Simon Willison’s Weblog

Girlfriend as a case study

I’ve been helping my girlfriend recreate her site using CSS and structural markup. She’s new to web design and has been taking to CSS like a duck to water—as a veteran of Microsoft Word globally defined styles come to her naturally and she took very little time to cotton on to the importance of seperating presentation from content. I’ve shown her tables as well but she isn’t really interested as she sees CSS as a much better solution for general presentation. I’m hoping to help run an HTML/XHTML/CSS training course at the University early next year with a heavy emphasis on structural markup, standards compliance and accessibility so it’s great to have a guinea pig to play with :)

I also got her started with PHP, which she is relishing as a far more pleasant alternative to coding things in Java (the language used on our course at Uni). Her site already features a simple shoutbox system and random quotes engine (both written by her) and she has plans for a whole load of other features. Pretty good going for someone with less than 5 hours of overall PHP experience.