It's August and most people have been on vacation, but there's still been enough happening on the blogs.

In this second peer into the blogs of Web development movers and shakers, Ian Blackham aims to highlight recent postings that will stimulate and educate.   

Hot Topics from the Blogs: August 2004

Well, following positive feedback from my first article I thought I'd repeat the experience.

For those who've just joined us I'd like to say "Hi", and indicate that the purpose of this article is to provide a quick pointer to topics that have been discussed on some of the more influential blogs in the Web development community. Hopefully this little digest will give you a heads-up on potential trends and developments, and also stimulate your own design and coding thoughts.

I have to admit I'm not going to completely chronologically restrict myself to August 2004 – I've found a few earlier items I think are useful.

Reworking, Revisiting, Resizing

In July's round-up the first part of the article talked a lot about third-party redesigns of inaccessible websites. Now in a related sense (OK related in my head) Douglas Bowman over at Stopdesign has published a great article entitled Throwing Tables Out the Window. In this article he talks about using CSS effectively and how to develop tableless layouts.

Now here's the link to last months discussion – to exemplify his work the article picks up on the Microsoft website and gives it a thorough working over (the article makes it clear that it isn't anti-MS, but the MS site is well-known enough to make a great illustration). Not only is the site made nice and accessible and capable of wider browser reach but also the HTML file size is reduced by a whopping 62%! 

Now, given the incredible amount of hits the MS site gets that adds up to a whole lot of bandwidth per year.

About a month later the size issue reared its head on Eric Meyer's site. Now actually the discussion (at the time of writing) spanned two days and was centring over the precise use of markup. I'm not going to tackle that – wade through the comments yourself if you want to test the brain. However the point I'm alluding to is – save weight on a page where you can (and within reason; obfuscating variable names to the point of unrecognisability may cause problems in a team environment).

Talking of reworking, time for our next topic.

Redesigns of the Rich and Famous

OK I suspect the owners of these blogs would quibble with my titling, but I think it's fair to point out that many of the leading lights in Web development are always looking to refresh, re-design and update their sites.

For our delectation this month first off I'd like to present that mainstay of Web development mezzoblue. Our design point from this site, ladies and gentlemen is the use of Fitts Law, which, to summarise glibly, indicates for the Web, that the larger a link area on a page, the easier it is for the visitor to select it. Looking at the new mezzoblue design it's interesting to see how large clickable areas have been created which are still entirely consistent with the site design.

It wouldn't be appropriate to neglect our own contributors in this round-up, so next under the spotlight we have Rachel Andrew at edgeofmyseat.com with a restful workover and another related UK web accessibility guru, Drew McLellan, going pink at allinthehead.com. It's good to see people re-working sites – and remind us to keep thinking, refining and designing.

Finally for this section I have to direct your attention to the amazing 1976design site. I'm not sure quite what the site looked like before its well documented redesign, but if you haven't seen it before check out the Panorama information tab just underneath the banner image on the right hand side.

Yes, that's right the headline image changes with the weather and the time of day or night. How cool is that?!

Friends, Romans, Countrymen

Molly.com has recently drawn attention to XFN 1.1. XFN stands for XHTML Friends Network and, according to the XFN website, is "a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks".

In short XFN, which is supported by some current blogging software, facilitates the development of navigable linked networks by the addition of values to the rel attribute on a hyperlink.

So for instance, if I wanted to link to my wife's site from my blog I could use the link:

<a href="http://wifes-blog.example.org/" rel="spouse met"> Wife's blog</a>

Where the values spouse and met define the relationship I have with the individual who runs "Wife's blog".

I guess in my case I could just find out that either I've got no cyber friends, or my wife wants to cyber disown me so I think I'll be keeping away from it for the present <grin>.

More seriously if you're an avid blog user you may want to check this out in detail.