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Zeldman's Daily Report is a good web standards blog. His site has links to many other good web sites.

Daniel M. Frommelt and his posse have recoded a prototype of Slashdot that uses valid, semantic HTML and stylesheets.

HTML is not a semantic web technology! here's the W3C Semantic Web page. Notice how (X)HTML isn't mentioned?

i don't know who to blame for the propagation of this usage of the word 'semantic,' but i think it might be Jeffrey Zeldman. i like the dude, but this has to stop...

That doesn't mean that the small fries are to be discounted. There are tons of truly interesting, but small, blogs that are out there that give a varied view on topics with a personal touch. If you separate the wheat from the chaff, just like the rest of the WWW, you can find some real gems.

On that note, here's a shameless plug for my new blog, .: Bent Double :.. Lacking in content, but only because it is still very new.

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.

For the most part, IE 6 supports CSS "well enough". It is possible to create a site that uses XHTML Transitional and CSS that degrades well on all browsers [including the cursed NS4].

The real problem is that UI designers and programmers want to do what they know how to do, rather than consider the alternative.

Take a look at the following sites for additional information:

• http://www.alistapart.com/
• http://www.zeldman.com
• http://www.realworldstyle.com/
• http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/

They are, actualy 1 guy is. This is exactly what is meant when people talk about malicious applications of patent. He has no desire or goal but to cause Microsoft pain. And while all the ./ crowd is in their mom's basement giggling and pretending that xbox doesn't own them; if this can be done to a company with nearly endless resources to throw at the problem, what'll happen when someone comes for your free software?

It is very scary that a single person can extort a half of a billion dollars from one of the most powerfull (if not the most powerfull) company on the face of the earth.

Software Patents must be repealed !

If you want more info on the whole story check out Jeffrey Zelman's site here.

Some info here, but I can't find the one where they talk about it being caused by something out of their control. I think that link was before the explaination.

If you're referring to zeldman.com, there's a style sheet option on the left that lets you make it black text. Make sense?

His site is http://www.zeldman.com/, the book's site is http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/ and one of the sites he's built using web standards is http://www.wired.com/

His site is http://www.zeldman.com/, the book's site is http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/ and one of the sites he's built using web standards is http://www.wired.com/

if, after reading it, the reviewer didn't realise how important it is to include hyperlinks to stuff refered to in his text - like zelman.com.

1) He's married.

2) As for his site sponsorship, see: this link

Am I the only one who noticed that his website is Supported by XDate Speed Dating, 30Dates Speed Dating, and for free online dating, xdate.com?

Maybe he should take a break from writing and get out to the bar a bit more.

I almost forgot, be sure to check out http://www.zeldman.com and http://www.meyerweb.com for ongoing debates on these subjects and more.

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.

My former company was checking out NetAccelerator recently to resell to our clients.

These things are a joke. The primary performance increase comes from recompressing images into really nasty JPEGs. AOL was doing this years ago (and getting blasted for it). If you turn that off, the performance improvement is not even measurable.

Furthermore, you tend to get a lot of stale caches on your machine. Most browsers don't even get this right, so they add yet another layer of potentially buggy cache abstraction.

No, these things are junk. They act as proxy servers and their source is closed. How can you trust them to handle your data? Even with all their compression features turned on, the performance improvement is seriously overrated. Don't bother. You simply cannot get something for nothing in cases like these.

Now, what would improve the download speed of the web is if web designers would start building standards compliant markup. Many web sites have as much as 700kb overhead in markup from tools that create loads of font tags and their ilk. Pure XHTML + CSS layout would do a hell of a lot more to speed up the web than these scams. Of course, don't take my word for it--read Zeldman.

Seriously. Accessibility is the next big thing, and the design practices that result (cleaner code, even if it lacks semantics), are worth it in the long run, especially for maintanence.

A basic overview
Designing With Web Standards

It's simple: adhere to web standards. There is nothing to be done about making big fonts or using graphics over text as some other idiot suggested. Use strict XHTML and use pure CSS to layout it out and control appearance. Here's why.

When you develop by web standards, which also implies separation of content from structure, you get content which is marked up based on what it is and not what it should look like. You never have any guarantee as to what size, shape, or color your content is going to appear as. The best you can do is describe it. For example, headers should be marked up with header tags, emphasized text should use <em> as opposed to <i>. How do you know a user has emphasized text set to italic? They may not. Publishers sure as hell don't do that when reviewing manuscripts. This is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. I highly suggest everyone go over and read Jeffery Zeldman's site for more details.

So what does this get you? Since we're dealing with accessibility, I'll concentrate on that aspect of standards compliant web design. If your content is properly marked up, it gets properly interpreted by screen readers and other software and devices that allow poor/no eye-sign view to get the content. A screen reader doesn't know what the hell <font size="+3">Title</font> mean. It doesn't know how to address it or "present" it to the user. However, if you use <h1>Title</h1> to define the text, the screen reader knows it's a top-level header. Based on the programmed behavior, the content will be far more intelligible.

But it goes further still. Many people who have tough time using web sites due to small fonts or bad colors will supply their own style sheets. (This is why good browsers give you this option in the first place.) People should be able to override the stylesheets provided with your site so it can become more accessible to them. If doing this breaks your site in some way, then its your fault and you should lose that customer.

At any rate, I highly recommend that everyone who is about to embark or is in the business of web design and development read this book: Designing With Web Standards by Jeffery Zeldman. This guy knows what he's talking about and if more people followed his advice, we'd have a web that was usable by everyone, regardless of their sensory disabilities.

I also recommend scoping out the CSS Zen Garden. It's a site built with XHTML strict and styled with pure CSS. You can even switch stylesheets on it and it's visual appearance gets completely overhauled without any modification to the mark up or structure. Now imagine how easy it would be to supply your own CSS to the site to make it more usable.

Yes, this is definitely a rant. I hope many of you take it to heart, nevertheless. Browsers are becoming more and more standards compliant all the time. The web as a practice is becoming more refined and serious as opposed to being laden with idiots who pirated a copy of Dreamweaver or Frontpage and are out there polluting the scene with crap.

Have them check out Designing with Web Standards by Jeff Zeldman. It goes into the whys and hows of writing valid XHTML. And if any of your friends are designers who think that CSS can't make good designs point them to the CSS Zen Garden.

Isn't it funny what a difference of 3 years make?

Back in 2000, Microsoft's IE 5 for the Mac was THE standard-compliant browser, on any platform. Believe me, it's true because Zeldman tells me so.

The thing which frosts me, now that I'm a prospective home buyer, is why-o-why do all of the real estate databases refuse to work with Safari? I'm assuming they're filled with heinous IE-only HTML, because, ta-da, they do work at work.

For the record I develop on a Mac. There's nothing quite like having Apache running on your desktop machine, and being able to use http://... to connect to your work site. (No relative links to fix before publication, PHP, perl, SSI, and sendmail run in-place.... It can't be beat!)

You best bet is Zeldman's book. Go see the website and the Amazon page on it. Also his website and the online magazine AListApart contain more usefull stuff on css and web design than most books.

There is one book I have found brilliant as a tutorial for css - Eric Meyer's Eric Meyer on CSS. It is a great way to learn css, each chapter is a project, and the projects are challenging and informative.

Also worth a mention (although why I should be giving him another free plug when his name is plastered over the sites and blogs of anyone who knows what CSS stands for - hint: it isn't cross-site scripting) is Zeldman and his new book designing with web standards. I'm a third of the way through it and it is an engaging read but I'm still looking for the meat.

Otherwise there are a bunch of on-line resources at W3C.

BTW, it's worth persevering, I recently replaced a gif menu and javascript rollovers with the equivalent xhtml/css and knocked over 20K off the homepage. Performance improved enough for customers to contact my employer to comment and that's feedback worth getting.

Dave

Netscape 6 was Mozilla .9 or something.
Netscape 7 was Mozilla 1.0.
And because they're using 1.4 as the next stable release, I'm willing to bet that it will be Netscape 8 (or whatever they decide to number it) (if they do so after the whole AOL / MSFT settlement).

Zeldman had some interesting entries on this: here, here and here.

Netscape 6 was Mozilla .9 or something.
Netscape 7 was Mozilla 1.0.
And because they're using 1.4 as the next stable release, I'm willing to bet that it will be Netscape 8 (or whatever they decide to number it) (if they do so after the whole AOL / MSFT settlement).

Zeldman had some interesting entries on this: here, here and here.

Netscape 6 was Mozilla .9 or something.
Netscape 7 was Mozilla 1.0.
And because they're using 1.4 as the next stable release, I'm willing to bet that it will be Netscape 8 (or whatever they decide to number it) (if they do so after the whole AOL / MSFT settlement).

Zeldman had some interesting entries on this: here, here and here.

Netscape 6 was Mozilla .9 or something.
Netscape 7 was Mozilla 1.0.
And because they're using 1.4 as the next stable release, I'm willing to bet that it will be Netscape 8 (or whatever they decide to number it) (if they do so after the whole AOL / MSFT settlement).

Zeldman had some interesting entries on this: here, here and here.

• Bright (download) is the best non-dithering quantiser in the whole world, and reasonably fast, too; based on dlquant
• pngrewrite sorts the palette
• pngcrush removes junk chunks, fixes Photoshop's gamma bug and tries many filters to find a smaller filesize
• OptiPNG is similar to pngcrush, but executes much faster
• pngout uses an alternative deflate, yields sometimes even smaller filesizes
• tweakpng manipulates chunks comfortably with a GUI
• pngquant quantises PNG24 with alpha transparency to PNG8 with transparent palettes, the result is alas mostly ugly

sleightplus demonstrates how to overcome IE's rendering bugs without polluting your markup or styles; no silly style inlining required, either. Use PNG images or backgrounds all the way they were intended.

Predecessors with only support for foreground images: Youngpup sleight, WebFX PNG behavior, mongus pngInfo, Bob Osola. PNGHack, a server side solution, is doomed to fail because of dysfunctional browser sniffing.

If that was useful for you, and you are a C hacker, I have a plea. Take the dlquant sourcecode (see above) and massage it so it works with PNG instead of the archaic PPM. I want a functional Bright clone for Linux that takes a true colour PNG and outputs a paletted PNG. Can you do that?

• Bright (download) is the best non-dithering quantiser in the whole world, and reasonably fast, too; based on dlquant
• pngrewrite sorts the palette
• pngcrush removes junk chunks, fixes Photoshop's gamma bug and tries many filters to find a smaller filesize
• OptiPNG is similar to pngcrush, but executes much faster
• pngout uses an alternative deflate, yields sometimes even smaller filesizes
• tweakpng manipulates chunks comfortably with a GUI
• pngquant quantises PNG24 with alpha transparency to PNG8 with transparent palettes, the result is alas mostly ugly

sleightplus demonstrates how to overcome IE's rendering bugs without polluting your markup or styles; no silly style inlining required, either. Use PNG images or backgrounds all the way they were intended.

Predecessors with only support for foreground images: Youngpup sleight, WebFX PNG behavior, mongus pngInfo, Bob Osola. PNGHack, a server side solution, is doomed to fail because of dysfunctional browser sniffing.

If that was useful for you, and you are a C hacker, I have a plea. Take the dlquant sourcecode (see above) and massage it so it works with PNG instead of the archaic PPM. I want a functional Bright clone for Linux that takes a true colour PNG and outputs a paletted PNG. Can you do that?

What, you mean like a petition to Instead, round up as many people as you can to petition Microsoft to get them to support the PNG format as well as Mozilla does.

What, you mean a petition like Aaron Adam's petition for Proper PNG Support in Internet Explorer for Windows, as endorsed by the likes of Zeldman (designer extraordinaire), A List Apart (who have an article describing various workarounds, which are simple but ultimately impractical), Eric Meyer (CSS guru - excellent books BTW), Owen Briggs (the Noodle Incident), and the like? I'd highly recommend that you take the time to sign it, it'll only take a few seconds...

I'd also encourage you to give Microsoft some product feedback (no registration or e-mail required) on IE/win's crappy PNG support ;)

As for resources describing each browser's level of support, check out this excellent listing of each web browsers' PNG support over at Gregg Roelofses LibPNG site.

Cheers,

ManxStef

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.

It's good that they are doing something to protect the people. Now I just hope they don't screw up XHTML 2.

> One (unfortunate?) thing about the Web is that its "architecture" (if you can even call it that) evolved and grew piece by piece. The design goals people had in mind back in 1993, or even in 1999, have been blown away by what has happened on the ground. Inter-company politics have also been a big factor - never helpful for promoting standardization, or sound design. >

I couldn't agree with this more from a web development area as well, so many designers are still using hack and slash methods from the early 90's it's sad[although not always their fault!]. It correlates to the same principles used to build the architecture itself.

side note: if you're interested in learning more about forward compatible web design you should check out Jeffrey Zeldman's new book 'Designing With Web Standards' you can find him at www.zeldman.com - I just finished this book and it was well worth the $24.50 - all you nested table designers should pick this one up or those looking to bridge the gap from using tabled design. =)

I'd agree with Zeldman on this one. They need to rename it to something else, and do some sort of forking, because switching terminology in midstream (for no appreciably visible reason) is simply not a good idea. I can see that it makes a certain amount of logical sense to convert images to objects, etc. ... but getting rid of H* tags and, as Mark mentioned, CITE? There isn't really anything to replace that kind of semantic markup, which is unfortunate.

I do remember reading some other stuff by IBM on this, and it was a fairly cogent explanation of the reasoning, but I still don't agree with the theories behind the changes.

I wouldn't mind most of the changes myself, but it will take decades for this standard to replace the current version if they drop compatibility. I'm sure that a few days afterwards Mozilla will have support for it, but the massive numbers of people who haven't yet upgraded to CSS-capable browsers tell me that we might see a few sites using XHTML 2 in, say, 2010.

You should go over to Sweden then.

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...

I'm not suggesting you ignore 10% of your audience. As a Mac user, I realize that alienating any significant minority group is a bad idea! I was just questioning whether there are that many sites out there that have a huge number of older browser users, such that you should let them dictate your design strategy instead of merely making your site accessible to them.

Is table-less design the future? Good question. I think it has to be determined on a site by site basis. Zeldman wrote a good article on the danger of getting rid of tables altogether.

Help me, I've gone link-mad! (But those are all good reads.)

Help me, I've gone link-mad! (But those are all good reads.)

... because there are plenty of free hints/tips for writing 'effective' weblogs.

Write the Living Web by Mark Bernstein
How to Write a Better Weblog by Dennis A. Mahoney
How to be Soopafamous by W.K. Lang
A Case for Web Storytelling by Curt Cloninger

Those links are just for a quick scan at Alistapart. I'm sure a little more work and you could build up a huge directory of 'good weblogging' links (or just read Zeldman).

As for the blogging systems themselves, can the people who buy this book not deal with README files? I've used Blogger and MT in my weblogging time and both have had excellent online documentation or readme files respectively.

This seems to me like a book for people who really don't want to try to learn anything for themselves, and need it all presented for them. There is so much more to be gained by finding out stuff fo yourself.

--Jon

"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."

netdiver.net has a good selection of nice website and cutting edge designs. Subscribe to lists like the ones at evolt.org, and read A List Apart and Zeldman. They all preach standards and do great work.

A bit off-topic, but I noticed quite a few Slashdot readers were commenting on the X-10 pop-under ads. You can go here and click one of the links to either kill their ads for the next 1,000 days or until the year 2015. Whichever you prefer. I did it months ago and haven't seen an X-10 ad (until I booted into Mac OS X and realized I need to activate that cookie there as well). :)

if you would like to improve your website, you might like to look into the work of actual designers. don't pay attention to the ramblings of nielsen.

Karma whore? Sure. I guess. But I'm already at 50, so what do I care? I'm just saving you from doing a Google search on "Powazek".

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There has been some good discussion and links related to this issue over at Dave Winer's scripting.com.

Also, over at Zeldman's www.zeldman.com.

They have already developed a similar (though somewhat less violent) thing... it's called vibrate mode. I leave my phone on vibrate, and it has the double benefit that:

• Other people aren't disturbed when someone calls me, and if I'm busy I can totally ignore the call without anyone else knowing.
• When someone else's phone rings, I know it's not mine, so I don't have to run around checking my phone to see if someone's calling me or not.

I've been noodling on this for a while and it is disconcerting to me that these media outlets are shutting down or floundering.

The dearth of weblog content is an incredible outlet for relevant information on world events, often relayed by the very participants in the news. However, too often, the linking goes back to major media outlets or a subsidary of one a large corporation.

While even further "elite" discussion boards and content sites will flourish (uber, A List Apart and Flak spring to mind), they lack the resources to disseminate their clever and unabashed content.

Publishing tools like blogger make it easy for the non-technical user to publish their thoughts, witticism, and commentary to the web. It is only when these sites reach critical mass (Kottke.org, Zeldman.com) that it becomes hugely expense to continue relaying the message.

I see the future of independent content lying in the hands of smaller, more focused community sites (Metafilter, The Fray)

Despite their shortcomings, these sites are paving the way backwards to a smaller, more closely knit internet the way it was several years ago.

Suzie Homemaker and Joe Six-pack will continue to the media that's delivered to them, and the rest who desire the independent voice will seek it and should they not find it, they will create it as they always have.

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