Special thanks to Dana Weitz of the GUILD for today's presentation summaries -

Kevin

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The first speaker at the November meeting was Andy Rutledge, Creative Director for Net Success, speaking about Web Standards. Andy passed along many coding do's and dont's as well as a number of helpful resources. His pursuit of the highest ethical and moral standards in web-related activities shows his committment to excellence. Web standards include accessibility and quality as well as several other factors for success.

The main points in creating good documents for the web are:

* A valid document type declaration
* Semantically correct markup
* Separating content from presentation
* Accessible content under a variety of conditions and technologies

Valid document types of the highest standard are html 4.0.1 strict, and xhtml 1.0 strict. The W3C website has a code validator that will check your web pages for compliance with recommended standards. Warning - this can be a truly eye-opening experience, but it will help you to be a better coder.

The question of tables came up - i.e. should we use them or not? Andy's view is one I have heard many times and agree with, tables serve a purpose and that is for tabular data. For everything else use css whenever possible. It is tempting to use tables as a fallback position, but if you can wean yourself away from tables and start using css instead to position your elements, you will be a better coder, and your pages will be cleaner and more accessible.

Things to remember when coding:

* Not all browsers behave the same
* Not all users have a visual browser
* Not all users use a mouse
* Not all users have plugins, or the plugin you want them to have
* Not all users have javascript or css enabled

Of course you want to reach the widest possible audience, so if you code to the highest standards all the time you have the best chance of successfully reaching your target audience. Web standards can be an overlooked area when doing web design or development, and one can be tempted to think it doesn't matter if you only code for yourself. However this is not a good practice and is not fair to the end user, the client, or to yourself. If you code to the highest web standards you provide:

* a good online experience for the end user
* quality code that is standardardized, accessible, and inclusive
* a quality product for the client (regardless if the client knows or cares about standards, you should care)
* something you can be proud of today and in the future.

Andy's presentation is available online at meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/. The document is a slide show based entirely on xhtml, css, and javascript. Check it out and you will see how quality and standards are maintained while retaining functionality and visual aesthetics.

The second speaker, Gene McCullagh, talked about the Adobe product - Bridge. Bridge comes as part of the CS Suite, or with any of the individual Adobe applications. Bridge is basically a file browser/organizer with a lot of cool bells and whistles.

The Bridge interface consists of palettes and windows, and allows you to move between various Adobe products in a logical and efficient manner. In one window you see your files and folders similar to Windows Explorer. A preview palette lets you preview your image, and even resize the preview. The right side is a lightbox that shows selected images and information about the images. You can add information (metadata) to your images, rate them, color code them, and view them in a variety of ways. You can save your files in different ways as well; by versioning, or as part of a file group. You can save a group of files from different applications as a group. When you reopen that group, Bridge not only opens the files, but also opens all the applications you were using with those files, for example Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

Some other features of Bridge are:

* renaming entire folders at one time
* dragging and dropping to and from various applications
* linking to partnered services on the web
* a slide show feature that includes editing tools
* filters
* lots of customizable preferences

Distributed cache files allow you to save the metadata for a file in the same location as the file. Then if you save a copy of the file to another location (say to a disk for archiving), you save the metadata with it.

Bridge has a compact mode that minimizes the window to the lower corner of your screen, leaving more real estate for other applications. In fact the compact mode allows Bridge to function like a palette in another application. An ultra-compact mode further minimizes the Bridge interface.

The Bridge Center includes sections like an RSS reader, recent folders, recent files, saved file groups, version cue management, synchronization, and help. If you have a copy of Bridge and you haven't tried it yet, you may want to crack it open and take a look. Even if you don't have the entire Adobe Suite, the file management options offer new ways to organize your images and related files.