Buzz Archives for April 2005
Acid2 Goes on Safari
Yesterday Dave Hyatt posted news that Safari now passes the Acid2 test, making it the first browser to do so. Patches to enable Acid2 related support have been made available in Hyatt’s announce post, linked above. Under the circumstances, I thought it would be unfair to simply announce the news, so I ...
By Ben Henick | Filed in Acid2, Browsers
- Browser Progress
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IE team member Chris Wilson has posted about a couple of new developments in IE7: support for alpha-transparent PNG images and fixing a few of the bizarre float-related rendering bugs in Trident, the rendering engine used in IE 4+ for Windows. It's a good start, and happily puts to rest persistent ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Browsers
- Whither Adobe’s SVG Efforts?
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What does Adobe's purchase of Macromedia mean for Adobe's SVG efforts? The FAQ (PDF) on the acquisition has this to say:How does this affect Adobe's support of SVG (scalable vector graphics)? Both Adobe and Macromedia have been involved in defining SVG and both were part of the W3C working group that ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Adobe, ‘Rich Internet Applications’ and Standards
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Adobe's impending purchase of Macromedia has fueled no end of speculation on the fate of now-redundant applications and hand-wringing over the impact of the acquisition on popular Macromedia applications, not to mention the loss of competition in the space. But all that's really a sideshow. The meat of the ...
By Chris Kaminski | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Acid2: Putting Browser Makers on Notice
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Those with long memories will remember ABBA. The rest of us may just about recall the good work of the CSS Samurai when they launched the Acid Test back in 1997 and challenged makers of browsers world-over to improve their support for CSS 1. Well, dammit, we're at it again. No, ...
By Drew McLellan | Filed in Acid2, WaSP Announcement
- Penn State Adopts Policy
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News from Pennsylvania State University, New Web Policy to Affect all of Penn State's Public Web Sites, gives a target date of August 15, 2005 for compliance to standards, guidelines, and accessibility. Major changes to the web policy were the result of consultation with the Faculty Senate, Web developers and ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Happy Anniversary, MACCAWS
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April 2, 2005 marks the one year anniversary (our 2004 Buzz) of documents published by the project team at Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards (MACCAWS). The publications are part of a Kit consisting of a standards primer and a technical white paper. These documents are currently available ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in Web Standards (general)
- Welcoming More WaSPs
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There are a couple of new WaSPs trying out their wings. As mentioned in a previous post, there are actually quite a few things happening in the background with the Web Standards Project, and for that we need committed and skilled people. Two such people are Andy Clarke (aka Stuff ...
By Ian Lloyd | Filed in WaSP Announcement
- Global Style
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CSS Zen Garden has been the inspiration for similar projects in other languages: El Camaleón in Spanish by Manuel Guerrero of México (an RSS Feed Available) CSS Zen Sentiero in Italian by Michele Ledda (Javascript needed) Zen-Garden do maujor - Tema de visitante in Portugese by Maurício Samy Silva Also worth a look: A collection of ...
By Holly Marie Koltz | Filed in CSS
The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Recent Buzz
UK government browser guidelines: good sense prevails
By Bruce Lawson | January 19th, 2009
You might remember that I published a post called UK government draft browser guidance is daft browser guidance last September, calling out a draft document outlining some UK government browser testing guidelines.
These suggested that for government web sites, webmasters need not test in less popular browsers (those with less than 2% in that site’s usage statistics) and that there should be a page on the site listing the popular browsers which had been tested with the message “We advise you to upgrade your browser version as far as your computer allows and if possible to one of those listed above”.
I called on readers to email the consultation address and object that the guidelines did not advocate web standards and methodologies like progressive enhancement to ensure that all browsers were served. The Register carried the story, and two days after I made that call, the author of the guidelines, Adam Bailin, commented that over 400 people had already emailed him.
Last Friday, 16 January, Adam published the revised browser testing guidelines, and he’s done a great job of including best-practice development. The guidelines point to the BBC’s support table as a good example of graded browser support, and notes the importance of supporting standards-compliant browsers (paragraphs 17-18):
Coding a site to web standards should ensure that any browser that supports web standards will render and behave as intended. Therefore your browser testing matrix must include browsers that support web standards.
You should follow a progressive enhancement approach to developing websites to ensure that content is accessible to the widest possible number of browsers.
The importance of valid code is noted (paragraphs 21-23):
All (X)HTML content must validate with respect to your chosen DTD.
You must use valid CSS for the presentational layer of your website including layout and styling. (X)HTML tables should only be used for presenting tables of data.
Code used for adding richness to the user interface (e.g. JavaScript, ActionScript) must be ECMAScript-compliant.
The guidelines now emphasise functionality over identical layout across browsers (paragraph 39):
You should check that the content, functionality and display all work as intended. There may be minor differences in the way that the website is displayed. The intent is not that it should be pixel perfect across browsers, but that a user of a particular browser does not notice anything appears wrong.
Graceful degradation without scripting/ plug-ins and accessibility are required (paragraphs 41-42)
You should also test your website to make sure that it works with scripting and plug-ins turned off.
Some users will be unable to use pointing devices so you should verify that the site works using a keyboard only.
I could be churlish and quibble about a couple of points in the document that I personally disagree with, but I won’t; the philosophical framework of the new Guidelines is a scalable, future-proof one that will properly serve taxpayers, web visitors and government webmasters in the UK.
I’d like to congratulate Adam Bailin and the team who revised the guidelines, and I’d like to congratulate every one of the 400+ readers who took the time and the trouble to write and support web standards.
It’s a job well done.
(Disclosure: I work for Opera, the browser vendor, and wrote the Opera consultation response).
Filed in Accessibility, Action, Browsers, General, Web Standards (general) | Comments (9)