Day: August 30, 2005

I’d like to congratulate Jeff and Rachel on the birth of their new baby – Ann Maria! Ann Maria was delivered just a little while ago, and weighs in a 11lb 10oz! Momma and Baby are both doing fine!

After a lot of deliberation, I’ve decided to go Gmail only for email. I am now having my chris@cdharrison.com and chris@powerserve.net accounts forwarded to my cdharrison@gmail.com account. Because Gmail allows me to send from multiple accounts, this transition will be seemless for users accustomed to sending email to me to any particular account.

Why’d I do this? Well, for starters, I want all of my email in one central location. With Gmail, I can easily (and automatically) filter email based on the destination account. Having it all in Gmail allows me to easily search email. I only have to login to one place now. Before, I was logging into several mail servers to check to see if I had email.

Sure, one could argue that it doesn’t make sense to mix personal email with work email, or that I could use Outlook to check all of my accounts at once. But none of those solutions meet my main need to have all of my email available to me in one central location.

I’ve been using Gmail for well over 6 months now, and I’m finally confident enough in it to make this switch. Have you considered doing something like this? If not, why not? I’m interested to hear what others have to say…

I came across a rather timely article this morning on web semantics, entitled "Semantics: The Red-Headed Step-Child of Markup" by Garrett Dimon.

While working on ideas for my site reorganization and redesign (which is still in progress), I struggled with how to present some items on my website – primarily my site navigation. I’ve been in the habit of using UL’s, but I figured there had to be a better way. There is..

When I first started picking up HTML and web design in general, I used to scour the source code of sites I liked the look of to see how they did things. I still do that. The best way to learn HTML or CSS is to look at what other people have done and build on top of it. In this case, I was looking through Jeffrey Zeldman’s source code on Zeldman.com for ideas. I noticed he was using DL’s! I also read Chapter 4 in Dan Cederholm’s “Bulletproof Web Design” where he used a DL to display groupings of photos, titles, and captions.

I have a confession to make: I have never, ever, ever, used a DL in markup before. It’s not that I didn’t know about them. The more I think about it though, the more they make sense for Navigation Lists, Product Displays, etc. Dictionary Lists are highly flexible, and it terms of their meaning… they are used to Define something. So, in the context of a product…

<dl>

<dt>Product Name</dt>

<dd><img src=”%photourl%” /></dd>

<dd>This is where the product description would go.</dd>

</dl>

This markup is completely valid, and makes sense – because we are defining a product!

I’m telling you all of this to tell you that Dimon’s article made me realize there are a lot more under-utilized tags out there – label, cite, code, samp, pre, and blockquote… Realizing that has made me reconsider the usage of some of these tags and how I might incorporate them into my markup. Each of these tags connotates certain meaning to the text they encapsulate. Using them can provide more meaning to your documents, and will give you even greater design flexibility with each tag.

Great article, Garrett. Thanks for reminding me about what I’ve been missing out on.