Web design phlosophy

My philosophy on web design is pretty simple. Use the appropriate tool for the appropriate job. In other words use HTML for what it is good at use CSS for what it is good at and use whatever else for whatever it is best at. I hate it when web pages use the wrong thing for the wrong job, such as using JavaScript to open a link in a new window or making the entire interface in FLASH! pretty much I think flash is only good for things like video and games; if its not one of those don't use flash! I absolutely hate the use of flash for any kind of interface and I will leave a site if I see flash used in this way. ok so that is my rant about flash. Essentially my philosophy is use HTML for content, use CSS to make it look pretty, use PHP/JS/rubby/whatever to do interface stuff that can't be done with either HTML or CSS, and avoid flash at all costs. Okay so this part isn't really Web design per say, but how else could I complain about JS links and flash...

I'm not an artist so I'm not very good with the look of a page but I do think it is important to have a page that doesn't look like crap ( you may think that it is strange that I say this because my blog looks like crap right now. Don't worry I plan on fixing that.). A lot of people want there pages to look the same on every computer that they are viewed on, and some will go to any extreme to achieve this (flash). As you probably already know that is stupid and pointless because not only does it not work but it makes your page look bad and in some cases unusable by certain people. If you don't believe me on that last on try using most websites with a resolution above 1280X1024. Many of these problems are the results of coders using hard sizes (pixels); so that the page can't resize based on resolution. Of course this is a very easy thing to fix, use percents for widths/heights and ems for text sizes etc.

A while ago I made a simple test website that uses these principles so that the page works at virtually any resolution. The colors are random so don't send me emails to complain about them. The only problem with this page are the images (especially the one on top) but I think with a lot more work I can also fix this. I think I may be able to use svg images and PHP to resize the images depending on the viewer's resolution. I haven't even begun to work on this (I don't know PHP) but I have plans to do it with in the next year. Tell me if you have any problems with that site. I have tried it on everything form my PSP to a 30" apple cinema display (in a store). That cinema display had a resolution of 2560X1600 so apple's own website was unreadable because it has a fixed width and turning up font size was useless (try it you'll understand), however my test site worked just fine and was very readable. So as Wikimedia says "Don't be a dick" make you pages usable and friendly.

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