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

PHP is not a drug (even though it may sound like one, namely PCP, but it sure can be addictive. What with it can do for web design and development, its benefits and potential uses cannot be overlooked. Thus, once developers begin employing PHP in their web sites, it’s really difficult to stop.

Continue reading “PHP is Not a Drug” »

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” »