Steve Workman

Entering data into a web site is possibly the most common task that is performed. In my time designing and developing sites, I’ve seen good forms and I’ve seen bad forms. The biggest sin with these forms has always been error messages. Web sites are designed to communicate a message. Whether it’s the day’s news or that a friend is having a party, the message must be clear an unmistakable. With errors, correct placement, styling and reference are essential. I’m going to show you how not to do it, and then best practice error messages.

How not to make error messages

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Recently, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about CSS and my commitment to it. I’m a purist when it comes to the web. I firmly believe that the only way to create a web site is to use standards-compliant CSS that is cross-compatible with all major browsers. Javascript should only be used as a progressive enhancement technique and should certainly not be relied upon (yes, I’m looking at you ASP .NET). Most of my colleagues regard this stance as noble, but somewhat stupid in the “real world”, where it’s not always getting it done “right”, it’s just getting it done. Why is CSS considered such a black art?

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With the release of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 this week, MS debuted a few new features for the browser. Not only is it more standards compliant etc (read about all the features here), there are two major features which developers can utilise to make web sites and services more accessible through IE8. I’m talking about Activites and WebSlices.

Activities is a browser feature where you can right-click on the page and bring up a context-sensitive menu where you can perform actions based on the content of the page. You can also select some text, say the address of a restaurant, and a drop-down menu will appear with options for a map or wikipedia entry. You can also get a preview of the resulting page if you hover over the link.

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I’m writing this after a hard day’s work with the Facebook API. It’s almost been work the blood, sweat and tears that I have shed during the last 5 hours. This will also hopefully serve as a guide for anyone trying to get something simple done with facebook authentication. Read more »

First, sorry for not updating this blog in the past month. I’ve been to Greece and then spent another week here doing all the touristy things with my girlfriend so I’ve not really had time to update this.

I’d then like to say, that whilst I’ve not been updating this, I’ve been hard at work on USEv4. Since I last updated, the whole site has been put into the templates and at the moment I’m just going over everything and fixing any problems I come across. Whilst I’ve been doing this I’ve been getting the opportunity to add a couple of fancy bits in. For instance, I’ve now got the Thickbox jQuery plugin working for squad status (see below) Read more »