Bananas managed to do some websites with the ‘modern’ stuff of 2011. Overall i was impressed and if your html fits nicely in-between the divs things should go without too much bother and doing xhtml strict is worth the pain in the past. However….
Jquery plugins move too fast, depreciating, or have no documents for them (jqgrid) without a licence which makes using jqgrid a bit of guesswork thing, (that’s probably in dojo now). Otherwise the plugin traps the of using some html feature you want excluded by your existing code. Plugins are a bit hit and miss, more fail than aid.
Debugging jquery ui is not fun, jquery does not like stylesheets being reloaded so some php / perl stuff had to have the css removed. A consistent ajax interface is one the great things about jquery which does need some work for more than one form per page with a specific instruction.
Something that seems undocumented in jquery is that once loaded (a), and you can load new code file (b) into that ‘framework’ means you don’t need to define jquery in (b), but if you load (b) outside of (a) the code will not run. That was interesting to observe and deal with after testing and into use.
Server side not much changed, i used some new json and some php for serving and liked the result.
Validating as html 5 [or what we think it will be] with all this ajax stuff was interesting, Css styling is certainly less of a skill and i needed less of it than in the past with themes.
The disabled lobby seem by accident to be a bit more accommodating with some better tools (yes there still crippled) for those of us with eyes.ears and nerve endings rather than having to hear the bitching about how hard horrid the web is to that community without examples and tools without hiring millions of midget testers without specific limbs and buying tools of dubious value. I prefer it the other way and only found these tools by accident at the last minute so with html 5 and all this other stuff its a low priority not that we sell disabled products to only disabled clients.
I am sure one of will be incompatible with the other at some stage.
Since html5 is a long way off, meta data handling is a bit weird, and with apple patenting bits of the spec, and the usual squabbles of css standards (ogg or mp3 patent rows) i seem to have reached a point where the page looks ‘samish’ and does not crash a browser used by people. Probably a good point to say i win and call it day until the next design refresh.
Back to the “DOES HE HAVE SUGAR IN HIS TEA” people it seems that much of divs and themes seem to challenge the community with issues but i am not going to bother with that since i will end up with a webpage from the era of 1995.
Some of jquery stuff still seems a little pointless – progressbar, and dynamic updates unless you know a lot about cached/connection speeds/things to load then it seems a little vague to use now.
That leaves the mobile site which despite being ok standards wise is not ok for the phones of the current. So not everything is well but time and jquery mobile might fix. It seems we are all stuck with mutliple sites even in 2012.
