Is a coding problem, bookkeeping, or some other nonsense getting you down?

A psychiatrist visited a California mental institution and asked a patient, How did you get here? What was the nature of your illness?

He got the following reply:

Well, it all started when I got married and I guess I should never have done it. I married a widow with a grown daughter who then became my stepdaughter. My dad came to visit us, fell in love with my lovely stepdaughter, then married her. And so my stepdaughter was now my stepmother. Soon, my wife had a son who was, of course, my daddy's brother-in-law since he is the half-brother of my stepdaughter, who is now, of course, my daddy's wife. So, as I told you, when my stepdaughter married my daddy, she was at once my stepmother!

Now, since my new son is brother to my stepmother, he also became my uncle. As you know, my wife is my step-grandmother since she is my stepmother's mother. Don't forget that my stepmother is my stepdaughter. Remember, too, that I am my wife's grandson.

But hold on just a few minutes more. You see, since I'm married to my step-grandmother, I am not only the wife's grandson and her hubby, but I am also my own grandfather. Now can you understand how I got put in this place?"

After staring blanky with a dizzy look on his face, the psychiatrist replied: Move over!

Notes working with Rhythmyx

Rhythmyx takes the developer’s code, strips it, and then recompiles it. Think of it as having Front Page reedit your page after you’ve written it and not allowing current coding standards. You have to go back to 1999 technology, using tables and transparent gifs. Yukk. Furthermore Rhythmyx strips away much of the white space making comments close to useless.

Label your images, even where SEO is not an issue, in order to have a reference point when you searching for a piece of code. Usually it’s easier to copy and paste the code back into your text editor of choice; make the changes; and then copy and paste it back into the Rhythmyx.

Rhythmyx adds width and height to <img src=""> tags whether or not you put it into the source code. However, if you change the size of the image (without changing the name) Rhythmyx does not automatically change the width and height in the <img src=""> tags. You need to go back into the source code and do that yourself.

Rhythmyx does not let developers add stylesheets; nor can one add anything to the head; nor can one use includes of any kind, including javascript includes.

One cannot use classes or ids of any kind. One can use <DIV>s but everything must be inline and one cannot use absolute or relative positioning of ANY kind.

One can add padding and margins to <DIV>s but NOT to images.

The editor is really bad. To link a graphic one selects it and selects a link icon, then input (or search) for the link. However there is no indication given should the icon already have a link attributed to it. So, if you link again, a new link gets added to the existing one. For example:

<a href="xxx"><a href="yyy"><a href="zzz"><img src=""></a></a></a>

and sometimes a <a href=""></a> thrown in at the end for good measure.

I don’t want to judge Rhythmyx solely from one experience with it, especially since we weren’t working with any Rhythmyx reps but I don’t have any warm fuzzies for it. Everything, from big issues such as speed, to smaller issues such as the pop-up windows being too small and having to scroll down to be able to select the form buttons are irritants.

EDIT: 5/8/2005

Spoke to someone from Rhythmyx. It seems as if the overwhelming majority of their users do not bring in designers and developers to work on their subsite. Thus the stripping of whitespace has not been a concern, nor was the absence of absolute and relative positioning.

Are two spaces after the period better than one?

I was having a conversation with several graphic artists, typography experts all, who were of the opinion that one and only one space at the end of a sentence was preferable to two. It's something that I never truly thought about as it not convention on HTML pages. (Although I do remember when clients asked me how to create the extra space.)

Apparently the convention of using two spaces after a period came into play with the adoption of manual typewriters. Typewriters used monospaced fonts that put a lot of space between letters and words. The extra space was necessary in order for the reader to more easily visualize the end of sentences. This is not necessary anymore as we're using proportional typesetting. Instead of helping the eye transition to the new sentence big holes are being put in the middle of the text adversely affecting the transition.

Back to the Top

Every once in a while I see something on a page and think how out of place it is; how archaic; how 1990s: for example the “Back to the Top” links one sometimes see at the bottom of a page, or worse at the bottom of every section. It got me to thinking - is there any good reason to have a "Back To the Top" link?

There are a lot of reasons to have a page split up into several smaller pages including tracking readership as users click through the article; and increasing advertising views. What possible reason could there be for keeping long articles on a single page? Outside of the expense of changing legacy files I can’t think of any. All new site designs should allow for multiple pages.

There is one reason to have a document all on one page - and that is for printing. It’s more than a little irritating to have to print out several files instead of one, and then to have extra pages for each of the footer sections. Government agencies seem to go out of their way to accomplish just that.

A counter argument could be that the link is simply an additional affordance; useful to those who want them and invisible to the rest of the population. An interesting aspect is that I’ve had many clients who’ve requested such links - even though they weren’t necessary – and not one have found the “Back to the Top” links to be annoying.

Of course one could simple press "HOME" and go back to the top of the page. But ... how many people know of this, or any other, keyboard command?


Edit: February 2, 2011

As iPads and phones are quickly gaining market share the 'Back to Top' links may come in handy as there may not be a keyboard command to quickly get the reader to the top of the file.

These devices have screen resolutions of 1024 x 600 pixels or much, much less so even average length files would be be considered to be a long page.

B versus using Span and Class

I have a client whose company name is bolded for branding purposes. It got me to thinking - ought the company name be bolded using the <b> tag or by attributes in the <span> tag?

Some have argued that <b> has been deprecated (or will be shortly) in favor of <strong>. It has not been deprecated although w3.org discourages its use in favor of stylesheets. The key difference between <b> and <strong> is that

EM and STRONG are used to indicate emphasis. ... These phrase elements add structural information to text fragments.

What are the relative merits of <b> versus <span>? If ever there was a case for the use the <b> element, this might be it as this its use is first and foremost a visual element. After all one cannot know how a browser will render <strong>. Still I would recommend <span> as the branding may change in time. <span class="logo"> maybe longer to write than <b> but it would solve all issues as rendering information will be located in the style sheets.

<b class="logo"> is an alternative. It will rank higher in today's SEO ranking (although is that really necessary for a logo?) and can be easily changed with a search and replace should the need arive at a later date.

Looking at .Net

I’m told that .Net is the future. It may very well be. There are some aspects that I like: namely the attempt to separate code from content, but I wonder if it actually accomplishes this task better than existing languages. I can do the same thing in CFMX. There is no reason to switch to .Net for this reason. There are some minor changes that I appreciate. I like that the default for their forms is POST and that the form refers back to the same file and automatically keeps the form data in state. But again – this is minor.

There is one thing that looks very interesting and that is .Net' conversion of standard HTML tags into server-side objects. I’m not certain how I would play with that but it is intriguing.

Overall my first impression of .Net is positive. I don’t know where they’ll be in 5 years but I think MS has dramatically improved its ASP product.

MailTo Link and Usability

Too often I go to a site, select a link, and have my email client activated. I find this very intrusive. Asking around, I found that this sentiment was widespread, especially among more experienced users. [See table below.] The browser should not open the email client without first giving warning to the end user. For instance the link “send an email” is more than sufficient to warn the user that a mailto link is being used. I think that usability would be increased by adding the mailto link. For instance

If you would like to know more please contact us at info@glmdesigns.com/

Contact Us links ought to take the user to a contact page from which mailto links are listed. Forms should also be included in case the end user is on the road and does not have an email client or does not wish to make his email address known. This is not a recommendation for eliminating mailto links. Site owners must be aware that contact forms are distrusted by many web users. [See previous post]

Bothered A Lot	Bothered Somewhat	Not Bothered	Experience Level
22	16	2	Very/Professional
14	16	4	Yes
2	5	11	Novice