An Event Apart: A Site Redesign, Part 2

by May 6, 2009

Eric Meyer's A Site Redesign Part 2 presentation at An Event Apart in Seattle discussed some of lessons he learned while coding the new An Event Apart Web site. While Eric got into a lot of technical details, I captured some of his higher level points.

  • Browsers are becoming more consistent in how they render borders.
  • In HTML 5, you can wrap headers inside of links but there was a TC/IP bug in Firefox involving packet boundaries so Eric had to revert to using spans instead of headers inside of links.
  • Microformats markup creates some accessibility challenges.
  • Presentation never trumps semantics (well, hardly ever).
  • Markup order still matters.
  • HTML5 allows interesting new patterns but there are still limitations
  • Javascript can enhance but there is a line not to cross.
  • CSS variables will greatly improve coding options
  • Image replacement is valuable
  • IE fixes are still needed but dwindling