Month: July 2008

Incorporating web standards into your design brief or RFP

Working on a design brief for a radical makeover of the website at work, and have been doing a bit of digging around into how people specify web standards in their project specs. Came across this post from quite a while ago, and ended up using it as sort of a template, with some modifications:

Usability, accessibility and standards

  • The website will conform to the following standards:
    • Validation to either the W3C XHTML 1.0 transitional or strict document type
    • Validation to the W3C’s CSS 2.1 or 1.0
    • JavaScript will be implemented as progressive enhancement
    • Will meet all WCAG Priority 1 Guidelines, except No. 1
  • The website will render correctly in IE6+ and Firefox 2+
  • All multimedia files will be available for download, and video will be provided via Flash
  • Alternative stylesheets will be developed for printers and mobile devices
  • Character encoding will be UTF-8

This is still not solidified, and I may decide to put HTML 4 in along with XHTML, though my preference is for the latter (for more on developing with XHTMl, see Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Better living Through XHTML” at A List Apart). Continue reading “Incorporating web standards into your design brief or RFP”

Annoyance from Ticketmaster

So, I was all looking forward to redeeming my “iTunes songs, compliments of Ticketmaster” that I got from a ticket purchase…

But when I go to actually redeem them, I get this:

I purchased the tickets on March 25th and the offer expires on April 30th? What kind reward is that? Perhaps, oh, say, the kind they don’t actually want you to take advantage of? Why do we just accept that this is okay behaviour? Is there any good reason for making the expiry date one month later, other than that it will probably mean some people like myself don’t actually get the goods and thereby cost Ticketmaster $$?

More cakePHP tips

Continuing from my last post on choosing a php web development framework, here are some more tips on cakePHP that you may not otherwise come across as quickly

  • if you change your database (as configured in app/config/database.php) make sure to delete the files in app/tmp/cache/models (see here)
  • cakePHP will do some nice automation work for you if you create created and modified fields in your database tables. But for cake to do its magic, the default values of those fields have to be set to null, otherwise cake will assume they’re already set and won’t alter them
  • if you need to set variables in your controller that will be accessible in your layouts, just append the string “_for_layout” to the variable name, and use Set as you normally would in the controller, e.g. $this->set('whatever_for_layout', $variable); The variable will then be accessible in the layout as it would in a view, e.g. <?php echo $whatever_for_layout; ?>