Nate Koechley

Rules-based Design

Rules-based design is where we want to get to. It’s what the web should be. Consistent rules, not consistent designs.

Here’s a good intro:

Grids are used to balance the design of books, ads, posters, and paintings. They are also often used in web design, particularly when it is executed via HTML tables or Flash. The grid has a long and noble history in the design of two dimensional media. But it is not the only way to design web pages and it is certainly not the webbiest way.

A modular approach, wherein the display of each element on the page is controlled by rules that take serial adjacency into account, may be better suited to the web as a medium. We call this approach Rules-Based Design. Instead of basing size and positioning according to an inflexible grid, rules-based design takes the environment of each element into account before determining how that element should be displayed. As a simple example, a header may have one margin when preceded by an image, and a different margin when preceded by a paragraph.

Read the full post here: Zeldman

Venkman JavaScript Debugger

If you’re writing Javascript, you should seriously consider becoming familiar with the Venkman JS Debugger. Many people swear by this thing. It’s pretty fabulous.

Read more about it here http://mozilla.org/projects/venkman/ and look at the development tree here http://www.hacksrus.com/~ginda/venkman/

More notes:

• Svend Tofte has put together a comprehensive Venkman
  tutorial called
  “Learning the JavaScript debugger Venkman.”
  It leads you step-by-step through nearly all of the features in Venkman, and it’s got lots of excellent screenshots to match the text. Plan to take a break and stretch in the middle though, it’s a long one :)
• Check out Netscape Devedge’s new article, Using Breakpoints in Venkman.
• Venkman now supports a tabbed view container, read the post titled

  “Venkman gets tabbed views” for more information.

• I noticed this pro-Venkman post on
  a Microsoft™ usenet group the other day. Funny thing is,
  it’s not on my news server anymore. Was it cancelled, or is this just
  a newsfeed hiccup? The world may never know :)
• Read about extending Venkman in this
  netscape.public.mozilla.jsdebugger post titled
  “overriding filenames in the loaded scripts view”.
• Netscape DevEdge has posted an
  Introduction to the JavaScript Debugger.

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