Weblogs: Web Standards Links
Microsoft to World: Do as we say. -- Shelley Powers has a powerful response to Zeldman's continued defence of Microsoft's version switching. She notes that we are not being told the whole story. This is the problem of working behind Non Disclosure Agreements. It sucks to be Zeldman right now.
Microsoft: Fish, or Cut Bait -- Shelley points out that 'Microsoft is asking us to declare our intentions, it's only fair we ask the same of it. If Microsoft won't meet us half-way – if the company releases IE8 without support for the HTML5 DOCTYPE or XHTML, and without at least some guarantee as to when we'll see SVG in IE – then we'll have our answer. It may not be the answer we want, but it will be the answer we need.' I completely agree.
Microsoft Koan -- Mark Pilgrim at his incisive best again. Short and directly to the point as to the flaw in Microsoft's 'Yes I really mean it this time' standards-compliant meta tag.
I won’t go naked this year! -- Christian has a well reasoned argument against CSS Naked Day. Sure, it was unique last year, but now there are serious questions about who the target audience is - since they're not paying attention to a bunch of web standards blogs anyway. Get someone like Amazon.com or Google participating, and then there's some penetration. Otherwise it just looks like a misconfigured webserver.
Browser Lovefest -- Douglas Crockford moderates a panel of browser vendors talking about how we advance the technology of the web. Apple didn't show up. Douglas notes: 'Apple invented technical evangelism, so it really peculiar that they would reject an opportunity such as this one. I think the company may have lost its way. I tried sending them a map, but it didn't help.'
Working Together for a Better Web -- Fresh from stepping down as the Group Lead from WaSP, Molly Holzschlag is now contracted to Microsoft in teaching and evangelising web standards and interoperability. This is a constructive step forward for Microsoft - and sounds like a challenge Molly will relish. She's a great role model of evangelising web standards - getting stuck in at the cliff-face rather than throwing stones from a safe distance. Good luck Molly!
Joe Clark: How not to fix HTML -- An excellent, and typically incisive look at Tim Berners Lee's decision to create a new HTML working group. Joe covers practical and relevant corrections and additions that add richer semantics particularly to newspaper type structures, and of course web accessibility. He also voices a concern that I share, surely WCAG2 Working Group is in a much worse position than the HTML Working Group - why is that being overlooked?
Reinventing HTML -- Tim Berners Lee announces a new HTML working group, based on the WHAT WG efforts. Recognising that HTML has to evolve, there is also a Forms working group that will work to make HTML forms (the form elements that make up the HTML set of elements) a subset of XForms, and to do that by updating XForms. The HTML working group will focus on HTML, and the work on XHTML 2.0 will now be overseen by a different, perhaps new, Working Group. This is a bold move, one that web developers have been crying out for for quite some time.
Float Containing Rules By Browser -- Ed Eliot's table of various methods of clearing floats and their browser support. An essential reference for web standards developers.
Why accountancy is not boring -- Joe Clark reviews Jukka Korpela's Unicode Explained (published by O'Reilly) and concludes it to be a plain-English guide to Unicode. Great, us mortals have been waiting for a Unicode book that we can read. Jukka Korpela was a comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html contributor who certainly influenced my view on web standards, particularly in understanding the nuances of HTML.
Ed: Methods for containing floats -- Ed evaluates the current crop of techniques for clearing floats. The self-clearing method (using the :after CSS pseudo class) looks to be prefered, and Ed makes sense of the different approaches and browser implications.
CSS Shorthand Guide -- Dustin provides an indispensable guide to using CSS shorthand values - covers background, font, border and margin/padding properties. Useful for CSS optimisation/minimisation.
HTMLSpecial Characters -- Very useful looking HTML entity reference. (via Hotlinks)
Correctly Using Titles With External Stylesheets -- 'we've gotten a number of Bugzilla reports about 'Mozilla is ignoring some of my stylesheets' and the cause turned out to be the incorrect over-use of title.'
Correctly Using Titles With External Stylesheets -- When stylesheets seem to be ignored, check you're not using the title attribute on the link element. Persistent stylesheets should have no titles, supplying a title demotes the stylesheet to one that can be switched to within a browser. (link via archive.org's Wayback Machine)
Won't somebody please think of the gerbils? -- In all the permathreads about semantic markup, XHTML, CSS and accessibility, I keep forgetting this (yet another) insightful piece from Mark Pilgrim. Three years old, and still holds its weight as a definitive guide to spotting snake oil salesmen.
The Early Bird Catches the CSS: Planning Structural HTML -- Starting a CSS design by concentrating on HTML structure and semantics. Virginia DeBolt guides the reader through the jump into CSS-based web design.
Priority 4: Is standards compliant HTML really necessary? -- Adam Osborne nails the key cost of non-standard HTML - browser vendors are forced to keep backwards compatibility, at the cost of standards, and at the cost of better features. Non-standard HTML lacks the rendering predictability of standards compliant HTML.
Blocking unwelcome robots -- Dan Champion covers four methods of blocking badly behaved robots, including banning robots that do not follow robots.txt rules.
More Rounded Corners with CSS -- Styling boxes with rounded corners and drop-shadows that are flexible and resizable.
Microsoft, IE and the Web Standards Project -- Chris Wilson: 'From ten years of experience in championing standards and web development inside Microsoft, I think it's actually critically important that the reasons for supporting standards in our products – particularly IE – be business ones. Business reasons stand the test of time. Pure altruistic 'ethical' reasons are hard to defend to shareholders.'
BBC Standards and Guidelines -- Online technical and design guidelines for the BBC. Comprehensive and inspiring.
Yahoo Developer: Graded browser support -- 'Support does not mean that everybody gets the same thing. Expecting two users using different browser software to have an identical experience fails to embrace or acknowledge the heterogeneous essence of the Web.'
FACE: Faruk's Animated CSS Enhancements -- Animiated effects for your website using JavaScript and CSS. An interesting mix of web standards.
WebPatterns and WebSemantics -- Discussing web patterns - standardising or componentising the use of classes and ids for architectural purposes. Add to the 'keep an eye on this' list.
Web Standards Compliance and Web Application Development (plus Microsoft Visual Studio) -- Nathanael Boehm, in light of the Disney shambles and his own experiences, describes why web designers and developers are still making bad choices and regressing sites to 1996 techniques.
Opera free - no banner ads -- via accessifyforum and whitingx
Improving the CSS 2.1 strict parser for IE 7 -- IE7 (in strict mode) will ignore * html CSS rules, accept multi-class selectors and multi pseudo-elements
Firefox investigation -- A typical Project Manager misunderstanding of Firefox compatibility. (via Roger Johansson)
All your <base> are belong to us -- IE7 will only support the base element inside the head. Previous versions of IE allowed base to be anywhere in the document.
Reserved ID Values? -- Eric Meyer reports on more id values that trigger an error in IE. Looks like a naming collision caused by document.all references
The Constants Gardener -- Eric Meyer describes Inman's CSS-SSC, a CSS preprocessor that allows constants to be used in stylesheets
When Printing Kills -- Printing in IE borks if there's an id='tags' on the page.
A standards truce in the browser war? -- The relationship between Microsoft and WaSP. Good comments from Molly Holzschlag, Brian Goldfarb, Chris Wilson and Jeffrey Zeldman
IE 7.0 Technical changes leave web developers, users in the lurch -- 'the company [Microsoft] has gone its own way for so long and now has to support so many developers who use nonstandard Web technologies that it will be impossible to make IE Web-standards-compliant without breaking half the commercial Web sites on the pl
URL Encode chart -- Useful.
IE 7: Three cheers for Molly Holzschlag and Chris Wilson -- Passion leads to openness, which leads to trust. A bit of patience and we get results. Hurray to Molly and Chris! Looking forward to more great news.
Standards and CSS in IE -- IE7 Beta 2 will support the abbr element.
IE7 CSS Updates -- 'Yes, the Peekaboo and Guillotine bugs appear to have been addressed. Though without having had a chance to test either very comprehensively, I'll hold off on saying they've actually been fixed just yet.'
IE7 beta 1 release -- Faruk Ates: 'Drop the alarm bells and put down the pitch forks.'
Joe Clark: IE7: The saga begins -- 'Standards-compliant pages don't need browser detection'
That's why it's Called Beta -- Molly talks about IE7 and the pitfalls of browser sniffing. Take a deep breath.
Memoirs From the browser wars -- 'Licensing our browser was a huge win for Spyglass. And it was a huge loss. We got a loud wake-up call when we tried to schedule our second conference for our OEM browser customers. Our customers told us they weren't coming because Microsoft was beatin
WaSP to Collaborate with Microsoft to Promote Web Standards -- More great news from WaSP. (that means I can uncensor some parts of my @media 2005 notes)
Redefining Tag Soup, by Faruk Ates -- Treating markup as tag soup is different to markup that is tag soup
Folder Tree List -- Styling nested lists as expandable folder trees
@Media 2005 - 9th and 10th June 2005 -- It's the web design event of the year. Kings College, London UK. See you there
CSS Specificity -- CSS specificity of styles explains how styles are prioritised when rendered.
You were warned -- Caveat developer. Ignorance of standards is irrelevant.
Why specs matter -- Even though this was written about syndication standards, the points raised are exceptionally spot-on for the 'use GET for changing state' brigade who are currently being exposed. Eithe Mark Pilgrim is a genius, a time traveller, or this problem has happe
I'm sorry, I can't kiss it and make it better -- Learning the hard way of ignoring web standards
I wonder why buttons look like that -- 'Launch the nuclear warheads' GET or POST?
Google doesn't REST -- Well, there’s a rottweiler hanging off some asses now, and it has 'Google' on its name tag.
Fixed verses liquid design -- Molly and Jeremy Keith having a to and fro. 'The context of the design is what will decide'
Arguments for flexible webpage layouts -- Summary of the arguments against fixed width layout
7 steps to better handheld browsing -- Tips and tricks for styling websites for mobile phones
The Acid2 Challenge -- Hakon Wium Lie and WaSP set down an acid test challenge for IE7. Excellent idea!
CSS - A tribute to selectors -- Malarkey explains attribute based selectors a[href^='http'] { .. } '
Web Forms 2.0 - Call for Comments -- 'Web Forms 2.0, an extension to the forms features found in HTML 4.01's Forms chapter and the corresponding DOM 2 HTML interfaces'
Browser battle shakes Net apps -- 'Although XForms offers advances over current standards-based HTML forms, some W3C members worry that it faces an uphill battle because it isn't supported by the current generation of Web browsers.'
Teach yourself CSS in 24 hours: Accessibility and Internationalization -- a sample chapter in Kynn Bartlett's book
Firefox gains ground -- 'usage of Firefox ... has almost doubled in the past three months to 4.95 per cent of all internet users.
BBC: Web inventor is 'Greatest Briton' -- Another honour for Tim Berners Lee
Ben Goodger, lead developer of Firefox joins Google! -- Firefox just may be the 'Google Browser'
Most Common Browser Bugs -- IE box model, double float margin, 3 pixel jog
Microsoft Internet Explorer Multiple Vulnerabilities -- 'Solution: Use another product.'
Free Fall: Internet Explorer Has Now Lost 30% Of The Browser Market -- 'By December 2005 or before ... Internet Explorer will not be anymore the browser of choice for the majority of Internet users.'
Internet Explorer Has Now Lost 30% of Browser Market -- 'There’s no time like the present to begin developing Websites based on W3C Recommendations first and foremost.'
CNet: Outsmart spyware -- 'Of course, you may want to consider abandoning Internet Explorer altogether and switching to an alternative browser such as Mozilla's Firefox. That will limit your vulnerability to many spyware and virus threats.'
Who created CSS? CSS Early History -- Tim Berners Lee and his user style sheet, Pei Wei and ViolaWWW through to the CSS specification
Elements vs. attributes -- pros and cons of each approach
Forgotten element types -- abbr, acronym, address, dfn, ins, del, cite, code, samp, kbd, var
Eric Meyer: Don't care about market share -- 'Anyone who uses those access statistics to make decisions for their own work is a fool, and a misinformed fool at that.'
Firefox 1.0 released -- The best browser on the planet finally reaches version 1.0!
What can we talk about now? -- Malarkey: It surely cannot be long before a standards based relaunch ceases to be news.
What is a web standard -- Molly separates the best practice from the 'web standard'.
Quirks mode -- What does quirks mode trigger?
Moral Arguments Aside -- Mark Pilgrim: CSS makes you money, and saves you money
Committed to sincere progress, not perfection -- valid markup is a prerequisite for genuine standards compliance
Who cares about validation? -- Steve Champeon: 'when a site crows about their compliance, without actually observing that principle, they are undercutting the argument for future generations of browsers to bother supporting the baseline'
All That Glitters -- 'However, to say that validation is unimportant and then call your work web standards? Real world or otherwise, it smells like semantic snake oil to me.'
Dear one-browser Web designers: Don't say I didn't warn you -- ' Today, depending on whose stats you choose to believe, MSIE has slid to somewhere between 93.7% and 70% of browser usage.'
CSS Comment Bugs -- Table of comment bugs against IE versions
HTML Syntax Checker in PHP -- done by Henri Sivonen
Pocket-sized design: Taking your website to the small screen -- semantic markup and other tips for catering for small screens.
Embittered General -- Glazman: 'There's not a single problem in XFN, HTML Overlays or WebForms that cannot be solved by people of good will'
Seven Deadly Markup Sins -- Molly covers content encoding, invalid attributes, escaping ampersands and alt attributes
W3C members: Do as we say, not as we do -- a stinging indictment of the members' commitment to Web standards
Prepare for the transition from HTML forms to XForms -- Builder.au article on XForms
Real life savings through Web standards -- Savings Multimap are making because of web standards
The second browser war -- The majority of Microsoft's business, therefore, could have been threatened if the IE browser team had continued past 2001.
Extending HTML, Again -- the semi-pseudo-namespace trick has been done before, by Microsoft, and in practice has proven to work just fine
Extending HTML -- Hixie: proprietory extension - and the only complaints are about the syntax
How To Grow HTML -- Tim Bray on semi-pseudo namespaces and W3C HTML WG
Party Like It’s 1996! -- Tim Bray questions the WHAT WG HTML extension approach
The art of questioning your clients -- Do they squirm when you ask open ended questions? Do they answer open ended questions with logical, linear answers?
Strategies for Long-Term CSS Hack Management -- comment, comment, comment
XStandard gets Better! -- standards compliant XHTML WYSIWYG editor
The Location Field Is the New Command Line -- Microsoft totally fucked up when they took aim at Netscape.
Well-Formed -- Tim Bray's rules for generating a well-formed XML file
Character encoding and HTML forms -- a browser will submit the data from a form using the same character encoding that the page is served in
Joel on WHAT WG -- wishlist: inline editing, REST, rich controls, performance, GUI standardisation, tree views, graceful degradation
Why you should dump Internet Explorer -- an MCSE viewpoint - security, standards and options
How IE can be standard compliant without breaking the web -- Clever standards based solution.
Negative Margins -- about floating sidebars to the right of flexible content when the sidebar is after the content in the markup.
how to write better code -- Doing MVC in PHP
Malarkey: Web imitates art -- More fascinating tones derived from famous art
Malarkey: Creating colour palettes -- Using one colour and a black and white base colour to create tones
WHAT's going on? -- Simon Willison rounds up the events around the W3C web applications workshop
Future of HTML and the Web, part 1 -- The W3C web applications meeting sure has sparked off discussions.
Brendan Eich: The non-world non-wide non-web -- 'The best way to help the Web is to incrementally improve the existing web standards, with compatibility shims provided for IE, so that web content authors can actually deploy new formats interoperably.'
Web Hypertext Applications Technology -- Selling the realistic idea of building on an existing browser platform.
XulPlanet: What is the WHAT? -- Thoughts about Ian Hickson's Web Hypertext Applications Technology
3270 Redux -- Disconnect between Opera / Mozilla and the mainframe establishment to web applications
Time to put a limit on when your pop-ups appear -- 60% of web users mistrust any company that uses -- or even hosts -- pop-ups
Web Standards ROI -- interesting project comparision that clearly demonstrates the savings on using web standards
Hixie: Day 1 of the W3C web application workshop -- Internet Explorer in Longhorn will not support XHTML or SVG
Extensible Open XHTML Outlines -- Improvement over OPML - browser renderable too!
Separating behavior and structure -- Modern JavaScript thinking - I like it!
Joe Clark's bookmarks for standards testing -- brain dump - (via Anne van Kesteren)
com.lang.javascript FAQ notes -- excellent addition to the clj FAQ (via Simon Willison)
XMLHttpRequest and Javascript Closures -- improving cross-browser scripting with closures
Private members in Javascript -- OO in Javascript (via BenMeadowcroft.com)
Why the 'statistics defence' doesn't stand up -- Cross platform/cross browser compatibility is the strength of the web - that was the problem it was designed to solve
Closures and executing JavaScript on page load -- Closures - mind boggling!
Microsoft behind $12 million payment to Opera -- The cost of the Bork! Bork! MSN fiasco
Tables, easier? -- Fixed mindset
Jim Ley: Web applications -- getting Opera to support the XMLHttpRequest object would be a huge first step - Yeah!
Web applications - Jim Ley's position paper -- build on existing browser platform, with graceful degradation
The future of the web -- Workable spec more important than a perfect one.
Web applications and compound documents position papers -- starting point for web applications
Son of Suckerfish dropdowns -- nested lists, consise CSS and HTML, smattering of Javascript
The Elements of Style -- Goldmine of information about writing
Accessible, stylish form layout -- CSS styling for forms
mezzoblue: colour schemes -- Technical and natural colour scheme selection
mezzoblue: Tables? Oh, the horror! -- Tables for layout - decide based on knowledge - not lack of it.
Don't resurect table-based design. -- Cost shifting from design to engineering
WebDev : Why HTML tables are bad form -- Some very good points!
Commercial Helpline - liquid layouts in CSS -- One of Marlarkey's sites gets reviewed.
HTML Dog - HTML and CSS Tutorials, References, Articles and News -- From a web standards perspective
Webby Award validation woes -- only one website validated (now two, almost three)
An Objective Look at Table Based vs. CSS Based Design -- A devil's advocate viewpoint - insightful.
StopDesign: on Blogger redesign -- excellent cutting edge and usable web design.
Gez on XHTML2 -- overview of some new elements
GreyTower: Disable CSS Bookmarklet -- Improvement on the accessify disable CSS bookmarklet
Simon Willison: Staying Valid -- by checking all inputs from external sources are valid
Resolution setting on PCs video card can alter font size -- Resolution lock-in. This is why resolution-based web design is counter productive.
BBSpot: W3C announces new features for CSS3 -- template{aol; nauseating}
mezzoblue: A Roadmap to Standards -- From neanderthal techniques to modern web design.
Ten questions for Eric Meyer -- The CSS guru, his plethora of books and CSS hacking
Dare: XPath for the HTML DOM in Internet Explorer -- Intriguing combination!
Pop-up Advertising is Not Good for Business -- Bunnyfoot whitepaper. Bunnyfoot are the people behind egg's accessibility.
Developing with web standards: Recommendations and best practices -- Practical guide to unlocking the benefit of standards
Gez: Equal columns with CSS -- Columns with the same height using css tables
Labelling buttons -- Use a lable more descriptive and appropriate than submit
MACCAWS: What every web site owner should know about standards: A Web Standards Primer -- Gentle introduction
MACCAWS: The way forward with web standards -- Dispel some myths, reiterate the positives
mezzoblue: Accessible Image Replacement -- Improvements over Fahrner's technique
Zeldman: Reinventing the wheel -- CSS layouts sometimes need a careful touch, but consider the benefits it delivers
Ken MacLeod: XML Namespaces support in tools, or lack thereof -- How namespaces should be handled and presented to the developer
CNet: Who says standards are sacred? -- Standards favour big companies? I, for one, welcome the ability to interoperate, even if its with a big company.
37signals: Web design going in the wrong direction? -- Web design is about people, not technology
Tsutsumi - The Art of Giftwrapping the Web -- An older article, but always worth rereading
Maccessibility: Explaining CSS Positioning in Greater Detail
mezzoblue: CSS problem-solving -- Useful collection of tips
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