Semantics before anything else

My first rule in styling websites or applications is to style semantics over anything else.

1. First use as much of the agreed upon tags and properties that the latest HTML spec gives you
2. Extend this with microformats or schema.org-vocabularies and what else you can find that is an (pseudo-)standard for semantic markup
3. Finally, if no matching semantically rich descriptors can be found, try to think of future proof names for your elements that may be reusable. Think "metadata div(vision)”, "(search) result" (you may style result here and add another more specific styling for search results).

Style the semantical markup. Semantics is about meaning, and by defining your content's meaning in html and highlighting this meaning with your style brings you consistency from the start. This is not only nice to you as a maintainer of code, but also to your audience. It leads to consistent, predictable behaviors.

The counter movem…

Introducing Workbook, a new rubygem

Sorry non-techies, this is really for (ruby-)techies.

For some time I've been working on a ruby gem that helps me on my project work, and may also help other ruby programmers, to work with table imports and exports more easily. Although there are other gems that allow you to read and write to different formats, of which the roo-gem is probably the most well know, I was particularly interested in writing Excel files based on templates.

I wanted to offer my clients more user-friendly Excel files that used some of the more advanced functionality of modern Spreadsheets (AutoFilter, printer styles) that couldn’t be offered by just manipulating styles and formatting using the existing rubygems. Which got me started to think about creating templates to start from, instead of starting from scratch using one of the Gems. Using another Excel file, however, wasn’t as easy as expected and here is where the Workbook gem comes in: to make that easier. Ad…