Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the fathers of the Web Standards movement. When everyone was using Flash, he soldiered on and shouted for everyone to hear: “Hey, write it in HTML instead!”. Now, according to himself, HTML, CSS and Javascript are the de facto standard the Web is built on. During this year’s SXSW Festival, Zeldman gave an interview to .net magazine where he discusses these and other issues of interest to the Web industry.
Yes, it’s true! The next working CSS specification is being published in paperback format. As a thriller! Some may argue the current CSS 3 Spec is already a huge page-turner, and would sell millions as it is, but the W3C, in a bold move to make Web Standards hip (as in cool), hired famous writer Dan Brown to novelize the upcoming standard.
Brown is the author of famous novels such as The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, both of which have been recently made into movies, so we should expect a work of the highest standard of fiction. Keeping this in mind, here is an artist’s rendition of the cover of the soon-to-be novel:
Oh yeah, and judging by the direction things are going, you should expect to see this in bookshelves across the World as early as 2017. And, sources say, the movie tie-in is coming in 2018.
Yesterday I gave a small lecture on designing and developing for the Web with IE6 support in mind. The presentation covers some of the most common bugs and techniques to circumvent or altogether avoid those little annoying issues that plague us all. Some of the bugs and their solutions were taken from Chris Coyer’s excellent post at CSS-Tricks on the same subject. Without further ado, here is the presentation:
One of the most frequent hurdles (and one which I’ve ran into myself) Web Designers face is how to correctly size text using CSS. The most straightforward way to do this is by using absolute px values, but this comes at a price: IE6 users won’t be able to resize the text, and will be stuck with whatever you decide is best. If one of your users has some type of vision impairment, congratulations, you’ve just made someone’s life a little harder. (…) more after the jump ›
If you’re familiar with designing for the Web, then you’ve probably heard about the principle of Graceful Degradation. This concept focuses on being able to provide a fault-tolerant system, assuring that a system can continue to operate should one of it’s components fail.
Translate that into the Web world, and all it means is that you should somehow support older browsers. You develop using the latest and greatest and then, by the end of the project, you test your product on older browsers, making fixes here and there. Also, you frantically strive to design a wholly equal experience for all the browsers you “support”. What ends up happening is that you get a relatively watered-down experience in all platforms, all because of the need to support older browsers. (…) more after the jump ›
