The Cafes » Web Development

CSS has finally caught on among web designers. It’s rare to find anyone advocating table based layout anymore. Sadly many designers, including not a few famous ones, have simply adapted the CSS meme to their old bad habits. They are now producing CSS layouts that are almost as inflexible and inaccessible as the table based layouts they replace, in a few cases even more so.

The first and most fundamental principle of accessible web design is the content comes first. This is both figurative and literal. In the figurative sense, the content matters more than the presentation and the design. However, in the literal sense the content comes first and all the presentational gewgaws, navigation widgets, sidebars, and the like come later.
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Jonathan,

You almost had me sold since I’m shopping for a new server anyway, but
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As you probably know using Google maps on a web site requires a custom API key that is locked to the web site. For example, my key is ABQIAAAANzhjmjn_aQro8IDfoVHCkxT-n61mIiazNPHwWTk3s75Ar5J1YhQDxyPhUR-O4Nfg_1iRn1pAUseY4g and every page that uses a Google map includes this script element:

<script src= "http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=1&key=ABQIAAAANzhjmjn_aQro8IDfoVHCkxT-n61mIiazNPHwWTk3s75Ar5J1YhQDxyPhUR-O4Nfg_1iRn1pAUseY4g" type="text/javascript"></script>

I’m not giving away any secret by telling you that. You could figure out the same thing using View Source. However. the key is locked to the web site. If you try using that key on a different site, the map won’t load.
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I’ve been thinking about getting an Intel Mac to replace the old Linux box that serves this site. However, a lot of software hasn’t been ported yet, and Rosetta emulation is slow. How much server relevant software is yet native?

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About a year ago I launched a The Cafes with some fanfare to host shorter writings on a variety of subjects that didn’t already fit into Cafe au Lait or Cafe con Leche. That site was a partial response to my feelings about the shortcomings of a lot of existing weblog management and CMS software. In several ways I think it’s still superior to a lot of what’s out there, including the WordPress engine that hosts Mokka mit Schlag. But not in all ways.

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