Another full, brain overloading day came and went at the Digital Design World Conference in Seattle, WA. While I thought I would be mingling with people from around the US, I found myself talking with a woman from South Africa, another from India and the list goes on...
Anyway, Thursday's events on the web design side continued with Macromedia MX. From hitting the highlights of what Macromedia has added to MX2004 over the previous versions, editing the Dreamweaver registry and menu files to create a user interface that screams "This is My System!", integrating the abilities of Fireworks, Freehand and Flash and adding e-commerce functions with WebAssist.com extensions, I found the best part of the day was the coverage on using Dreamweaver to validate your web pages for XHTML and CSS for any of the most widely used browsers.
I will give a quick hit list to what was covered in the validation section. Like many of you, I have been creating (not always W3C compliant) web sites for current as well as previous browsers. There is now the need for all of us to start focusing on (what was the key phrase for the day) "Forward Compatibility Programming." The big thing was that while so many of us are trying to stay compliant with all the browsers of the past, we are not programming or validating for the browsers and interfaces (PDA, Cellphone, Palm PC) of the future. And this was the main focus over most of the discussions. When I can get into the online references available to the attendees, I will give more concrete examples.
But we covered how Dreamweaver holds the standard for web validation applications of today and tomorrow. With a few minor adjustments to some of the xml files used in Dreamweaver, you can make sure that all your XHTML tags include the closing tag, as well as setting the appropriate preferences to make sure your tags are all lower case and validated for XHTML while in the developing process. We also reviewed the validator tools avialable in Dreamweaver and how it helps with CSS as well in that the validator will expand to attached css files. So if there is a validation issue with your site, and if it lies within the attached CSS file, the validator will create a path so you can easily find and correct your errors.
Some of the outside resources referenced included Jeffrey Zeldman's book
Designing with Web Standards and web sites such as
webstandards.org,
browsercam.com and
www.browsers.evolt.org to name a few.
I am getting ready to take on the last day of the conference so I will end here. I hope to give much more detailed info on this great conference in the days to come.