We’re jazzed that Web developer Casey Rosenthal has joined us down at the “Fab Lab” at 28 Maple Street. Casey runs Port 49 and he’s an accomplished Ruby on Rails developer.

Casey also organizes the techMaine Ruby user’s group and is a member of the MaineUX usability interest group. But most importantly, Casey is a staunch supporter of the coworking concept and as such we couldn’t be happier he’ll be working with us.

You can follow Casey on Twitter at: @caseyrosenthal

The nominees are….

Eastern Book Company
http://www.ebc.com
Best Corporate Image
More Eastern Book

Maine Merchants Association
http://www.mainemerchants.org
Best Non-profit Web site
More Maine Merchants

Bluezberry Jam
http://www.bluezberryjam.com
Best Arts & Entertainment Web site
More Bluezberry

Another Pemaquid site, OakhurstDairy.com, was submitted in the Best Corporate Image category, but was not named a finalist.

Winners will be announced at the techMaine 2009 Technology Awards Gala June 2, to be held at the Eastland Park Hotel.

It’ll be awhile

Bottom line: HTML4 and xHTML will be with us for a long time to come. The HTML5 spec is still a work in progress and browsers still don’t render a lot of the new tags. Still, the possibilities are interesting.

The Takeaway

HTML5 will provide better cross-browser support for Web apps (not just documents like PDFs). Look for mobile devices to make use of the new spec first.

Resources

• HTML5 Specification – Editor’s Draft, 5/19/09
• What is HTML5? – Wikipedia
• HTML5 tags in use by various browser engines
• A Preview of HTML5 – A List Apart, 12/4/07
• Semantics in HTML5 – Issues regarding backward/forward compatibility, A List Apart, 1/6/09
• An Event Apart – Recently redesigned in HTML5 by Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman
• An Event Apart and HTML5 – Eric Meyer discusses the making of AnEventApart.com in HTML5
• Validator.nu – Validation tool for HTML5, used by Eric Meyer in redesigning AnEventApart.com
• HTML5 Shiv – jQuery creator John Resig discusses how to get Internet Explorer 6 & 7 to recognize/render HMTL5 tags using javascript
• Prototyping with the canvas element – David DeSandro discusses how to use the HTML5 <canvas> to draw graphics, like an RSS icon

Presentation

It was a bit challenging to prepare this presentation because:

1. I hadn’t put together a 2-hour presentation on the subject before
2. I didn’t know going in how much participants knew about CSS, so I covered a lot of ground, from the basics to some advanced sorcery
3. My partner in crime, Jen Ecker, (a.k.a. Dr. JEcker), had to bow out at the last minute due to a stomach bug, leaving me to do the whole 2-hour spiel (Jen sends her regrets and I’m glad to report she’s feeling much better today, though she remains disappointed that she missed out)

Fortunately, on the subject of Web design, I’m usually not at a loss for words.

Here’s the main point. Using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a better, more efficient way to design Web sites. It’s a lingua franca for the Web, along with that other 4-letter “word”, HTML.

CSS has “that same great taste, but it’s less filling“, meaning, you can make great looking sites w/a fraction of the markup. That leads to all kinds of benefits:

1. More Flexible Design
2. More sophisticated Design
3. Easier, quicker maintenance
4. Greater Accessibiilty
5. Better search engine ranking
6. Lower costs for bandwidth, server storage and redesigns

Jen and I have put up a CSS Quick Reference Guide we’re calling CSS 101. It’s here:
http://css.pemaquid.com/101/

Here is a list of some of the other resources we dug up for you. Use them in good health!

Online Resources

• A List Apart
• W3C – CSS
• W3 Schools – CSS Reference/Tutorials
• Position Is Everything
• CSS Zen Garden
• CSS Beauty
• Smashing Magazine (random article)

Books

• Bulletproof Web Design
• More Eric Meyer on CSS
• CSS Web Site Design
• Transcending CSS

Tools

• Firebug
• Web Developer Toolbar
• Colorzilla
• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Gurus

• Dan Cederholm – www.simplebits.com
• Andy Clarke – www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk
• Eric Meyer – www.meyerweb.com
• Dave Shea – www.mezzoblue.com