The series of posts on Starting Good CSS Habits begins here.

Now that we have work on improving our HTML in the previous articles, we are ready to start applying some CSS to the page. We will begin by discussing text and fonts.

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The series of posts on Starting Good CSS Habits begins here.

Christoph Wiese, a friend who already has good CSS habits, made some good points I forgot to put in the last post. Before we keep going, it is worth going over them.

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I am often surprised by how much bad HTML is out there. Especially HTML that does not use Cascading Style Sheets yet. CSS has been around for over 10 years now! It was added to HTML in 1997 and well-supported (at least reasonably) in web browsers by 2000. I think the reason many people never upgraded is that they either learned HTML before 2000, they learned it from sources (friends, coworkers, internet, legacy code) from before CSS, or they learned just enough to get a site online and never bothered learning the “right way”.

Legacy sites are not always worth the trouble to update—I know I have plenty of old code still floating around out there—so their flaws are understandable. But some folks are carrying around their bad HTML habits still. If you ask them to code a page they probably know that frames should not be used, so they use a table to layout the page instead. They might use <center> when they want text to center. I see bad code and misused tags all the time. You can “view-source” on many major websites and see bad code by people who should know better.

If that sounds like you or someone you know, keep reading, I will try to help you break your bad habits and start good ones.

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Save the Developers! is hoping to make the lives of web developers easier, while also improving the experience for web users. Their current campaign is Say No To IE 6! which is an attempt to rid the world of Internet Explorer 6.

How? By getting developers to put a bit of JavaScript on their website. Developers can either link to their external JavaScript file or download the script and host it themselves. (I added it to this site.)

If the JavaScript detects the the user’s browser is IE 6, then a small window appears suggesting that they upgrade. Clicking takes the user to their website which contains links to the latest versions of IE 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

They acknowledge that it may take awhile, maybe even a few years, but their goal is to reduce IE 6 usage as much as possible to help usher it into permanent retirement. I think that’s a goal all web developers share.

It is simple, effective and—best of all—won’t bother most users because they won’t see it. Their website will let you preview the effect, even if you don’t have IE 6. If you don’t like the look, just modify the JavaScript to fit your site design. If you don’t want users leaving your site, you can adapt the JavaScript so that the window links to an upgrade page on your own site.

Remember: Every time you upgrade a browser, a developer gets his wings.

IBM has a nice summary article explaining some of the changes that will be coming when HTML 5 is finally released. HTML 5 (also know as “Web Applications 1.0″) will add new tags for page structure, block and inline elements, embedded media and interactivity, while still maintaining decent backwards compatibility for HTML-4 browsers.

Full technical specs for HTML 5 can be found on the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group website.

Adobe is putting on a multi-city tour called CS3: The Creative License Conference to demo some of their latest CS3 software offerings (Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign) as well as to give design and workflow tutorials and tips.

The tour will take place from mid-May through June in eight cities: Chicago, Austin, San Jose, Toronto, Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. The first six cities are one-day events while the LA and NYC conferences are two-days long and definitely offer the best value of the bunch.