I'm in the process of founding a Dutch Guild of Front-End programmers. This entry is a national call to actionPeter-Paul Koch

Peter-Paul Koch has started a great thing. A guild for front enders in the netherlands, a way to try and put us on the map as a real discipline.

After years of working in the field as a professional front-ender, he got tired of telling people that it is a real job. Not just something that you can do on the side, something that I have been saying (together with a lot of people) for years. Up to this day, front end is often done by the graphic designer or java developer. The guild is a try to put our job on the map.

We already have over 50 members and are growing fast, now that we agreed to 'come out'. You can read the (dutch) announcement here, or you can sign up for the annoucement list.
At the official page you can read about what we have done (I only went to the last meeting at info.nl) and what we are going to do and talk about.

Last but not least, it is a great way to set the dutch webrichtlijnen on the map.

Tell me what your opinion of this news is...
And to no suprise, I counted a couple of happycloggers at that meeting...

After a couple of months, I decided to redesign (realign) my site yet again. I still rather like it. The illustration at the top is one of my personal favorites, not in the least as I created it for the birth card of my youngest son 'Pieter'.

But there were some usability issues that concerned me. Not that I lost any sleep over it, but still. There was way to little crowd participation in the form of comments and stuff. People didn't find it easy enough to navigate to other pages and such. So I changed the whole bit. Keep reading to learn what I have changed, that you can see. But more importantly, why?

The comments are now fixed on the left side, or at least for people who use decent browsers (cough, not IE) to make it easier to comment. After all, it saves you one click. In the previous version of the design, you had to click the link (which had a non obvious text), to get to a seperate comment page. That didn't quite made sense, didn't it. Now you can comment as you read.

Future versions will include the fixed comment for IE and a live preview of how your comments will display..

The links to the next and previous articles are

I removed the AJAX search box. Blasphemy, I hear the crowd shout, thou willst not remove any of the holy AJAX thingamics. And to make matters worse, in daily life, I implement that functionality. But let me explain my decision, so hear me out;

In the previous version of my design, the search box had a 'google suggest' kinda functionality. You typed and a max of 10 results dropped down below. Those results were reachable with the keyboard, so far so good. BUT, it didn't always work as planned in all of the browsers that I tested it in. And the results that you got were short and sometimes that hindered me. As I have always said, this is my site, so I call the shots. So for my own purpose, a seperate page with the search results is more usable, the results are displayed with more detail, so I can have more information on which I can make my choice.

All of the css stuff is now standards and I have yet to implement some IE 6 and below fixes. The fixed comments are not fixed yet in IE 6 for instance and I think more things will tend to go wrong. At this moment I will not worry about it, as the majority of my readers do use a proper browser. I will create a seperate post, just to collect the comments on things that go wrong.

I just read an interesting article by 'uncle jen' on (best) coding practices. It focuses more on C and cocoa apps, but I think that these tips will work for javascript and css just as well. Here is one:

“the main person you’re writing comments for is yourself, six months in the future.�

Maybe it is time that we front-end people realised that we are not so different and that we need to grow up. (saying that in a ' do as I say, not as I do' kinda way.) I mean, for the most part the front end code that I see and , to be perfectly honest, some that I deliver is not very wel crafted. I mean, take a look at some of the code that I am working with right now:

The basic idea was very simple, I see that (as you can). The developer started from a graphic design of some sort and thought: ' this part is divided into two column's of 192 and 560 pixels wide'. And on they went, naming some vital part of the code completly wrong. Omitting values and inserting them in places where they aren't needed.
The fun thing is that people don't do these things to bug you, but still. The naming is far from semanticly correct and now is second on my list. The problem which these people hadn't considered was that different browsers show things differently.
A utterly new concepts I found out some 10+ years ago...
And after you go through a couple of box models, the naming doesn't quite makes sense anymore. And don't even start about a different graphic design in a few years or months...
The first place on my list is (still going strong)

Do any of you have simular examples, to share, please do. Or do you wish to tell me about any of the mistakes you made in the past...

I just read an interesting article by 'uncle jen' on (best) coding practices. It focuses more on C and cocoa apps, but I think that these tips will work for javascript and css just as well. Here is one:

“the main person you’re writing comments for is yourself, six months in the future.�

Maybe it is time that we front-end people realised that we are not so different and that we need to grow up. (saying that in a ' do as I say, not as I do' kinda way.) I mean, for the most part the front end code that I see and , to be perfectly honest, some that I deliver is not very wel crafted. I mean, take a look at some of the code that I am working with right now:

The basic idea was very simple, I see that (as you can). The developer started from a graphic design of some sort and thought: ' this part is divided into two column's of 192 and 560 pixels wide'. And on they went, naming some vital part of the code completly wrong. Omitting values and inserting them in places where they aren't needed.
The fun thing is that people don't do these things to bug you, but still. The naming is far from semanticly correct and now is second on my list. The problem which these people hadn't considered was that different browsers show things differently.
A utterly new concepts I found out some 10+ years ago...
And after you go through a couple of box models, the naming doesn't quite makes sense anymore. And don't even start about a different graphic design in a few years or months...
The first place on my list is (still going strong)

Do any of you have simular examples, to share, please do. Or do you wish to tell me about any of the mistakes you made in the past...