Pixel Thread

Progressive enhancement is a way of building websites that emphasises accessibility, semantic markup, with external stylesheet and javascript.

I dropped the phrase into a conversation with Adam (top notch interface developer) recently. He hadn’t heard the term, so I explained and he said:

“Ah - you mean a well built website!”

Of course, he’s right. When the term ‘Progressive Enhancement’ first showed up, it wasn’t necessarily accepted that this was the best way to build sites. But over the past few years the internet has grown up and sites that are built to these standards have become a lot more commonplace.

The very term ’standards’ implies a lack of creativity, but this isn’t the case. There’s a very good book called Web Standards Creativity all about getting creative with code while still adhering to standards and guidelines.

Sometimes the most creative work is done working within constraints - the constraints force the creator to innovate.

sIFR uses javascript, CSS and Flash to replace short passages of plain text with text rendered in any typeface - regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Update: sIFR 3 is now available here , although still in beta I think…

The SEO Playbook, is a long blog post by a guy who goes by the name of Stuntdubl. It’s a useful overview of where SEO is today, breaking down the many different aspects that exist to the practice.

SEO is the thought process of lateral thinking and understanding of website creation and marketing combined.

A lot of companies see SEO as something for the techies to deal with, but it’s about much more than just the code.

If you want to get your head around some of the jargon and some of the tactics that surround Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), check out the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It’s a great resource for anyone new to SEO, as well as old hands who might need a quick refresher on some of the basics.

The amount of care and attention author Rand Fishkin puts into the guide is inspiring. He’s great at sharing knowledge and experience and comes across as very altruistic. creating a lot of goodwill for his company, SEOmoz.

It’s a perfect example of good content driving traffic and links (like this post).

This is a great piece of script that you can use to include an email address in your web page, but stop spambots picking it up.

“Junk email (a.k.a. spam) is a part of everyone’s life if they ever put their email address on the web. For HTML authors, site admins, and for people who want a little credit on the page that they put online, it is a constant problem. You want to include your email address on the page, but you don’t want your email address to be harvested by spambots.

The best thing you can do is encode your email address so that browsers can see it and spambots can not.”