emotionalmarkup

Since I’ve worked as a frontender/web dude in a few countries now in the last few years I thought I’d impart my, albeit limited, knowledge on the current state of the market for us webbies in the cities I know more or less something about. As you are probably aware, things are better in some places than in others and I’m not just talking about the remuneration: the cost of living and the environment are all factors that will determine where you end up.

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I recently helped a colleague rebuild his site the CSS way after he’d spent hours at home trying to do it himself. This guy was no computer novice - he’s a fine python/ruby programmer and writes Linux applications in his spare time, but he just couldn’t get the whole logic of CSS and how it related to elements on the page. I understood his frustration.

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London is a city in which you see-saw between feelings of optimism and despair. Optimism flows from the endless source of ways to amuse yourself. If you have money or the will or both, the question of “What will we do tonight?” is one of the easiest to answer as there are cultural and social activities frothing from just about every orifice of the city’s concrete hide. However, despair lurks close by and will attack without notice causing you to forget all of this and drown yourself in a grey turmoil of bad weather, food and grim surroundings. A reliable way to shift from the former to the latter is through public transport.

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You know the situation: you begin to make furtive glances over your shoulder because you think they are near, you wonder if they actually understand what it is you do at all, and the dread moments before the monotonous weekly meeting surpasses what even coffee can placate. They are the project managers - the very whisper of which can incite fear in the most hardy of web veterans.

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I remember back in 2000 when I first used CSS to style a web page. It was a strange and often frustrating experience shifting from the development paradigm of cross-browser markup to cross-browser styling. I didn’t realise how revolutionary it was back then mainly because I was frying my brains trying to write code that looked decent in Netscape 4 and IE5. And now look at us: CSS 3.

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Q: How does a spectacularly immense organisation go from tables and HTML 4 to web standards and XHTML strict without breaking a sweat?
A: They don’t.

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Pagination is a great tool for presenting data. It breaks up large volumes of information into formats and amounts that our brains and browsers can handle. Search engine results, photo galleries and e-books are all good examples of where logical page breaks make a difference to the user experience. Yet sometimes we come across an inappropriate use of pagination that decreases usability - news articles for example.

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