Welcome to Sorcerer's Isle, a weblog covering a multitude of topics, ranging from programming to 3D graphics; photography to gadgets; tutorials to tinkering.
Within Sorcerer's Isle are three sub-blogs, which each focus on different aspects:
At Sorcerer's Tower you'll find programming and web dev; Midnight Isle covers photography and digital art; and with 100% Geek you'll find gadgets, gaming, technology, and more.
Articles may appear on just one of the weblogs, or across multiple, but every article posted will always appear on this one.
As we (hopefully) all know, using HTML tables for layout is Bad and Wrong.
Unfortunately, the most common way people avoid using tables is to just replace their table, tr and td tags with divs, divs and more divs.
The div tag is a generic container that should be used as a last resort, if there are no other more suitable options.
Whilst the problem of excess divs is not limited to the conversion of table layouts, it is perhaps most obvious here, as it shows the developer is still stuck in the column+row frame of mind, rather than thinking about what they are actually displaying.
In this blog entry, I show an example of how avoiding this mindset can result in much simpler and cleaner code.
That being my answer to the question, "How does one build a website effectively?"
So, let's examine what I mean by it...
Over the past few months I have been working on creating a custom tag library for easily creating accessible and usable forms.
I have of course been planning to launch it as an open-source project, and today I finally got around to comitting my code to RIAForge.
It is still a development version, so you might not want to jump in and use it on important sites straight away, but if you're interested in creating accessible forms in CFML please do take a look at what I've done and give me your thoughts over on the project's forums at RIAForge.
There are three very simple reasons to write accessible code:
The biggest barrier to creating an accessible Internet is not browser support or badly designed syntax, but rather people's false beliefs of what accessibility is; what it means to 'be accessible'. For many people, being accessible means switching from font tags to CSS, using em tags for italics, and replacing tables with divs. THAT IS NOT ACCESSIBILITY!