The merit of semantic markup and web standards for websites cannot be over-emphasized. While it is fairly obvious why this can vastly benefit website design, few realise that web applications can gain the most out of this potent mix.

For starters, the separation of content and presentation means that developers and designers can play well together. When the developers take effort to output XHTML code in a semantic way, giving meaning to the page content, the designers can easily take this away and apply presentation styles to format and control how each part of the pages get rendered. Gone are the days when table or list formatting need to be hard-coded or couple tightly to the application code. By strictly producing content in terms of what they signify (Is that a data table? Or is that best perceived as a list?), developers can defer presentation decisions until the designers can work on them. This also opens up possibilities for content on the page to be reused in a multitude of ways.

Another cool benefit is that different stylesheets can be developed to control how the application screens can be rendered on different media, such as on-screen or on paper. Much like the argument for websites, data and content displayed on these screens can be easily transformed or omitted depending on what’s needed on screen (such as fancy graphics and colours to demarcate areas) and the bare essentials for output destined for printing on black-and-white printers. Not to mention if access by mobile devices are also on the plate, but you get the picture.

In fact, we have been doing this for a while for our own web applications, and this has smoothen our development process where the application screens can be easily skinned to a new look or to blend with existing branding. You can get the screens rendered to a format suitable for print without too much effort (contrast with the traditional way of coding up additional “printer-friendly” scripts). All in all, this method of developing web applications has made it flexible for developers and designers to focus on what they do best and allow for clear separation of tasks. For the target users, what they benefit most is better experience that comes with smaller downloads (verbose presentation rules are left out of the content codes) and better looking screens. What’s not to love about this?

Two more new copycats found running in the wild. Thanks to our visitors for letting us know.

Copycat No 1: Site taken down as the owner gracefully explained his situation to us. All the best Dan.

This one is the ultimate, Copycat No 2: Taken down but we are getting very tired of hearing the same old “I’m just trying out the CSS…” or “I’m learning how to build tabless website” story.

Seriously, if you bother to change the graphic and text, I’m sure you can put in some effort to change the look and feel of it. Or put a big text that says “Training Session - rightful owner, thepixelage” and don’t put them under your actual domain name!

Have you ever imagine how it is going to look like if our prospective client where to stumble upon your website first? We will end up being accused of stealing someone else’s design.

This is not a joking matter. Do keep in mind that this website is a business website, not a personal website. So if you want to learn CSS or learn how to build a website, take some effort to at least make it look like you are doing that.

Real ONE International is a professional real estate solutions company specialising in project marketing. One of their current focus is in Australian real estate. Interestingly, the people behind Real ONE International were in fact the real estate agents who got us our current office space. As they started building their new business, they realise the importance of a good website for their business. So after talking to us, they decided they were ready to take the dive, and the website was born.

Real ONE International:

The responsibility of a realtor is no longer seen as one who produces good old fashioned sales talk. Through information technology and networking, it has become increasingly important that a professional realtor is able to provide a total solutions concept whereby the customer is comfortably settled down when ’space becomes home’. Real ONE International has the vision and mission to achieve this through total sales staff management, market research, integrated marketing campaigns, expansive database, product knowledge and prospect empathy.

Since the launch, they have gotten much positive feedback about the professional look of the website and have seen an increase in the amount of enquiries through the internet. End result? They are extremely delighted with the website and we are happy to know that we have ourselves another satisfied customer!

Visit their website if you want to find out more about properties in Australia.

One of our blog objectives is to introduce our clients website, like a mini introduction or promotion for our clients. To start off, we introduce YS Productions:

YS Productions is founded and headed by Yvonne Suberamaniam who has been in the event business for over 12 years. YS Productions’ area of expertise includes corporate client management for all forms of special events ranging from corporate meetings to incentive events and staging of gala, awards and launch events.

To learn more about YS Productions please click here.

We have used a number of PHP frameworks for our PHP projects, both internally and for clients, from roll-our-own frameworks to open-source frameworks. A few years back, we fell instantly in love when we discovered Mojavi for its simplicity and solid implementation. Then the deal became even sweeter when symfony was born. To put it plainly, symfony is to PHP what Rails is to Ruby. It takes the best of Mojavi, Rails, Propel, Ajax and tons of other frameworks and best practices and rolls them into a very effective, practical and well-documented framework. Since its launch, symfony has built up quite a large following, which goes to show how good the framework really is.

We believe symfony can only get better. One of the new additions to the symfony website is a Code Snippets section, which is a code repository for fellow symfony users to post fragments of codes for popular tasks. This is definitely a great resource for users of the framework which we have not seen elsewhere before. And the developers have even released the source code to Snippets so that new users can take the code and learn how to develop such a web application on their own. That’s the spirit that really draws us in to symfony.

Since we started using symfony in a few of our projects, we have also started building up some code fragments that we will readily share with the community. For starters, here’s one on how to send batch emails through symfony.

Many frameworks have come and gone, but symfony has managed to garner a positive reputation for being practical, straightforward and fun to use. Add to that the fact that it is the most well-documented framework in the PHP landscape, symfony is definitely here to stay for a long time.