There’s a ton of new things that I’m working on in my new job on the IE Dev Marketing team but one of them is a 3 part reference poster for HTML/CSS/JS. I’m trying to figure out the correct content and the like for these reference posters and using a ton of things as inspiration. However, I’m kinda at a head smacking keyboard point so I thought I’d ask for help.

What would you like to see on a set of reference posters that we give away at conferences, user groups and the like?

Chances are that you’ll see one of these posters being given away at an event near you sometime soon so it’s in your best interest to chip in and give me some ideas. 🙂

I really don’t want to end up with something as messy and text heavy as some of the reference posters that I’ve run across (not pointing fingers but http://www.visibone.com/html/charts.html…).

First I saw the posters up at HTML5 Poster – http://html5poster.com/. Those are beautiful and I think that people like them but I’m really leaning towards something that would be useful in addition to beautiful so that people would keep them up and use them for a long time to come.

One of the first semi technical inspirations was poster that was part of a kickstarter – http://www.html5blog.org/2012/09/01/the-best-html5-poster/ but I looked at the kickstarter and it failed to raise the desired $4000 in funding so I’m not sure what that tells me.

The next one that I saw was from XHTML-Labs which you can check out at http://www.xhtml-lab.com/html5poster. There’s a similar one for CSS (https://gumroad.com/l/css-cheat-sheet). Reality is that these are not a new concept (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cbowen/archive/2007/12/09/got-tech-posters.aspx). I’m not ashamed (well, not that ashamed) to say that I had the Silverlight 1.1 Developer Reference Poster (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=10423) on my wall at one point. But I started thinking about that and wondering if that’s valuable. Would you like a reference of all of the HTML tags possible and their associated attributes?

Or would you prefer something that was a little more targeted at the new stuff so assumed that you know the basics of the head, body, ul, ol, li and the like? Or is that even useful?

I also saw the SitePoint HTML Reference poster – http://www.sitepoint.com/have-you-got-your-free-sitepoint-html5-reference-poster/. That one goes through and shows a number of little useful tidbits and how they were built. Thoughts on that? It breaks down the idea of three posters being HTML, CSS and JS but we could continue to add to it over time and it could be more than three posters and end up at 10-20-* depending on how many little ideas we come up with. What I don’t like about this is that this seems like a LOT more work than the simple reference ala the ole Silverlight reference poster that I used to have.

There’s also the periodic elements poster but AlaraMills.com at http://alaramills.com/store. It’s definitely a unique take on the HTML spec. It’s not something I’m going to do but I really like the take. My problem there is that then how do I take it to JavaScript and CSS as well.

So I put it to you, what kind of poster would you find valuable/desirable? What would you hang on your wall and refer to?

Please use the comments below or if you want to send me a not privately, ping me on twitter (@joshholmes) or email me at [my first name].[my last name]@[where I work].com (hopefully you can figure out the email without too much trouble…).

Thanks!!!