More Reflections from Refresh06

November 16, 2006

I realized after I posted my entry last night that I did not discuss what I took away from Andy Budd’s seminar on CSS Mastery.

He encouraged us to be proud of our work and the choices that we make and not to worry about what others have to say. He made this comment in the context of talking about real world markup. The reality is that there are a lot of different techniques and strategies as we do a CSS design. I came away feeling a bit more confidence as a CSS designer.

He mentioned Microformats. I do not know anything about them and I am looking forward to hearing Jeremy Keith discuss them on Friday. Andy was excited about them and suggested them as a tool.

I benefitted from hearing Andy’s best practices. It made me aware that I had taken that advice away from his book when I read it last May. I have implemented some of his advice, particularly his advice about organizing and commenting on our style sheets. It has been helpful on a couple of designs I have done recently.

I enjoyed hearing about positioning and floats. It was a good refresher from what I read in his book and I learned some more to add to my knowledge.

I want to explore more in the area of the image techniques he discussed. I have not had a chance to work through that section of the book or try some of the techniques he writes about. I was unaware that CSS Opacity is pretty well supported so I might play around with that in the future.

I also enjoyed his discussion on bugs and bug fixing. He pointed out that most of the problems are not with the browser but with the techniques we use or an incomplete understanding of the specifications. I have found this to be true. I appreciated his advice to keep things simple and that can avoid a lot of the problems. He also suggested to try other methods instead of spending a lot of time trying to fix something that is not working. I know I ended up doing that with a CSS Reboot design this summer. One way was not working so I came at it a different way and came up with a solution.

I am looking forward to today’s sessions:

• Pragmatic Web Design
• How to Be a Web Design Superhero
• It’s More Than Markup
• Creating Accessible DHTML
• Improving Front End Architecture