When Good Browsers Go Bad -- And They All Do
Jeffrey Zeldman must have thought he'd never live to see the day. Ten years after he co-founded the Web Standards Project, all of the major browser vendors have shown renewed commitment to supporting World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards in the last few years -- and they're following through. Those who lived through the browser wars of the '90s might think that hell has frozen over, were it not for one, small problem: Users still experience plenty of problems on the Web.
Mitchell, Robert L. Computerworld (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers
Fifteen Surefire Ways to Break Your CSS
But as silly as it may seem, some of the biggest CSS blunders stem from the simplest of errors. Knowing what some of those errors are and remembering to look for them can save you hours of wasted labor. Here are fifteen ways I’ve found to break my CSS for sure — and fifteen things I always look for whenever I have a problem in my code.
Glazebrook, Rob L. CSS Newbie (2009). Design>Web Design>Standards>CSS
New Accessibility Guidelines A "Welcomed Update"
The World Wide Web Consortium recently approved new accessibility guidelines. Passed in December 2008, the new "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" is now the official recommendation for web accessibility for the disabled. This new WCAG 2.0 document, a welcomed update, replaces the WCAG 1.0 W3C recommendation of 1999. This article is part one in a series discussing the impact of WCAG 2.0 on your website.
Dolson, Joseph C. Practical eCommerce (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
New Accessibility Guidelines Part IV: Robustness
The fourth principle of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines requires new web documents to be “robust.” Robustness, future-proofing, user-agent independence, accessibility-supported: All are terms that suggest the same basic idea that your documents should follow standard, supported models for web document types. In many ways, this is the simplest and most testable requirement of the WCAG, but the details can be quite complicated.
Dolson, Joseph C. Practical eCommerce (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
It is six months since the release of WCAG 2.0 and I thought it might be interesting to see how extensively it has been adopted as a bench mark for determining web content accessibility. Over this time, I have felt that the rate of adoption has been relatively slow and the number of countries and other regulatory authorities now using WCAG 2 is lower than I expected.
Hudson, Roger. DingoAccess (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
This standard is directed toward ensuring equitable access to all content on Government of Canada Web sites.
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (2007). Resources>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
html5doctor is a collaboration between, Rich Clark, Bruce Lawson, Jack Osborne, Mike Robinson, Remy Sharp and Tom Leadbetter. The site came about following a HTML5 meetup after the Future of Web Design conference in London (2009). We decided that there wasn’t a resource that catered for the people who wished to find out more about implementing HTML5 and how to go about it, so we thought we’d better build one. We will publish articles relating to HTML5 and it’s semantics and how to use them, here and now.
HTML 5 offers a new element to mark additional information that can enhance an article but isn’t necessarily key to understanding it. However, in the interpretation of 'aside' there lies confusion as to how it can be used, and with that there is demand for the Doctor to step up and clear the air. In this article I will look at what 'aside' was created for, including sample uses and how not to use this useful, misunderstood element.
HTML 5 Doctor (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today!
The blogosphere was jerked into excitement when Google gave a sneak preview of its new service, Google Wave. Only the select few have an account, but there’s an 80-minute video about it on YouTube for the rest of us. The service is an HTML 5 app, and so HTML 5 has gone from being too far away to care about to today’s hot topic.
Lawson, Bruce. SitePoint (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
Here at SitePoint, we have started thinking about HTML 5, and whether or not the time is right to publish a book about it. To help us decide, we asked a number of web luminaries what they thought. Their answers were both varied and interesting. Take a look and decide for yourself: is it time you started learning about HTML 5?
Yank, Kevin. SitePoint (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
Recommended List of DTDs You Can Use in Your Web Document
When authoring document is HTML or XHTML, it is important to Add a Doctype declaration. The declaration must be exact (both in spelling and in case) to have the desired effect, which makes it sometimes difficult. To ease the work, below is a list of recommended declarations that you can use in your Web documents.
W3C (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>XHTML
This XHTML cheat sheet is excellent for XHTML coders. Along with many basic attributes, this two-page grid includes references that even experienced web professionals would find useful. Three types of elements are defined in this cheat sheet: block, inline and table elements. The miscellaneous section includes 22 additional elements. Each row contains the name, description and attributes of each of the elements available for use.
Flyspray (2007). Resources>Web Design>Standards>XHTML
This cheat sheet is designed to not only be a quick reference for CSS properties but also to give you a good feel for how each property should be used. It contains all of the properties in the CSS2 specification including a description of the syntax of each one.
Coding Fool, A (2007). Resources>Web Design>Standards>CSS
Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group Wiki
The mission of the Open Web Education Alliance Incubator Group is to help enhance and standardize the architecture of the World Wide Web by facilitating the highest quality standards and best practice based education for future generations of Web professionals through such activities as: fostering open communication channels for knowledge transfer, and curriculum sharing between corporate entities, educational institutions, Web professionals, and students.
With the flurry of HTML5 tweets this past month, I felt it was somewhat easier to park some of them in a blog post. Retweeting was adding to the confusion for a non-HTML5 person like me.
STC AccessAbility SIG (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5 Comic Strip
Now that the development of XHTML 2 is discontinued, should we stick to XHTML 1.0 or move forward to HTML 5 or better prefer the old HTML 4? Let’s set things straight once and for all. In this post we are trying to clear up the confusion, explain what is what and describe what markup language you can use for your web-sites.
Colbow, Brad. Smashing (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
Why is HTML Suddenly Interesting?
Today the HTML conversation is reborn. Standards development around HTML seems to actually have a chance of influencing user experience in the browser, and Microsoft itself is participating in the HTML 5 conversation despite still holding roughly two-thirds of the browser market. While Microsoft's market share is only slowly eroding, developer mindshare seems to have shifted decisively to the band of WHATWG upstarts, Microsoft's competitors.
St. Laurent, Simon. O'Reilly and Associates (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
Ten Ways To Make Your XHTML Site Accessible Using Web Standards
Let’s take a look at 10 ways to improve the accessibility of your XHTML website by making it standards-compliant. We’ll go the extra mile and include criteria that fall beyond the standards set by the W3C but which you should follow to make your website more accessible. Each section lists the criteria you need to meet, explains why you need to meet them and gives examples of what you should and shouldn’t do.
Irigoyen, Michael. Smashing (2009). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Standards
Why Apple is Betting on HTML 5: A Web History
To get an accurate picture of why HTML 5 matters and how its adoption will change the future of the web and software in general, you have to take a look at the squabbling drama of contention that HTML 5 is emerging from as industry rivals work to achieve a new level of consensus on how the web should work.
Dilger, Daniel Eran. AppleInsider (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
Are you interested in HTML 5 and what's coming down the pipeline but haven't had time to read any articles yet? We've put together an educational Introduction to HTML 5 video that goes over many of the major aspects of this new standard. In the video we also crack open the HTML 5 YouTube Video prototype to show you some of the new HTML 5 tags, such as nav, article, etc.
Google (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
Ready or not, here it comes. Despite the confusion surrounding its evolution, real-world HTML 5 is right around the corner. Longtime ALA contributor J. David Eisenberg returns to get us all up to speed on the markup we’re about to be writing.
Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5
If you’re working with the latest technology, there may not be any user reference material at all; the only documentation available is the specification. In such a case, learning to read the spec is a necessity, not a luxury.
Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Specifications
RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets.”
Birbeck, Mark. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>XML
Dive Into HTML5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards. I shall publish Drafts periodically, as time permits.
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