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Actually, I'm not the good at programming. I mostly read code that others have written (I write API docs for a living). But let me throw out some inexpert opinions.

Notice that I didn't say performance was the priority. Obviously there are, as you say, other priorities that take precedence in the early stages of a project. So yeah, you have to pay more attention to getting the thing working than to making it work fast.

But you can't just ignore performance. If you do, you'll make design mistakes that will be very hard to reverse later.

Except that's what the Mozilla team did. They piled on feature after feature, without worrying about whether they were destroying the performance of the product. I guess they assumed this was something they could fix later. Well it is later, and they still haven't fixed it. Yeah, we just had this breathless annoucement with gee-whiz figure about how Mozilla is smaller and faster. Except it still hasn't gotten as fast as IE 6.

Speaking of which: I finally nailed that spyware. (My main anti-spyware tool is now Spybot S&D. Koller is painfully flaky, but his software does the job better than anybody else's -- once you figure it out.) So I'm back to using IE. Yes, it isn't as kewl as Firefox, and yes it belongs to The Dark Side. And of course it isn't standards-compliant. (Though these days, who is?) But I don't go crazy waiting for pages to load, and I have a googlebar that actually works.

And yeah, if I had free choice I'd switch to Linux and use Konqueror. Or if I had free choice and deep pockets, I'd switch to Mac and use Safari. But I don't so I won't, so enough with the "switch to something else" mantra.

• Make your markup as clean and semantic as possible. Avoid all presentation (font tags and the like); put distinct sections in div tags with ids; use the markup the way it was designed.
• Do a first style pass in your browser of choice. I use Safari. It's not the most standards-compliant, but it's easy for me to use. Every browser has quirks, but that's the next step.
• Preview in Mozilla, Opera, IE, Safari and Konqueror. Most of these can be had for any platform. IE is hard on Mac, but I use Virtual PC. Safari is hard if you're on Windows, but you can use Konqeror, which is similar.

@import "style.css";

Oh no! Tell me ain't so! Still, we still have hand-typed URLs, nae skins, nae tabs (wait, don't tell me, IE7 will have them), grudging compliancy wi' standards, etc. So Hell hasn't frozen over just yet.

Dave Shea at the 'zengarden talked about the browser upgrade campaign and its successes and failings - basically it came across as negative. Dave suggests MOSe - Mozilla, Opera, Safari enhancements - to highlight the strengths of modern, standards-compliant browsers, and I'd tend to agree.

Still, the idea of building sites that tell people they're using a 2nd-rate product when better, free products are available does appeal...;)

Although you're right that many users will indeed have those fonts, it turns out that just having them doesn't mean they'll be readable; Arial in particular creates problems for Mac and unix users.

With just a snippet of extra work, you can easily avoid those problems; to summarize, just specify a font list (rather than a single font), making sure it is ordered such that it degrades gracefully:

HTML:
<font face="Times New Roman,serif">
Degrades to a proportional serif font for everyone
</font>

CSS:
<div style="font-family: Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
Shows Geneva on Macs (instead of too-small Arial), Arial on Windows, and Helvetica on unix, all degrading to generic sans-serif if no named font is available.
</div>

Also, you might want to take another look at CSS, keeping in mind that same principle of degrading gracefully; the archives at A List Apart contain an elderly but valid article saying To Hell with Old Browsers, and they make a lot of good points. They and the Web Standards Project seem to feel that most of the hard push is over with, and we can begin to really use CSS (again, it's workable because it allows graceful degradation), even though MSIE abounds.

The designer hardcoded a fontface because CSS doesn't automatically resize columns like tables do.

Er, 'fontface'? WTF is a 'fontface'?

As for CSS resizing automagically, resize in relation to what, pray tell? A box with width: 30%; resizes in relation to the viewport, a box with width: 15em; resizes in relation to font size, as of CSS 2.1 a box with float: left or float: right and no width resizes in relation to content (most browsers--including IE/Win--do this anyway) and table-layout will get you table-style layout with whatever tags you like. MS just didn't feel the need to support it in IE 5/Win or IE/Mac so people don't use it much. That's Microsoft's fault, not the W3C's

Because CSS was designed by doofus eggheads and not experts in solving real world web design problems.

Ian Hickson edited the CSS2.1 spec, and he's been 'solving real world web design problems' since at least 1998 when I worked with him at the Web Stanards Project. Hakon Wium Lie edited CSS 1, 2 and 2.1 and has been working on Opera since 1999, earned an MS in Visual Studies from MIT and wrote his thesis on electronic display of newspapers. TantekCelik is responsible for the widely-lauded Tasman rendering engine used in IE 5.x/Mac. These people do use this stuff in the real world, and if you don't like the directions they're taking your'e free to join the www-style discussion list and let them know.

Which then forces me to do a bunch of work

One line of CSS is 'a bunch of work'? I suppose you find tying your own shoes a pretty onerous task as well?

or accept undesirable browser settings

Let me get this straight: you're hacked because the site doesn't use your settings for font size and face, but setting your browser to override the site's settings with your choices is 'undesirable'? Huh?

Actually webstandards.org is claiming at least some responsibility.

http://webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2003_10.html# a000237

browsers actually support css now - a thing _nobody_ _ever_ thought would happen 3 years ago

He's a nobody, she's a nobody, wouldn't you like to be a nobody too?

In the days when css was synonym for the crappiest implementation of cross-plattform standards ever,

History lesson: the CSS recommendation we all know and love started life as a proposal to the W3C by Microsoft Corporation. In about the same time frame, Netscape Communications made their own proposal: JavaScript StyleSheets (JSSS). MS naturally implemented their own proposal, NS implemented theirs. Shortly before Navigator 4 was to be released, the W3C settled on CSS and JSSS became roadkill. NS hastily retrofitted Navigator to translate CSS rules into JSSS rules that their style engine could understand, but of course the capabilities of the two technologies were different and so the result was less than whelming. Point: CSS suffered not because of a lousy cross-platform implementation, but because Navigator never did grok CSS; it just translated it (badly) into JSSS.

Flash was the *only* way to make a good visual appearance and be truly cross plattform. In fact, you'd be more compatible and accessible with Flash than with anything beyond "table" and "href".

Oh dear.

Setting aside questions of taste (and grammar) inherent in the 'good visual appearance' portion, 'truly' cross-plaftorm compatible' is a load of horse manure. A great many browsers/platforms didn't support Flash until well after the advent of Netscape 6.2. Many still don't. And as far as accessibility goes, ever try to access even most recent Flash movies with a screen reader? Rotsa ruck.

That has changed since then, with the appearance of NS 6.1 came a whole bunch of browsers that manage css in a way that is fairly acceptable.

Any 6.x version of NS you care to name was released weeks or months after the corresponding Mozilla version. IE 5/Macintosh offered far and away the best CSS support of any browser when it was released in '00--well ahead of NS 6.0. While it may be a bit dodgy by today's standards, even the original release of IE 5 for Mac is better than even the latest IE 6/Win.

Likewise, Opera 4.x sported a very solid CSS implementation--better than IE 5.x/Win, at least, and arguably on a par with IE 6/Win. That browser was out well before even IE 5/Mac.

Netscape 6.2 was a pretty good browser, particularly from a standards perspective, but it hardly broke new ground in that area.

Back in the we-don't-give-a-f*ck-about-webstandards time Dreamweaver was the _only_ tool that would make webdevelopement possible.

Bullshit. I've been doing web sites since 1996 for large and smal companies (Kaplan, Inc., APBnews.com [if anyone remembers them], GovWorks.com, Eureka-GGN CTW and Insignia Financial Group, to name a few). I've not used Dreamweaver for any of those clients. Not one.

Nobody would handcode anything for NS 4.7, trust me on that one.

Hi, I'm nobody.

Matter of fact, I did several sites for Aktion Mensch (3rd most recognized brand in Germany) that used CSS for layout and had to look 'right' in NN4.x. I did 'em by hand.

no matter what VI zealot keeps bullshitting about on /.

Vi? Never touch the damned thing. Used BBEdit and HomeSite or HTMLKit mostly.

Luckily the Web Standards Project has been talking to Macromedia since before the first MX product line, and MM has complied rather well according to them.

I am not sure how the auto generated code is, but I have used MX 2004 for a little tester, and the feature I saw was deeper integration with the CSS standard when making your pages, in the hand coding way. Which of course you can do with dreamweaver. I wouldnt even touch it if you couldnt.

I've been reading Zeldman's book Designing for Web Standards at safari.oreilly.com and it addresses this quite well. Safari and Mac IE 5.2 are very compliant to standards moreso than any version of IE on Windows, so it's not as big a deal now as it once was during the browser war era. Yeesh what a mess that was.

If you can move away from using old pre-war coding practices you'll be a step ahead in the fight. Check out these sites for more info on coding pages that look good in any browser on any platform:

• The Web Standards Project

• Zeldman's site of course.

• A List Apart

• Netscape's DevEdge is a great source of info.

• Validate your source.

• Validate your CSS.

• Another html validator.

• Accessibility is not only a good thing it's the right thing, especially if you ever make a government site.

• Bluerobot has some pre-cooked layouts to cut your teeth on.

Designing with XHTML and CSS means not leaving anybody out. From Web-enabled phones to IE 6 to text only browsers like lynx or links you'll only need to write your code once. I say do away with javascript browser detection scripts and write once, run (almost) anywhere!

There is a last resort you can go to if you must. Macromedia Flash looks the same in any browser provided you have the proper plugin. :) Although that is not my recommended solution.

Hehe, Slashdot's not really a shining example of web accessibility, but it's a good place to ask for help none-the-less.

The first stops for help (as someone's no doubt pointed out already) should be:

Section 508

Mark Pilgrim's excellent "Dive Into Accessibility"

The W3C's web accessibility guide

The UK Disabled Rights Commission website, paying particular attention to the superb Interactive Demos (e.g. Inaccessible Website Demo).

Buy these books:

Constructing Accessible Websites

Building Accessible Websites

Oh, and a copy of Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards for good measure.

Write your pages using validating HTML or XHTML, and style the pages using CSS.

Validate your webpages using the W3C Validator and your CSS using the W3C CSS Validator. Use Watchfire's Bobby to validate your pages, and aim for AAA rating (also note that Bobby has some helpful hints when it does find errors).

Other excellent resources (in no particular order):

http://www.webstandards.org/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/QuickTips/
http://www.mezzoblue.com/
http://www.meyerweb.com/
http://www.simplebits.com/
http://www.whatdoiknow.org/
http://www.stopdesign.com/

By "enterprise application", I take it this is an application with a large number of users (10,00+), but still internal to your company.

I'd agree with the above post for an external website. About the only two plug-ins that you can reasonably count on people having are Flash and Acrobat Reader. And IE 5+ would limit you to about 90% of the browsing public - you don't want to turn away 10% of your potential customer base.

However, if the application is internal to your company, requiring a plug-in is very reasonable. You do need to make sure you have an easy way to distribute the plug-in and that you have your support people ready when you implement your app. In fact, part of your app should be detecting if someone has the plugin then directing them to the correct page to install it. A plug-in based system linke SVG or Flash is a little easier to install than a Java Runtime Environment. However if you plan on creating more web applications, you may find yourself needing a standard JRE eventually.

I wouldn't limit myself to IE - a better standard would be the W3C's recommendations or you could check out the Web Standards Project. If you must use IE, I strongly recommend IE 6. Again, you may need to upgrade some people's browsers; you just need to include that in your implementation.

Webstandards probably account for most of geckos 'bloat'. I'm not going to evangelize but there's no getting around the fact that they are important.

I used to poke fun at WaSP, the Web Standards Project, because:

1. WaSP does not follow acroymn standards;there is nothing to correspond to that letter 'a'
2. Since the W3C produced reccomendations, they should be called WaRP

But I see now the W3C has started to believe the hype.

I liked it better when the W3C just said, "We think these things are good enough to go try out in Real Life. Let us know how they work."

I guess I just don't get this "keep complaints to a minimum" tactic. If I went into a CD store and complained that the discs they sell won't play on my Victrola, they'd laugh me out of the store. But if I go to a website in a browser that's close to a decade old and complain that it doesn't render properly, some web designers will fall all over themselves trying to fix it for me. Why? Make your pages gracefully degrade, add a browser upgrade message if you're really politically-minded, and leave it at that.

On the other hand, if you keep designing different versions of pages for different browsers, you'll hold back web design and technology (people like you are the reason why CSS1 is a 7-year-old standard that I still can't use to its fullest effect) while not really doing anyone a service.

But if you really want to do it that way, it's your prerogative. Have fun in the Stone Age . . .

If you write a webpage in standards-compliant html or xhtml with CSS stylesheets, it will work fine in IE (with some quirks), Netscape 6 and 7, Mozilla, Konq, Safari, Opera (though I don't recall whether they implement a true DOM yet), links, and hell, even lynx.

Only Netscape 4 and IE 4.x browsers screw things up quite so royally, and they've been doing so for half a decade now!

So, if you're still running one of those crawling horrors, switch to Something Else. You've been holding back the web quite long enough.

http://www.webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/

Indeed. And since the poster seemed to be asking specifically for ECMAscript/DOM/DHTML stuff, here's a link to the Web Standards Project's DOM, Platform Issues, & Cross-Browser DHTML resources. Plenty of links to browser charts, cross browser code snippets, etc.

• The browser market share is something like 99.9999% Internet Explorer
• Mozilla/Netscape 7 supports everything
• Only weenies do anything except designing for the standards - using CSS, separating content from style, etc.

I hate to think what Microsoft acquiring Macromedia would mean for webstandards. Dreamweaver by Macromedia is certainly one of the most popular WYSIWYG HTML editors around, and because of that there has been groups such as the WaSP have been work with Macromedia making sure it is complies with the web standards out there. Who knows what Microsoft would do with Dreamweaver seeing that is in direct competition with Frontpage.

Microsoft is part of the W3C, and help make many of these standards. If you look at the acknowledgments [w3.org] you'll see Microsoft is actually a member of the working group responsible for these guidelines.

Haahahaa (sorry, I couldn't help myself). This explains why hugely respected accessibility expert Mark Pilgrim slated the MS site redesign in October then (as did Zeldman)? See the news post over at the Web Standards Project (scroll to the bottom of the page).

In summary: Invalid. Inaccessible. Undecipherable in a text-only browser.

Don't get me wrong, Microsoft have some fantastic employees such as Tantek Çelik (who's site kicks major ass BTW) who care passionately about standards, but MS doesn't seem to want to listen most of the time...

• 2002-10-11 14:09:06 Wired redesign to use XHTML and CSS (rejected)
• 2002-12-06 16:39:05 W3C redesign to use XHTML and CSS (rejected)

Requesting that a user update their browser merely to view your site is bad coding.

Yes, and no. If the user is using IE3 or NS4 there are quite a few features which simply won't work... especially if your coding according to web standards.

Let's face it... old browsers simply didn't support the standards properly.

So while the site looks fine with CSS, without CSS you get maybe stark gray...

Very few web sits voluntarily chose a grey background. In fact, that glorious grey is the browser's default background color. If fact, if you visit webstandards.org without CSS support, you're getting the colors, fonts, and layout you asked for. Don't like it, take a trip to Edit > Preferences > Appearance > Colors. Click the button for "Background" and change it to something you like. See, control in your hands.

So what's actually going on here is not a case of these developers adhering to web standards, but rather, they are picking and choosing the standards they want to use, such as by not making use of HTML completely and correctly.

Actually, they're making use of the latest version of HTML completely and correctly. Using the various color tags and techniques from previous versions would in fact be violating the correct use of HTML. When you break standards you end up having to do dozens of special cases for the quirks of each browser. If you stick to baseline modern HTML with CSS, all modern browsers will display the same thing looking good, older browsers will degrade gracefully.

You argue that by not supporting out of date HTML you're somehow discriminating against people with older computers. That's a bizarre claim. By using out of date HTML, you're making it harder for anyone to use it. Modern HTML makes it easier to render a web page in lynx, or on your WebTV, or on a braille display, or be read aloud by a text to speech program. CSS makes it easier to keep your HTML small, speeding up the browsing experience for people with lower quality phone lines or working over an expensive wireless link. Modern HTML degrades gracefully. The old hackery HTML turns into a mess when forced to degrade. The webstandards.org page you complain about may not look pretty, but it's sure as hell usable. It'll work fine under lynx and a text to speech reader will easily and accurate speak the page for a blind person. As someone who occasionally must fall back on extremely low end systems and extremely slow connections, I appreciate how well webstandards.org degrade and curse how poorly most "old HTML" sites do.

Zeldmanistas...intentionally set it to something different than what is set in CSS. ... So while the site looks fine with CSS, without CSS you get ... black with black text over it.

Actually, anyone playing this sort of game is most certainly not a believer in Web Standards. Setting the background color at all in HTML (instead of CSS) is not invalid by the standard. No, those people are just assholes.

The whole "web standards" debate is stupid, and most especially one sided sites like Zeldman's webstandards.org. All that Zeldman and his cronies are doing is try to push new standards ahead of sane development, probably just so that he won't have to deal with standards like HTML. He has a point, though, as the older standards are lame and the newer standards are better. But he lacks the ability to understand that browser development and deployment will always lag behind, and why. The sad thing is that his kind of suckered lots of web developers into believing that all they have to do is blame the user for having an old browser and all will become better because all users will upgrade. Truth is, that's not always possible or feasible.

A tour of web sites using the Zeldman style with an older browser will generally work, as he does not advocate breaking them. But what you do get is less than what that browser is capable of. For example, browsers have for ages supported setting a background color or even a background image in HTML. Zeldmanistas refuse to set the background color, or in some cases, intentionally set it to something different than what is set in CSS. So while the site looks fine with CSS, without CSS you get maybe stark gray, or worse, black with black text over it. So what's actually going on here is not a case of these developers adhering to web standards, but rather, they are picking and choosing the standards they want to use, such as by not making use of HTML completely and correctly. So why should he any right to expect that others will choose to use newer standards like CSS or XML or whatever.

There is also a very good reason to make a web site that works with older browsers. Many groups are now operating in lower income urban areas carrying out programs to get older computers donated to them from businesses that are doing the upgrading. Because of the economy, the number of businesses doing upgrades has dropped off and most donations are rather old. What this means is that most of the people receiving these computers are getting something in the late 486 or early Pentium range, and at best a copy of Windows 95, which is usually all (other than BSD or Linux, which hasn't made it to these programs that I've seen yet ... something for us to get more involved in I suppose) that these old machines with slow CPU, small memory, and limited hard drive capacity can handle. So they end up with usually an old Netscape version 3 browser (Java and Javascript are hopelessly broken, and CSS is non-existant). Newer browsers overwhelm the machine, if they even fit at all.

This "economic accessibility" isn't yet addressed by law, and may never be. Private business does not have to cater to them. So the banks and other financial institutions listed with specific browser requirements aren't in violation. And besides, we're talking about people who can't afford a computer and have to use limited time community access ISPs just to get online (if the phone and electric bill are paid up). I'm sure the financial institutions have no interest in extending them credit.

While businesses probably should have a free choice in what, and who, they support, governments OTOH should not. People should have a right to expect their government internet based services to be accessible to all, not just those who can afford a bigger faster computer that can handle the latest obese and overloaded software. And since it is possible to make web sites that not only work well with new standards, but also work well (as well as those standards allow) with older standards that the smaller browsers support, governments should be required to do this in all citizen-facing web sites. In other words, if it can be made to work in a minimal set of standards, it must be made to work that well when that's what's available. Then if it works even better in newer standards in ways that the older standards could never do, that's fine, too.

What I think might be a better approach to this would be to support the development of a not-so-obese web browser, as well as programs to get systems like Linux deployed onto more of the computers being donated to the economically disadvantaged (aside: why are politically correct words so long?).

I'm sorry, but your friend is riding the Microsoft train, and probably isn't getting off anytime soon. Microsoft implemented many proprietary extensions to JavaScript (and the DOM -- the API for accessing the document through JavaScript), and if you rely on them then your code will not work in non-MS browsers. The assertion that Mozilla takes 4x the code is ridiculous. I've found that writing standards compliant code will run almost unchanged on any modern browser, particularly if you use the DOM.

Sadly, however, MS is not alone with their bad JS interpreter. Of course, Netscape 4 and IE 4 were almost completely incompatible, and Opera has terrible DOM support (and is, IMHO, a weak browser with poor support for CSS).

The world of web design has changed completely in the last year, with the stabilization of Mozilla, and the improved compliance of IE 6 (and to a lesser degree, 5.5). Sadly, many web designers and programmers seek to lock clients into the "old" way of doing things, rather than re-learn their trade. The proliferation of IE does not help this matter, as many lazy developers see it as their only target.

A great place to track the latest web design "revolution" is webstandards.org.

Sometime you have to put extra text within tables that seeing person does not need, however to make the screen reader make sense you need this extra text.

Yes, write valid HTML and use alt properties that are meaningful. Even better, use the right tag for the job. Don't use tables for layout. Use CSS, which has been a W3C recommendation since 1996. Mark up the content according to it's purpose (striving for a more semantic web). Support web standards, including standards-compliant browsers.

Not sure which part of "academia" you're referring to, but in Texas state-funded schools fall under TAC rule 206. http://www.dir.state.tx.us/standards/S206.htm

But the simple answer is that the W3C has set standards for all of us, and they're not difficult to follow. Someone ought to send WaSP after this judge.

Yes, I submitted a story on this to Slashdot, but apparently it wasn't considered "newsworthy".

Nevermind that it's probably the biggest milestone for XHTML and CSS supporters yet. Nevermind that it proves that a large, popular, high-traffic website can successfully design and implement a site that makes itself accessible and easy to read in Lynx, that doesn't need to use tables for layout, needs less bandwidth to run, with less server load, will be easier to maintain, and will be viewable in every browser, whether Netscape 1 or a Pocket IE. Nope not newsworthy. Instead we get articles telling us how duct tape can remove warts, great... Alright, alright, I'll stop whining now!

There's a couple more comments on the Wired changeover at the Web Standards site and CSS guru Eric A. Meyer's site (both excellent examples of XHTML themselves BTW).

Cheers,

Yeah, if the W3C standard ment a damn. Microsoft co-writes the standard, and then writes a non-compliant browser. Unforunately, since they have 99.9% of the market, then 99.9% of the websites will be "obsolete". I render my web site with the W3C standard, yet I have to deal with IE's EXTREMELY annoying lack of support for CSS and proper JavaScript. (I've had to deal with plenty of "Works in Netscape, but not IE" bugs.) Nevermind that this property isn't supported in CSS or that command in JavaScript reports something much different in IE than the web standard.

Give Netscape all the grief you want, but at least they stuck to standards. Propeirtary tags be damned because all of the real tags were there and did when they needed to do.

(Not to mention that the W3C validator is extremely anal about "obsolete" tags. Maybe I want a FONT tag in one piece of text that I'm never going to change. Why do I need a CSS name for EVERYTHING?)

"It wouldn't be tech journalism without at least one misguided soundbyte. News.com quotes the opinion of a systems architect from Clearwater, Florida, who says 'Opera ... would do better to support [Microsoft] technologies rather than ... industry standards.'

In fact, Microsoft, along with Opera's other larger competitors, has made a point of supporting the industry standard DOM. To stay viable, Opera must do likewise. That they plan to do so soon is very good news. We're guessing the quotation was taken out of context."

The point I was trying to get across was that non-MS browser developers should co-opt Microsoft's proprietary extensions strategy and use it against them!

...Web Standards Project link.

I'm very glad to see this kind of progress actually taking place. Since I started not worrying about NS4 support (that is, giving NS4 dumbed-down or no styling at all), IE/win has become my arch-nemesis of web design. The broken box model alone is enough to keep a man (or woman) up nights.

I hope the introduction of AOL gecko clients, especially for windows, will put a damper on the attitude of many web authors that "IE is all that matters," and "mozilla sucks because it doesn't support industry standards."

HTML Help
WASP would be a good place for all newbs to start.
WASP
Find Tutorials is a good general tutorial finder.

PHP
First LAMP tutorial
PHP.net
PHP Help

There are tons of good .asp sites out there, but my guess is that's not what slashdotters are looking for....

i stuck with designing stuff with clean (by the book, w3) code, even though i knew that NS couldn't/wouldn't display properly...

i was safe in the knowledge that as soon as mozilla was available mainstream all my designs would suddenly look fine.

and they do.

they still look good in ie too.

webstandards.org/upgrade

The organization that is devoted to evangelizing Web standards is the Web Standards Project, aka The WaSP. They have been promoting web standards for years now.

Originally The WaSP targeted the browser makers to support standards in their browsers. They also targeted WYSIWYG Web development applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Golive.

Now that modern browsers are (mostly) standards compliant and WYSIWYG developers have released programs that generate standards compliant code, The WaSP has changed focus to the Web developers.

The WaSP agrees that the last bastion of old school, standards flaunting Web junk lies with Web developers. Now that we've got good browsers and good tools, there is no excuse why we don't have standards compliant sites.

Why web standards:
webstandards.org
How to actually do it:
alistapart.com

I was about to post the same thing. I have been running an up-to-date version of Mozilla/Galeon for quite a while, and things seem to be much better now that Mozilla has matured. The also plugins seem to be much better now - I usually find that Java Applets and Flash work just fine too.

I very rarely find a website that I can't view correctly. That being said, we still need to keep up the web standards pressure to make sure this trend continues.

Who set these mythical "standards"?

Volunteers from academia and industry, just like the people who set up the "mythical standards" for the Internet.

The W3C has been irrelevant for several years now.

Then why are the browser manufacturers working so hard to make their products standards-compliant?

how can you stand it? it has netscape 4.x like standards support. any self respecting web surfer should stay from omni-web.

more info here: http://www.webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/

• "The vast majority of internet users don't even know that they can change their own font size (let alone how to do it)." I reckon the vast majority also don't they can override a specified font and specify their own fonts or own font sizes. So, are you suggesting that if a user's font preference are important, they should write their own style sheet? Of course not. What you mean is that page authors know better than users what looks good. That's elitism, in practice. What you fail to see in this argument is that the "most of them are stupid" claim works both ways.
• You arguing that absent font-size:small designers would have been put off by the ugly size of their defaults. If web designers aren't even bothering to change their default fonts or use their own styles, what about the vast majority of internet users who aren't web designers? Or could it be that web designers also belong to the class "vast majority of internet users"?

• "The vast majority of internet users don't even know that they can change their own font size (let alone how to do it)." I reckon the vast majority also don't they can override a specified font and specify their own fonts or own font sizes. So, are you suggesting that if a user's font preference are important, they should write their own style sheet? Of course not. What you mean is that page authors know better than users what looks good. That's elitism, in practice. What you fail to see in this argument is that the "most of them are stupid" claim works both ways.
• You arguing that absent font-size:small designers would have been put off by the ugly size of their defaults. If web designers aren't even bothering to change their default fonts or use their own styles, what about the vast majority of internet users who aren't web designers? Or could it be that web designers also belong to the class "vast majority of internet users"?

Slashdot relies on tables for layout which is a big sin for WaSP. Not only do table-based layouts violate the structural markup that is the basis of HTML

I don't know about slashdot, but when I make web pages I still frequenly use tables for page layout simply because nothing in CSS can do some things that tables can.

For instance, in CSS, there's no way to say "position this block 30 pixels off the bottom of block X". As an example, check out the web standards project's own site. See that sentence at the very top ("The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting...")? The main part of the page looks to be absolutely positioned below it. Try increasing the font size of your browser a bunch (ctrl + in mozilla). Eventually, the sentence at the top will overflow into the main text below it. If they had used a table with two rows, one for the quote up top and another for the body text, then the top row would grow and move the body text down to accommodate the larger font size. With absolute positioning, its stuck there and won't move even if the text is bleeding out of it.

Now, this isn't so much of a problem with the text blocks so far apart like that, but many times I have had to arrange blocks of text like this close together and if you increased the font size at all, the text would bleed out of its absolutely positioned container.

And none of the other positioning modes make it work... I've tried for hours to make certain layouts work with CSS *and* be flexible to varying font sizes and browser window sizes to no avail. Only tables worked. There's relative positioning, but that requires a parent-child relationship between the two blocks (which often makes no sense) in question and doesn't remove the child block from the normal flow layout.

I've got that page open in the second tab of Moz as I write this. It is liquid from any browser width down to 410 px. Below that, it degrades acceptably (remains readable) until the columns are just a single word wide, well below the limit of reason. All text responds to user-agent changes in the font size, and the layout reflows without problems. I've looked at their stylesheet and it looks good (wsp/css).

There is no may about it; this page does "abide by all the standards."

Does it also abide by the spirit of the standards?

Yes. The standards are not intended to lock you into any design style. There is no "best" design style. The standards were developed to assure that material written to the standard will be presented to the reader no matter what his user-agent (so long as the user-agent also recognizes the standards).

The standards have nothing to do about good design. All they address is across the board functional design. IMO, I think that on this page WaSP has sacrificed some quality of design to showcase what can be done within the standards. That is a reasonable design trade-off, and it has nothing to do with standards compliance.

In this instance, you need to realize that WaSP's core audience, the group they are hoping to influence, is not the average guy using his browser in the usual way. Their audience consists of web designers and others who are pretty sophisticated in their use of the browser, and are likely to have their browser window set at around 700px width, in a corner of their 1600x1200 screen.

Moz just seems to 'think' about every action a while first.


umm.. computers don't think. People do.

So, I guess in this age of eye-candy, Mozilla is king ("ooh look-skins!").

There's a lot more going on there than pretty skins bro, ever hear of web standards? Didn't think so. Here's a couple of hints for ya.

w3.org

webstandards browser upgrade

Webstandards

While yer at it, you may wanna validate some of those pages you surf in NS4.

Did you know what people have been writing webpages with CSS for the past few years?

Back to NS4 and waiting for Mozilla 2.

Thats it, I am finally using some DOM sniff code and routing all the 4.0 browser people to AOL, where they belong.

Moz just seems to 'think' about every action a while first.


umm.. computers don't think. People do.

So, I guess in this age of eye-candy, Mozilla is king ("ooh look-skins!").

There's a lot more going on there than pretty skins bro, ever hear of web standards? Didn't think so. Here's a couple of hints for ya.

w3.org

webstandards browser upgrade

Webstandards

While yer at it, you may wanna validate some of those pages you surf in NS4.

Did you know what people have been writing webpages with CSS for the past few years?

Back to NS4 and waiting for Mozilla 2.

Thats it, I am finally using some DOM sniff code and routing all the 4.0 browser people to AOL, where they belong.

Okay, let's drive this point home. Even if you don't care about DOM scripting, there are other reasons why Mozilla is considered the most compliant of all current browsers.

FYI, the founder of Opera is also the chief author of the CSS1 standard. So you might be surprised to know that Mozilla has better CSS support than Opera.

... but there is always a price. The best trade-off (IMHO) for most situations is losing the 'D' when you're in NS4.x or IE4.x. You said:

I am seriously thinking of redoing my main page in Flash, primarily because it would be compatible with Netscape 4.x and the latest spiffy browsers. Flash seems to be more cross-platform than anything. It's not perfect, but sadly neither is Dynamic HTML.

By your comment, I assume that support for NS4.x is a priority for you. I could try to argue all of the reasons to deprecate NS4.x, but The Browser Upgrade Initiative and A List Apart do a much better job.

The bottom line is that you can create web sites that:

• are beautiful in any of the 5.0+ browsers
• are totally dynamic in any browser with Javascript and a reasonable implementation of the DOM
• drop down into a clean top-down format in browsers with poor (or no) CSS support (that means that it is beautiful in Lynx as well)
• and are acutally easier to create and maintain

If outside forces require that you make your sites all flashy in every concevable browser, then you have my sympathy. Every new browser will mean time-consuming maintenance, because pixel-perfect backwards compatability automatically precludes forwards compatability in today's web. If you don't need 100% accessability (screw those blind and non-Flash-liking people) Flash is probably your best answer. If you want a site that is a breeze to maintain, and don't mind giving older browsers a plainer page, (and maybe don't mind pushing the web forward a little instead of holding it back,) go with the latest web standards.

Omniweb has been much praised for its elegant interface and superb antialiasing of text, and its support for Unicode and international character sets is unparalleled (only Mozilla comes close).
Unfortunately, Omniweb's support for important web standards like CSS1 and the DOM is so poor as to make it unusable.

If you want elegance and superb antialiasing and standards compliance, consider Chimera.

There are a couple of things to take into consideration here:

For the most part, web designers crave standards. The absolute number one bitch of web designers is having to code for the quirks in different browsers. By having one of the major players in the market switch over to standards compliance, a *huge* load is taken off of the development time. Developers have been clamoring for more compliance for years. (And face it: IE is a very standards compliant browser; making the switch will all not be that drastic.) While it might take some time to make the switch, it will be well, WELL worth it to do so because you can just code to the standard.

AOL is in the business of delivering content over the internet. Currently the tool used by their customers to view this content is controlled by a competitor: Microsoft. It just doesn't make business sense for AOL to be dependant upon MS for such a core element of their business model.

AOL is a huge entity with enough clout to pressure commercial sites to change their ways. If a significant percentage of your customer base are AOL users, and AOL has changed a few things, you will either change your site or lose the customer. Most businesses will change their site.

In short, I think this is absolutely a win-win situation for the industry and the consumer. AOL is less dependant upon MS, developers are (more) happy because they don't have to code for Nutscrape specific quirks, and the end user will get a more consistent browsing experience.

Slashdot has quite an amount of good programmers and a big heap of *nix users (or at least 'nix wannabees).
But honestly now, most rant about compatability and flash being o so crappy and superfluos (actually one of the main reasons to use flash is/was compatability), smartass about HTML being no typesetting language (blahblahblah...it makes me sick!) and at the same time make the crappiest webdesign one could ever imagine. Reading some the comments posted here just gets me fuming again about the arrogant *nix comunity.
Bluntly said: Most /.ers don't know sh*t about webdesign, in contrary to what they think their Webdesign is in quality.

My suggestion:
Get into it and try for yourself and learn form the people you've seen good webdesign from. A very good community is built around Zeldmans AListApart and WebStandards.org(stick to this site when your going into implementation phase!).

Top of the pops DESIGN (.dcr and flash - of course) you can find at Yugo Nakamuras Site Yugop (check out the archives!!) and at NosePilot(the link at the bottom!).
Note that this is DESIGN that is kinda over the top in the way that it actually allready is art.

If you're going to make a massivley content orientaded site you might want to go dynamic form the begining. Check out PHP/MySQL for this. Or get youself a full featured GPLd CMS that are out there for a dime a dozen, maybe like PHPNuke. But that's actually all more webprogramming, that kinda comes later on...

Good luck. Oh, and NEVER discuss design with the people of kornshell.com, xfree.org or listen to the advice from /. patrons. Of course I would be one of the exceptions to that. :-)