71 @media print,
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266 websites A List Apart, 134 New
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WEB STANDARDS CREATIVITY

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