ShopTalk Show - SoundSage

This week it’s another RAPIDFIRE! We talked about (roughly in order):

Q & A

2:23 I recently ran the W3C Markup Validation tool on one of my WordPress site. I was amazed to see how many errors came up… Do you have any suggestions for validating my markup?
9:19 Should I learn Haml or Emmet to speed up writing HTML?
14:47 Do you know of any good tutorials or resources that explain how to set up a workflow for WordPress using GitHub for version control? (Yes: The Lodge at CSS-Tricks and WP Migrate DB Pro)
23:40 I was wondering if you know of a way to synchronize break points values between different assets? Is there a way to set the breakpoint values in some way so that both Sass and JS can load them in and use them?
27:45 Whenever I use SVGs as a background-image and add the background-size property, the SVG in Firefox is blurry. I’ve tried fixing this several ways, including making the width and height of the SVG 100%, but that doesn’t seem to work in every case. Have you ever run into this problem?
30:48 Do you follow any specific style guides for personal/team coding? ( Yes: Sass Style Guide)
37:15 Sponsor: CSS Summit Use the discount code “SHOPTALK” for 20% off!
39:48 I was wondering if you had any advice for what should go into every .htaccess file – do you have a standard that gets put into every project? I heard some talk about the one included in the HTML5 boilerplate, and took a look, but a lot of it didn’t really mean anything to me, so I wasn’t sure what to take…or should I just take it all?
46:32 I have a question for you: What is the best way to create column layouts in CSS?
56:15 In order to use em and rem better, I declare html {font-size: 62.5%;} so that the root size is 10px. This allows me to do mathematical calculations much easier and faster. (For eg., a 15px font size can be declared as font-size: 1.5rem;). However, this doesn’t work when it comes to using em in media queries. I’ve noticed that for these to work correctly, I have to revert back to the default 16px. So a min-width: 1000px will be the inconsistent min-width: 62.5em instead of 100em. Do you guys know of a fix for this? Should I even be using em for media queries?
61:35 In one of your previous episodes you talked a little about nginx, and I was hoping you could talk more about that. In the little that I read, it seems like it’s much faster than Apache. But are there any catches? Or is it a no-brainer to switch from Apache?
66:56 Could you talk about using Normalize with Compass on Sass? What is your workflow for getting started?