I can’t tell you how much fun I have when challenged by the “standards” crowd to implement something with the Spry framework for AJAX. At the end of last week, I was privy to a conversation that Stephanie Sullivan was having with one of her fellow WaSP colleagues concerning Spry’s ability to be completely unobtrusive. In other words, to provide a completely standards-based, bare bones version of the page free of any extraneous semantic markup and/or JavaScript, and then to progressively enhance the page with AJAX functionality only at runtime for JavaScript-enabled user agents.

As you may have read here, I covered this technique in chapter 6 of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3 using not only the ability to externalize the JavaScript code which initializes the Spry widgets (a Spry Menubar and Sliding Panels widget), but also dynamically assigning the Spry attributes such as “spry:region” via the same external JavaScript. The issue was raised, however, that there was still some unnecessary code in the page – from a standards’ viewpoint. To understand this, let’s take a look at a simple accordion in Spry. (more…)

Well, it’s that time again. The popular and highly educational Web Design World Conference is making a stop next week in Chicago. There will be tons of great content and sessions, including talks by industry giant Jeffrey Veen of Google (and, Jeffrey is a giant – I know, because I was suffering from neck pain after craning my neck to talk with him last week at An Event Apart in New Orleans!), the always entertaining and informative Jared Spool, CSS luminary and allaround good guy Dan Rubin and my good buddy Joe Marini (even though he works for Microsoft now, I still love to hang out with him).

And on Day 3 of the conference, Stephanie Sullivan and I will be reprising our Adobe CS3 Workshop with over 6 hours of everything you ever wanted to know about Photoshop for the web, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, CSS, Flash and Flash video. Judging from the feedback when we conducted this all day workshop at WDW in Boston earlier in the year, it’s well worth the visit. And… we might just show something new this time around! ;-)

If you’re planning on attending, or you can convince your boss that you really, really need to head to Chicago next week, be sure to use the code “SPREW”, and of course to say hello – I’ll be the one with the beer in his hand at the opening night party – shouldn’t be too hard to find me! Cheers!

I want to make sure that all of my friends out there are aware of a brand new seminar series that will be kicking off in Los Angeles at the end of the month. We’ve partnered with some good friends, MOGO Media, founded by the amazing Mordy Golding, to get folks up-to-speed on designing cutting edge, standards-based web sites with Dreamweaver CS3 and CSS. The class will be taught by Brian Wood, who is an accomplished book author and an Adobe Certified Creative Suite Master.

“Our goal in presenting this one-day course on web publishing with Adobe is to help creative pros become confident with moving their content to the web,” said Mordy Golding. “By learning the benefits of CSS, these workshops teach designers how they can extend their knowledge of the Adobe toolset and get started with Dreamweaver.”

Whether you are just diving in, or you’ve been swimming web site laps for years but still get tired in the CSS end of the pool, the series is sure to offer tons of great tips, tricks and innovations. If you’re in, or can travel to, any of the following cities, I’m sure that you’ll have loads of fun and walk away inspired:

May 29—Los Angeles, Ritz Carlton Marina Del Rey
June 4—New York City, Marriott Marquis Hotel
June 17—Washington D.C., Walter Washington Convention Center
June 24—Chicago, Chicago City Centre Hotel
June 26—Boston, Marriott Copley Place

You can get more information and register for the events on MOGO’s Seminar site. And be sure to tell them that “Greg sent you”! Cheers!