Vassar Web Design

Best practices day. Check!

by Tim Brown

Just wrapped up an all-day meeting about Best Practices, including a little time for discussion about HTML5, CSS3, and support for IE6. Here are today’s major decisions and accomplishments.

• We’ll use the sprint halfway meeting for BP chats (meet once/sprint instead of once/week as we used to)
• Deprecated old BP checklist; BPs now served by SAMPLE SITE ADVANCED, wiki, and Campfire chats, with blog posts providing the glue; Best Practices Queue page in Backpack is a good place to toss ideas
• Component samples: SAMPLE SITE ADVANCED folders (we made two today: Flash, Tabs)
• Component versioning: in SAMPLE SITE ADVANCED, versions inside a “versions” folder, indexed on component page (just an idea right now)
• Identified high/low traffic sites for Universal IE6 candidacy, agreed that we’d begin using UIE6 (with a “how to” BP chat next sprint)
• Could not quite articulate a general strategy for bringing sites up to BP; it depends on a variety of factors, and may change altogether depending on how old we let sites live to be
• Figured we should wait on HTML5 until there’s more support; useHTML5 for one fairly low-traffic site to gauge impact on older browsers (possibly ColRel Editorial Style Guide, with all of its various content)
• Agreed to try and share experiences about advanced CSS selectors we had rarely used before, but can now use freely because we will drop visual support for IE6