Web Standards
This is a rant, for which I will make no apologies. The wonderful thing about web applications is that they free you from being tied down to a specific platform. A well written web application is acce...
D. Keith Robinson is Sick of Web Standards, and to a certain extent, so am I. Like Keith, I'm not sick of standards themselves; I've been using them for over two years now and couldn't conceive of dev...
I have a whole bunch of gripes about Internet Explorer, but my personal favourite is the way it will render a document served with a text/plain Content-Type header if it thinks the file might contain ...
Via Phil Ringnalda, the W3C have published three useful articles on HTML internationalisation techniques. In classic W3C style, the boilerplate and verbiage at the start of the documents threatens to ...
John Allsopp: Message To The Messengers - Props to the old school:
Of late, with the latest version of Style Master released, bedded down, and well received, I've been a little nostalgic about the ...
Andrei Herasimchuk:
There seems no automatic way to keep a site valid with web standards unless you close it off to the rest of the world to contribute to it. I will not do that anytime soon.
...
Yuck:
<img src="images/blank.gif" alt="blank space (graphical place holder)"width="55" height="5">
Via WaSP. When the 13th International World Wide Web Conference gets it this badly wrong ...
I decided to hold off commenting on the news that Lockergnome were dropping their CSS layout in favour of a table based alternative until I had seen the new design for myself. I figured that they were...
Robert Scoble went to lunch with the head of the Internet Explorer team - yes, they still exist, despite having released nothing but security patches for over two years.
Robert says that the team i...
Here's an interesting topic for a conference: PHP and Web Standards, to be held in Manchester from February 20th to the 24th. I've devoted a lot of time and energy to combining the two for this blog -...
cgi_buffer is voodoo magic for Perl, Python and PHP scripts that automatically handles a bunch of bandwidth saving HTTP tricks such as Content-Length headers (which enable persistent connections), ETa...
This email to the css-discuss mailing list does a great job of describing the confusion and frustration that still confronts traditional web developers who are only just starting out on the road to ma...
The Sprint PCS site has relaunched, using XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS. It's another great example of a mostly web standards compliant commerical/corporate; there are a few validation errors thanks ...
Launched today by Lindows, Nvu is a new project to develop a complete "web authoring system" (aka Dreamweaver/Frontpage style WYSIWYG editor) for the Linux platform. Reading around the marketing hyper...
Well colour me yellow and black, I've just become the latest member of the web standards project! I've been an avid supporter of the web standards movement for over a year now - in fact, my first ever...
How important is the ability to tell the difference between data sent by POST and data sent by GET (i.e in the query string) when developing web applications? Some web frameworks (such as PHP) provide...
A List Apart has unveiled the long awaited redesign, and is celebrating it's third manifestation with three brand new articles.
The redesign is currently being discussed on Webdesign-L, and the gen...
Just spotted in a comment by Drew McLellan on Russell Beattie's Notebook:
I'm comfortable using tables for forms. My point of view is that they are interactive tabular data.
I'd never thought of...
The W3C Validator team are seeking help with the latest version of their validator, dubbed the "Zeldman Made Us Do It!" release. They want people to play with the beta and submit suggestions...
Semantic markup is getting a lot of blog coverage at the moment, following a starter post by Jason Kottke. There's some great content flowing around (Dave Shea, Doug Bowman and Paul Scrivens in partic...
Ian Lloyd: Designing for the future, and the training gap. Ian highlights the frustrations faced by all web standards advocates when trying to encourage their less web-enthused co-workers to take the ...
Congratulations to Eric Meyer on the launch of his new consultancy business, Complex Spiral Consulting (named after his famous css/edge demo). The new company's tag line is "Helping clients improve th...
Shelley Powers: RDF: Ready for Prime Time gives an overview of the many applications and services already deployed that use RDF in some way. Via that article, RDF in Mozilla Docs and RDF in fifty word...
Steve Clay's Private Validator is a really handy tool for people who working on intranet sites who want to be able to run them through the W3C's validator. It's a PHP script which you install on a ser...
Tom Gilder has started a series of posts looking ahead to CSS3. In his first installment, he describes the awesomely powerful ::outside pseudo-element. Using this, CSS3 authors can apply multiple back...
Chances are you've heard this already, but Netscape is no more. MozillaZine are reporting that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what w...
Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path have launched the redesign of the Adaptive Path site. It's well worth exploring: the site looks gorgeous, and is a great example of best practise structural markup, CSS a...
I'm completely stuck on this one. When serving XHTML documents to Mozilla as application/xml+xhtml, the available DOM is for an XML document rather than an HTML document. This means it's missing the d...
Dave Shea is advocating moving forward from Internet Explorer, enhancing pages for more advanced browsers (Mozilla, Opera, Safari) using additional style rules that are hidden from IE by using selecto...
By coincidence, Jeffrey Zeldman just posted something in a similar vein to my previous rant, looking at things from a different angle:
By its recent actions, Microsoft seems to believe that if co...
The Register's coverage of the end of development for IE on the Mac makes some worrying conclusions:
Had Apple worked with inspired vigor since January to improve Safari, users might feel safe wi...
D. Keith Robinson recently launched the redesigned website for the Washington State Drowning Prevention Network. He has written a fascinating account of the development process used for the site, whic...
One of the side-effects of switching my blog to serving pages as application/xhtml+xml to browsers that support it (mainly Gecko engine browsers) was that my blockquote citations script simply stopped...
Dave Shea: The Way Forward:
HTML will die. Today's internet is obsolete, and anyone still coding in HTML 4 is planning the obsolescence of their own code. The big picture says that if, and this i...
I wasn't planning to cover the recent AOL and Microsoft announcements as they've been covered to death elsewhere by people with far more insight than myself, but this third piece of news seems to brin...
Craig Saila: Browser bug swatting:
I've decided it's time to start actively pushing for the browser makers to fix some really annoying CSS bugs. In day-to-day development, I find myself continual...
In The XHTML 100, Evan Goer describes an experiment in which he checked 119 site claiming to be with an XHTML doctype for full compliance with the W3C standards. His test consisted of three parts - a ...
Better structural markup rants than mine: Owen Briggs' classic Design Rant and Craig Saila's Tables or CSS? Choosing a Layout. Incidentally, my rant has sparked some excellent feedback in the comments...
Via the WaSP blog (I wish they would ping Weblogs.com), How to achieve web standards and quality on your web site and List of valid DTDs you can use in your document, both by the W3C QA team. The form...
The alternative W3C buttons on AntiPixel are great. Jamie Zawinsky suggested recreating them in CSS. Stuart Langridge, Marek Prokop, Nick Boalch and Eric Meyer all had a go. Eric even did the Raging ...
Meet The Makers are carrying a great interview with Steve Champeon, author, web standards advocate and founder of the Webdesign-L mailing list (which I re-subscribed to today). Steve's explanation of ...
Marek Prokop has a cunning way of getting Internet Explorer to style <abbr> elements (IE, for reasons unknown, usually ignores their existence both as stylable elements and through the DOM). A c...
Cool - the new Glastonbury Festival website uses a CSS layout! Unfortunately it completely fails to validate as XHTML Transitional, but comes to within an inch of validating as HTML 4.01 Transitional ...
Clearing out some more tabs:
Common HTTP Implementation Problems is a W3C Note describing a whole bunch of best practises for serving up documents and designing URIs.
Iraq-O-Meter and Iraq Body ...
Daniel Glazman's proposal for smarter positioning in CSS (see also this blog entry) makes a lot of sense....
Adrian Holovaty's open email to Staci D. Kramer of Online Journalism Review makes an excellent case for the adoption of web standards by online news sites. It's written in nice, clear non technical te...
The WThRemix contest has posted a list of submitted entries. The contest (to design a new homepage for the W3C) asked entrants to use valid tableless XHTML, CSS and meet WAI accessibility level 1. The...
Craig Saila has a minor rant about HTTP error codes. Did you know that a 410 should be served instead of a 404 when a resource has been deliberately, permanently removed? I didn't....
I don't know how I missed it, but SitePoint have redesigned in funky valid structural XHTML and CSS. I quite like the new look (not so keen on the new logo though) and the navigation is definitely a h...
Leonard Lin on The Folly of Depending on CSS Parsing Bugs:
I would not compensate for CSS rendering bugs by exploiting CSS parsing bugs except as a last resort. Think about it from a standardized t...
Al Sparber makes perfect sense in article from June last year:
There's nothing inherently wrong with using tables to layout a web page. They are great for rapidly deployment sites for clients who...
In-Valids is an enjoyable rant by Joe Clark chastising the big guys on the web for being completely incapable of producing valid HTML....
Also, I know it isn't what Dave was after but I've recreated the front page of Weblogs.com in structural/semantic XHTML and CSS as well. Again, it works fine in Phoenix and IE 6 but probably needs a f...
Dave Winer:
A question for CSS design gurus. What's the best you can do with a table that has three columns like the one on Weblogs.Com. Let's see an example. I'd like the page to look good and l...
A message to clueless website authors is an entertaining and informative rant against browser specific, standards incompliant sites. Via Aquarionics....
When browsing through other site's source code, some of the ugliest HTML occurs when the site uses one of the most basic javascript effects: The image rollover. There are a myriad of these scripts ava...
Aquarion points out a truly moronic "browser upgrade" notice. I especially like Anything larger than 800 x 600 is too large, and the pages do not diosplay [sic] properly....
Dorothea Salo has posted her thoughts on Semantic HTML as well. Dorothea points out that while pre-defined tags (paragraphs, lists and so forth) are well defined it is easy to run in to problems when ...
In repsonse to Mark Pilgrim's Poisoning the envelope, Brian Donovan has expanded upon his opinion that long term web facing content should not be stored as (X)HTML:
Do everything "right" (proper ...
In Who dropped the deat cat into the well? (via Mark Pilgrim), Brian Donovan argues that keeping web site content in (X)HTML is a fundamentally bad idea. I thoroughly disagree. When I started this web...
There's been something of a backlash against "browser upgrade" messages recently, for a variety of reasons. Now Jeffrey Zeldman, the man who brought upgrade messages widespread attention in the first ...
Douglas Bowman provides some background to the new HotBot redesign, which uses CSS for layout and almost but doesn't quite validate. It was all looking great until the HotBot Skins page told me I shou...
In A Touch of Class, Tantek continues his series of tips on writing better semantic markup and then issues a challenge: find related improvements that can be made to his blog. I couldn't find anything...
The W3C have redesigned to use CSS instead of tables (new layout explained here). About time too! It's a shame the site still looks so, well, ugly. I know it's a technical site and it doesn't have to ...
Mark Pilgrim pretty much single handedly killed the discussion thread on syndicating weblog content with XHTML started a few days ago by Anil Dash. Stuart's reply to Mark's post is definitely worth a ...
It seems the W3C have made some changes to their beta validator's XML output option. The bad news is that this has (temporarily) broken my web service interface, but the good news is that the feature ...
Hixie and Aaron Swartz are debating Hixie's infamous Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful on a W3C mailing list. While I am just as guilty of sending XHTML as text/html as anyone else (I've b...
The hack we've all been waiting for: How to hide CSS from OmniWeb. OmniWeb is a Mac browser which understands the @import rule but horribly mangles CSS layouts beyond all repair. Thanks to this hack C...
Stuart points out that the W3C are seeking public approval for their recently published last-call draft of their patent policy. The email address is www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org. Show them your sup...
Douglas Bowman has left Wired, and is striking out on his own with Stop Design, his one man consultancy business. With the Wired redesign Douglas gave a massive and long-awaited boost to the web stand...
And here it is: Flash Satay - Embedding Flash while Supporting Standards. It involves jumping througg a few hoops but the end result is a nice chunk of standards compliant code that can be used to emb...
Jeffrey Zeldman:
The next issue of A List Apart will publish a technique allowing designers to embed Flash movies while adhering to W3C specs and eliminating code bloat. No, really. Watch this spac...
Handy bookmark for bloggers who wish to validate: cleanURL. It gives you the URL of the current page with all &s replaced with &, ready to be posted in to a blog entry. Unescaped ampersand...
Adrian Holovaty has been investigating the content-to-code ratio of various news sites compared to various blogs. Unsurprisingly the blogs win hands down due to the tendancy to use CSS to separate str...
webgraphics have an interesting discussion running about the need for a weblog entry XHTML validator. Dave Lindquist suggests using his JavaScript XML Parser to perform validation on the client side, ...
Zend (the commercial company behind the PHP scripting language) have launched a redesign of Zend.com. My verdict on the new design ... terrible.
Non-standards compliant code and a huge mass of ne...
Craig Saila has launched his latest project, Trade by Numbers, which uses valid code and (Netscape 4 friendly) CSS for layout. The CSS code is worth looking over for the intelligent use of browser hac...
Dorothea has posted two more excellent rants on the subject of ebooks, archiving and the importance of a single standard for master files (as opposed to a single standard for end user files which is a...
As Scott Andrew has noted, the W3C's beta validator is now returning the following warning as part of it's XML output:
This interface is highly experimental and the output *will* change -- probab...
Earlier today I mentioned how useful a web service interface to the new W3C validator would be. Tom Gilder pointed out in the comments that the validator now has an XML interface:
http://validator....
Scott Andrew calls for an XML-RPC or SOAP interface to the new W3C HTML Validator (currently in beta). I've been hoping for something for this like ages - if the W3C don't do it it would be great if s...
I'm writing a simple events calendar system at the moment, and since I always seem to end up making things more complicated than they should actually be I've been investigating using the iCal standard...
Douglas Bowman's weblog is making very interesting reading at the moment. Douglas is responsible for Wired's exciting new design and since the launch has been updating with observations and lessons le...
I'm not sure when it happened, but Opera.com has been redesigned (since the last time I checked the site). The new layout is done with valid XHTML and CSS but is decidedly tabular in appearance, demon...
Dave Winer: What is Tag Soup?
They've already lost the argument. The Web is tag soup. People use blockquotes to indent. Even though the REST folk argue that it's anti-Web to do RPC, people do RPC...
Wired have redesigned, and now boast one of the snazziest CSS layouts on the web. The redesign is explained in A Site for Your Eyes, and has already drawn commentary from Jeffrey Zeldman and Mark Pilg...
Leonard Lin has a new HipTop - a hand-held wireless device for browsing the internet. His description of how well different sites work in the device makes for depressing reading. Blogs constructed wit...
Peter-Paul Koch explains graceful degradation in Fluid Thinking:
Think fluid. The WWW isn't a fixed medium. It's unpredictable. It will do unexpected things to your site, and the best you can do ...
The Bath University Web Standards & Publishing Guide makes interesting reading. They have standardised on HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS level 2, although the actual page that suggests those stand...
Hixie has published the specification for Pingback 1.0. In general the specification is an excellent document, but I'm not entirely happy with the following statement:
HTML and XHTML documents MAY ...
Hixie has submerged himself in Unicode. Stuart muses that the reason Unicode is so (potentially) huge is a legacy of the Y2K problem. I prefer the explanation given in XML in a Nutshell (my current re...
Flash Voodoo's Battle of the Flash Text Editor Components (via Jeremy Allaire) is interesting - the editors are all good, but they all suffer from the same problem in that the code they generate is pr...
Randal Rust has posted an updated version of his excellent CSS forms demo. While exploring Randal's site I stumbled across ALPHABET SOUP: A web designer's journey to standards and accessibility, an ex...
The Incutio XML-RPC Library for PHP (IXR to its friends) now has a forum. The forum is powered by incForum, Incutio's very own forum software written by my colleague Tim....
A comprehensive list of different MIME media types (via Scripting News)....
The Semantic Web: 1-2-3 is an invaluable collection of links to semantic web resources, compiled by Morbus Iff. Morbis is the author of Amphetadesk, an excellent news aggregator which was reviewed fav...
Two gems from Jeffrey Zeldman: Show, don’t sell and Table Layouts, Revisited. An extract from the former:Take credit for what CSS has done. Don’t say: "Web standards did this." Do say: "We’ve se...
Coming soon: Opera 7:
Over one year ago Opera's engineers started working on two separate development branches. One of them later became the successful Opera 6, released in December 2001. The latter ...
Jeffrey Zeldman: "99 percent of Web sites are obsolete". An excellent interview covering web standards and the new techniques they encourage....
Phil Ringnalda is questioning the point of XHTML. The single, huge advantage it has over HTML is that XHTML can be parsed by anything (or any language) with an XML parser. As an example, a few weeks a...
A few more notes on XHTML 2.0. Tom Gilder (who incidentally has written an excellent series of tips on accessible scripting) has pointed out that the <dfn> tag is part of HTML4 and corrected my ...
The W3C have published a working draught of XHTML 2.0. Since the Changes from XHTML 1.1 pages doesn't appear to have been written yet, here are a few of the most notable differences I've spotted so fa...
Confused about the difference between W3C Notes, Working Drafts, Candidate Recommendations, Public Recommendations and normal Recommendations? So was I, until I found this handy list of definitions on...
I've been messing around with CSS today, trying to convert this page to use standards compliant CSS and XHTML while keeping the overall look and feel. My efforts so far can be seen here - I've knocked...
Tim Luoma on thelist poined out this table, which details the media types that can be used when serving XHTML documents. The table shows that XHTML 1.1 should not be served with a text/html Content-Ty...
Mark Pilgrim has made his first update since finishing his accessibility series a week ago. He has launched a new site design (as previewed on css-discuss) in an attractive shade of blue, and posted...
The ODP require you to display an attribution on any page that reuses ODP data. The recommended attribution fails to validate as XHTML, so I created an XHTML compliant alternative which looks visually...
Browser Specifications:This document attempts to explain why forward-compatibility matters, and why we, and our clients, should carefully consider the browser specifications of every project. ...
A member of KPMG's web team responded to my query about Mozilla support (sent via their online contact form using IE because the site was unusable in Mozilla) and informed me that a new site is on the...
I have Mozilla, Netscape 4, Internet Explorer and Opera installed on my Windows PC. I use Mozilla for browsing and the other three for testing. It turns out that all four browsers can be loaded with a...
I've seen a few questions on various forums and mailing lists asking if there is a way of using target="blank" on links in XHTML Strict without running in to a validation error. I've put together an e...
Fantastic news for the web standards movement: Lycos Europe goes XHTML and CSS for layout (via Zeldman and the W3C evangelism mailing list). The new layout can be seen here - at the time of writing it...
Things I learnt today part one: Nested lists in XHTML are possible, but you can't just put a list inside another list. You have to nest the nested list in a list item. References: W3Schools XHTML diff...
MACCAWS is a group of web professionals dedicated to:
Promoting education and understanding of the benefits of standards compliance from a business perspective;
Convincing business and industry lead...
New article on Evolt: DVB-HTML a new standard?. The article describes DVB-HTML, a new standard being developed to allow the next wave of digital televisions to access internet content. The good news i...
I just found a nice, clear and above all short explanation of the Semantic Web at The W3C's Technology & Society Domain page:
The Semantic Web seeks to augment the current Web of linked documen...
CNET: Even though all the major browsers are considered to be up to snuff on standards compliance, some Web authors still find it easier to code directly to IE--and test only with IE--rather than to ...
Caveat Lector: <em>, <strong>, and markup assumptions. Dorothea Salo explains these semantic tags, why they exist and when they should be used, and throws in a bit of HTML history as well....
Macromedia to Embed the Opera Browser in Web Authoring Products - it seems Opera could soon be providing the rendering engine for Dreamweaver's preview mode, at least on the Mac. Great news for CSS la...
Evolt: New DOCTYPE sniffing in upcoming Mozilla releases. If you weren't confused enough by Mozilla's standards and quirks modes, the next release of the browser will include a third rendering mode ca...
Redesigned W3C validator icons (via Zeldman). I like these a lot - I've avoided using a validator icon on this site up to now because they're pretty ugly, but I'll add the alternative XHTML 1.0 icon n...
I've signed up for a new mailing list (probably not a good idea, I'm getting over 200 mails a day which isn't much fun on a modem) - XHTML-L, which describes itself as A forum for discussing XHTML iss...
More CSS layout fun courtesy of Webdesign-L. This time Steve Clay has taken Anil Dash's standards compliant Amazon and reworked it to use CSS for layout. Unfortunately it is likely to be a while befo...
Micah S Sittig on css-discuss has created an alternative version of the new Yahoo site design using CSS for layout instead of tables. The aim of the excercise was to demonstrate how much code can be s...
The road to validity is frought with peril. I've just fixed another small group of errors that were preventing this page from validating (after spotting the ominous W3C validator in today's user-agent...
Anil Dash provides a copy of Amazon's home page in HTML 4.0 Transitional, and it validates. Solid proof that you can rewrite a complex ecommerce site in valid HTML, and another victory for the web sta...
Hixie has answered my question. Judging by how long it took IE to support CSS1, he estimates 6 years until XHTML is ready for main stream use. He's almost certainly right, but I'm going to try to stic...
Hixie has replied to my previous post (and provided my first ever link in the process).
The message may not be diluted... I simply think it is very bad form for a group that is claiming to champion t...
Hixie has been poking around the new Web Standards Project site, and he is not impressed. His analysis of the site makes interesting reading, with complaints including CSS colour and background not be...
The Webdesign-L mailing list is ablaze with a huge, rambling, flamey thread about the relaunched Web Standards project. As with so many flames it has become quite difficut to work out what is being ar...
Netscape 4 hit 5 years old yesterday. Scott Andrew celebrated this monumental occasion with a poetic tombstone tribute, entitled "1997 - 2002". The challenge now is to make this dream a reality - NS4 ...
The Web Standards project has launched Phase II....