Beast-Blog.com
Mike Cherim's Professional and Personal Web Log

A short time ago web developers used to use tables to place contents on a web page. The attributes of these tables and associated elements was controlled on-page. This was so difficult for developers. If a change needed to be made it involved a lot of work as many corrections needed to be made. Then came along CSSs or Cascading Style Sheets, putting some definitions of the table content elements on a separate page. A single page. This allowed content updates to be made by solitary changes. Then tables went bye-bye and developers started using page divisions or Divs.

Continue reading “Style Power” »

I see craziness on the web all the time: I view a page’s source code, as I often do to see how people build their pages, and see an omission of the Document Type or "DOCTYPE" for starters. All websites should declare a DOCTYPE as it tells the browser what it’s supposed to be reading. Tell it what to do, don’t let it decide for you.

Continue reading “Document Types” »

Standards are important. It helps developers produce the same mark-up, which conversely corrects many browser-related issues — like those associated with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer® not displaying the same page as one would see with a more standardized browser like Mozilla’s Firefox®.

Continue reading “Web Standards” »

For quite some time I have been trying to come up with the right words. I felt I needed to say something well enough to effect what I and many others thought needed changing. I wanted results for the benefit of all. We all wanted results. But it was a tough subject to broach. Now no one has to say a thing as David Shea has taken it upon himself. It began like this:

Continue reading “Kudos to David Shea” »

The what?! I’d ignore this old post.

A good friend and web design colleague, Jonathan “Jona” Fenocchi suggested I write a piece on this obscure topic as he felt some folks might be interested and intrigued. I decided he was right and that I should do just that. I have a method of doing away with some popular hacks used to solve Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s inability to properly interpret cascading style sheets the way other more standards-compliant browsers do.

Continue reading “The Triple Box Method” »

So, what is it I like so much about Fireworks?

I have a number of imagery software programs, but I must say that one of my all-time favorites is Macromedia’s Fireworks MX. I have entered in discussions about this awesome program before and have discovered that I am indeed a minority in this preference, but there are others like me — the majority, of course, prefer Adobe’s Photoshop CS.

Continue reading “Celebrate Fireworks MX” »

So, for now, do feel free to drop by and say Hello back at me.

If you think I write, well, you’re right. It’s not always easy as my mind moves far faster than my fingers — as testimony to this just get me on instant messenger someday and you’ll see what I mean. I have to write though. That’s why I felt I desperately needed a web log or blog.

Continue reading “Blah, blah, blah…” »

If we follow these four image-use rules […]

The seemingly mysterious use of the Alt attribute of images as it concerns web accessibility is alive and well. I have some thoughts on this matter, though, so I say let’s kill this horse once and for all. Please consider the following carefully. If we want to employ semantics correctly, we should be thinking of imagery this way:

Continue reading “Images & Accessibilities” »