Buzz Archives for August 2004
Standards and Web 3D
Via /.: Former VRML heavyweight Tony Parisi has posted a thought-provoking article on the XML-based, ISO-backed standard for real-time-3D-over-a-network, X3D. While X3D isn't one of our 'core' web standards, Tony has been working on standards — and on making them commercially successful — long enough to have some good insight on ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Heading in the right direction
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Nearly two years ago, a new design of the Microsoft.com home page was met with near universal contempt from the web development community. Jeffery Zeldman took them to task for their gratuitous font tags, and Mark Pilgrim heavily criticised their terrible accessibility. Fast forward to today, and the site has had ...
By Simon Willison | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Web Standards a Campaign Issue?
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No, not really. But lefty überblogger Kos gets in a good rant about them anyway: Until browser developers learn to embrace web standards and allow for a uniform browsing experience, people like me will write code which will break on someone's browser, somewhere. Of course, Kos is still slogging along in <table> ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers, Web Standards (general)
- (Not So) Heavy Chevy
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Chevy has received glowing praise for cutting weight and adding polish to their new C6 Corvette. Now they've taken the same approach with their redesigned web site: it's both slimmer and easier to use thanks to semantically-sound, standards-compliant markup. Oh, there's the odd typo here and there, but dig into ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Browsehappy: Bad Grammar for a Good Cause
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The Web Standards Project launched on Friday a new campaign dubbed Browse Happy. Despite Microsoft’s efforts to keep a competitive browser on the market, problems with Internet Explorer for Windows continue to mount. Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that broad changes to Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows will wait for ...
By Ben Henick | Filed in Browsers
- Accessibility Settlements by Priceline and Ramada
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The New York State Attorney General's Office [published a press release][1] this Thursday announcing that [Priceline][2] and [Ramada][3] had agreed to make their sites more accessible to visually impaired visitors: >Under the terms of the agreements, the companies will implement a range of accessibility standards authored by the Web Accessibility Initiative ...
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in Accessibility, Legal
- FrontPage Horrors
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>Frontpage 2003 is still the current version in August of 2004? I guess that's the problem with using a date in your product name. Or maybe it's an indication of a larger updating problem. >Here's [an article][1] featured on the FrontPage homepage within the Office website: "Create a structured page layout ...
By Meryl K. Evans | Filed in Authoring Tools
- SEO + Standards = ?
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Well, that didn't take long. In his follow-up to his 'Silly Expert Opinions' post, Eric Meyer ponts to a test run by Peter Janes. The early results aren't necessarily encouraging. My next question: in the comments to the compooter.org post, Shari Thurow insists that CSS does matter to Google. As proof, ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- SEO Redux
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Reading through the comments to the compooter.org article, it seems they contain the beginnings of an interesting, if occasionally heated, dialogue between the SEO and standards worlds. That's a pure good, IMNSHO. If the message of the SES crowd in the comments is indeed what they were preaching at the ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- SEO tomfoolery
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compooter.org and Eric Meyer share a laugh at the expense of the panelists and organizers of SES 2004. Some samples of the SEO silliness, as paraphrased by compooter.org: quotation removed due to doubts about accuracy I must say, I've worked with a couple of SEO outfits recently and neither of them spewed ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Netscape 7.2 Released
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Via /.: The long-rumored update to the Netscape browser based on Mozilla 1.7, Netscape 7.2, was released today. Personally, I much prefer the lightweight, browser-only Firefox variant of Mozilla, or even Mozilla itself. Still and all, it's nice to see Netscape alive, if only for nostalgia reasons.
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers
- Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE/Win
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Chris Pederick's outstanding Web Developer Toolbar has long been a must-have tool for web developers & designers using Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers. Now, webheads who're still using IE for Windows (yes, there really are some, and they deserve our pity ;-) have a comparable tool: the Web Accessibility Toolbar. Much ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Accessibility, Authoring Tools, Browsers, Validation
- A Web Standards Checklist
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Once again, Max Design provides a great resource for the standards world: A Web Standards Checklist. The list is meant to help folks understand the breadth of standards and provide a tool for developers. The list examines six distinct areas of interest as follows: Quality of code. This section hones ...
By Molly E. Holzschlag | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- You Said the ‘S’ Word!
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Vincent Flanders apparently thinks 'standards' is a dirty word. Vincent takes WaSP member Douglas Bowman to task for not including a link to the finished work in his post about a table-free redesign of Microsoft's home page. He has a point. That is, until he flies off into bizarro world ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- IE for WinXP SP2 Explained
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Over on IEBlog, group program manager Tony Chor is lifts the kimono on the changes made to Internet Explorer in Windows XP Service Pack 2. While the update isn't available for other Windows versions, and it doesn't offer any improvements to IE's standards support, the security enhancements made to IE in ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers
- Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.
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WaSP co-founder and emeritus Jeffrey Zeldman writes: “I’ve seen people debate whether ‘leading’ web designers are all using the h1 header element exactly the same way on their personal sites. The question isn’t meaningless but it feels small and slightly beside the point. Likewise, the same ancient arguments about XHTML keep ...
By Ben Henick | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Moz gets XForms
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Via /.: the Mozilla Foundation is teaming up with IBM and Novell to implement XForms on the Mozilla platform.
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers, Web Standards (general)
- WaSP Interviews: Jim Ramsey
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Another brand new car smellin' WaSP interview is live as Jim Ramsey of the San Francisco Examiner talks about redesigning the site into a Web-standards compliant site. Jim is hooked on standards. He discusses how he took the plunge, how the code stays clean for a large and frequently updated site, ...
By Meryl K. Evans | Filed in WaSP Announcement
- XHTML and document.write()
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Ian Hickson has written a nice little explanation of the problems with document.write() in XHTML documents that are served with an XHTML MIME type.
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in HTML/XHTML
- Do DOCTYPEs Matter?
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A short time ago, Anne van Kesteren and our own Molly Holzschlag had a brief back-and-forth regarding DOCTYPEs. Anne makes the point that whatever DOCTYPE you use, all browsers will treat your markup as 'tag soup' (aka HTML) unless you send it with the correct MIME Type. That is, it's ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Updating IE
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Internet News has an article discussing a possible upgrade to Internet Explorer. I must say I don't put much stock into their speculation that IE7 may come out prior to Longhorn, the next upgrade to Windows. And some of the features they mention — like pop-up blocking and a download ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers
- Washington, DC Web Standards Meetup
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[Thomas][1], [Kimberly][2], and [I][3] are trying to light a fire under the monthly [Web Standards Meetup][4] for Washington, DC. Pay no mind to what the Meetup site says--we're still getting together tomorrow night at 8:00pm at the [Capitol Hill Capitol City Brewing Company][5] (in the old post office building next ...
By Porter Glendinning | Filed in WaSP Announcement
- New co-operation agreement between W3C and OMA
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A few days ago, the W3C and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) announced a Memorandum of Understanding that will allow them to collaborate on mobile Web specifications. This formal working relationship enables the two organizations to collaboratively engage in exchange of technical information and contributions. The result will benefit developers, product ...
By Steph Troeth | Filed in Mobile
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Recent Buzz
Six New Courses Added to the InterACT Curriculum
By Aarron Walter | March 17th, 2010
Today, six more essential courses join the WaSP InterACT curriculum to help schools prepare their students for a career working on the Web.
It was just one year ago that The WaSP released its open curriculum project InterACT designed to help educators roll web standards and industry best practices into their courses. InterACT debuted at SxSWi 2009 with eleven courses created by a host of veteran educators and industry pros. Today, six more essential courses (that’s seventeen courses in total now if you’re counting) join our living curriculum to help schools prepare their students for a career working on the Web. Continue reading Six New Courses Added to the InterACT Curriculum
Filed in Curriculum, Education, Education TF | Comments (0)