HTML can feel unwieldy and inefficient to edit. There are lots of great tools and alternate syntaxes that make this easier… but who wants to set up a whole framework and all the dependancies that come with that just to be more efficient. With a basic Vim command and the surround plugin you can greatly increase your productivity traversing and manipulating tags.
Say, for instance, you have:
I recently competed in UnmatchedStyle’s CSSOff competition where frontend developers each took a crack at marking up the same Photoshop document. Submissions are to be judged based on a list of parameters including: semantics, resource optimization, legacy browser support and general code cleanliness. We were encouraged to use HTML5 and tasked to support browsers as old as IE6. Here are some observations I made during and since the competition.
Here is a quick tip that comes in handy for me all the time. I like to work out ideas analog. A frustration I have with notebooks, in general, is that lined and graph paper tend to be of inferior paper quality than sketchbooks. My solution is to create my own graph or ruled paper and place them behind my sketchbook sheets so that I can see the lines through the page in the same way a calligrapher would. Ruled or graph paper is easier to create with Illustrator than you may think.
A few weeks ago, I decided it was time to start blogging, again. I sat down to my computer, loaded up my blog and realized that I needed to relaunch my blog first. After all, I had rushed this iteration of the blog together in a hurried attempt to match the business cards that I had painstakingly designed. I had never come back to apply the last bit of fit and finish that I told myself I would. My blog was still powered by Drupal 6! Drupal 7 has been out for nearly a year now. How could I possibly sit down to write under such conditions?
Susy looks to be a very nice tool for making cleanly marked-up grid-based sites. It’s one of the many new compass plugins that are floating about these days. It doesn’t claim to be an out of the box layout, and that’s what makes it such a strong candidate for a real life solution.