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This is a collection of the articles I've written over the past 8 years, I've edited and tidied them up for clarity. I also got rid of a lot of older, less relevant (read: stupid) articles. I'm going for clean, and quality.
Filtering by Category: Rants
So, this week I've been teaching web design at Shillington College in Sydney. Today we had an interesting discussion about <section> vs <div> for marking up regions on a page in HTML5 - in our case: particularly the main content region (which previously we style as <div id="content">. The debate stemmed from the (somewhat obsessive) idea that <div>'s are evil.
Read MoreAdding a target="_blank" attribute to an A tag has long been seen as a way to keep users on your site. This logic is fatally flawed (i was under the impression that this was commonly agreed upon, however i've had to argue the point with a few people recently).
Firstly, what does target="_blank" do? this attribute makes a link open in a new window (or new tab in some more modern browsers) - the thinking used to be that the user was therefore STILL on your site as well. However this concept breaks the standard usability in the browser: the back button stops working - often times leaving the user confused. Furthermore, advanced users will automatically use CTRL/APPLE click to open links in new tabs anyway, so this functionality has no real purpose.
Keeping a copy of your site open as well as the link that your user wants to see was often seen as leading to longer visit times on your site - however this statistic means nothing if there is a window in front of your site that is showing the user different content.
Also, if a user clicks on an external link from your site and they don't want to come back and keep reading your content, then you having sneakily left a copy of your site open behind the link they clicked is more likely to irritate them than help them - and the last thing you want to do is irritate your audience.
So don't target links to _blank.
Having been a web developer (professionally and for fun) for the better part of ten years now, I’ve watched the art of making websites change significantly. This post is a stream of consciousness about the web industry and standards.. hopefully these things change in the future.
Read MoreA look at photo libraries from behind the lens. **Designers hate plagiarism.. it steals our worth. Stock libraries are killing photographers.. but designers still love them.. why? ** This article is a reflection on the pros and cons of stock photography.
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