Dhassa web designer, developer and front end coding

Browsers

My favourite browser is Firefox, and I deffinately recommend it. It is fast, easy to use and comes with a whole bunch of extensions that you can add to it. The best extension, for me, is the Web Developers Toolkit. From a web page coding point-of-view, it has fairly good standards compliance and is not too buggy.

After Firefox, my next favourite browser is Safari for the Mac. It also seems to have very good/strict standards support, plus, like many things on a MAC, it looks good.

www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ - for the latest Firefox Mozilla browser
www.opera.com - for the latest Opera browser
www.skyzyx.com/downloads/ - to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine
sillydog.org - for old versions of Netscape
www.danvine.com - to take a Safari screenshot of a web page
browsers.evolt.org - for an archive with many different types of browsers

Also available at Mozilla is the Mozilla Suite. This is, loosely speaking, an upgrade of the Netscape browser, mail client etc. For Mac there is the Camino browser. I have not tried this, but it is advertised as having the same Gecko engine for HTML rendering (Mozilla 1.7) as in Firefox.

Editors

I have not yet found an editor which can create XHTML strict. To date, in my experience, it must be hand coded. I am not fussy about what editor I use for hand coding XHTML, whatever comes my way will do. But I do like something which can colour code tags, attributes etc.

I do have a preference for producing CSS. For this I like to use TopStyle Lite. It has a nice window called the Style Inspector which shows the properties of the CSS or it can list all my selectors. Very usefully for organising large CSS files. The best thing is that all you need is the Lite version for CSS and it is free.

Bradbury TopStyle Lite - free download

XHTML

When I want to look up my HTML or XHTML tags and attributes I go to www.w3schools.com and then to validate XHTML I go to validator.w3.org provided by W3C.

CSS

When I want to look up CSS I look in Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference by Eric A. Meyer. It's three years old and partially soaked in fruit juice, but still the best reference I have found.

To validate CSS I go to jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ provided by W3C.

Other CSS resources which I use are:

www.positioniseverything.net - the site to fing out about CSS bugs in browsers
www.alistapart.com/topics/css/ - CSS articles
www.mezzoblue.com/archives/css/ - CSS articles
css-discuss.incutio.com - for a big CSS resource
www.csscreator.com
cssvault.com - with a gallery of CSS styled designs
www.csszengarden.com - same page, many designs, all zen

Accessibility, Standards and Usability

To test the accessibility of your web site try using the onlineBobby accessibilty scan at Watchfire. Or Lift at UsableNet is a fantastic accessibility testing program.

www.w3.org/WAI/ - the Web Accessibility Initiative
www.gawds.org - the Guild of Accessible Web Designers
www.evolt.org - for web articles
www.webaim.org - Web Accessibility in Mind
www.diveintoaccessibility.org
www.accessify.com
www.webstandards.org
www.thenetplace.com/accessibility.php - for accessibility articles at the Net Place>
www.thenetplace.com/standards.php - for standards articles at the Net Place
www.thenetplace.com/usability.php - for usability articles at the Net Place

World Wide Web Consortium

Like a parent site, www.w3.org is where to go if you are looking for the specifications of a web page.