Category: Technology

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Very interesting post and comments regarding IE7’s support of CSS. The post author writes about how IE7 fails the WaSP’s Acid2 test. As was noted in comments, this test isn’t necessarily the be all end all that it’s made out to be. For instance, according to Ziff-Davis UK Firefox also doesn’t pass the test, and Opera 9 barely passes it.

What do I think? I think a good web page designer can create a site that uses standard CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript and have it work with IE7, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and even other more esoteric browsers. I think the NewsCloud site is overdeveloped and too busy. I’m not a designer, but as a web page reader for 15 years, it gives me a headache. It also gives the W3C XHTML validator a headache with 307 errors! I’m surprised the page developer’s Firefox isn’t lying down and whimpering with that count.

As for browser-specific extensions and non-standard uses of technology, we don’t have to look any further than Firefox’s support for JavaScript 1.7 in Firefox 2.0b to see rather significant examples of both. There is no ECMAScript standard to support these. How is it, then, that this innovation is considered good while Microsoft’s innovation (which, I want to remind the more histrionic among you, helped bring about today’s implementation of Ajax) is considered bad?

IE is not my favorite browser. I do have to do extra work to ensure my pages work with it. However, it’s a vast improvement over IE 6, and as long as the changes continue in the positive direction, I will be encouraged. Guardedly encouraged, but encouraged nonetheless.

I think putting up a banner screaming at your customers to change their browser is a case of ‘been there, done that’ back from the old Netscape/IE flag days. Anyone can code a page to work with Firefox–it takes skill to make the page work with all the browsers and still validate.

I also think that if someone wants to put up banners and force people into one browser or another, more power to them, and more jobs for me. I may not be a designer, but at least I know how to create sites that validate.

Update

The author of the post quotes a year old column by Paul Thurrott, noted Microsoft writer. What he fails to quote, is Thurrott’s follow up post.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I just posted a story at ScriptTeaser about a weblog post whereby the writer rants and rails (not the Ruby kind) against IE7. I find myself in the rather unusual position of responding in defense of this much maligned browser.

For all that there are rants against IE and Microsoft’s use of non-standard technology, that non-standard technology gave us the roots of Ajax, as well as the basic architecture of today’s DOM (Document Object Model). I remember very well when IE was the hot browser, while Netscape’s Navigator pretty much sat there, doing little.

In addition, it was Mozilla/Firefox 2.0b that gave us JavaScript 1.7–a non-standard extension to the JavaScript programming language. So, the team behind IE is not the only browser team that ‘innovates’.

In fact, about the only browser that attempts to keep up with all the standards is Opera, and it only has about a 2% customer share.

You have to make pages that work, and they have to work in all of the popular browsers, and should work equally well with or without JavaScript (or Flash). If you can’t, someone else will. That’s the law of this jungle.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

WordPress.com has released a new paid upgrade: custom CSS. Now those who host their weblogs with the service can pay for an upgrade and customize their weblogs. To start, the company provided a Sandbox theme layout that can be altered through the custom stylesheet.

It’s interesting to read about this theme in the associated forum thread. There seems to be confusion associated with web page semantics and abstracting out the presentation from the layout. The theme creator wrote, The Sandbox is powerful because it generates semantic classes for a myriad of pages, which allows practically absolute control over the theme with CSS alone. He also wrote, The Sandbox will undoubtidly(sic) be the easiest theme for novices to write CSS for, with selectors that are semantic and logical/.

I’m assuming he means that the theme uses ordered and unordered list elements for lists, but what this has to do with CSS, I don’t know.

Quick Review:

XHTML and HTML are page elements.

Some (X)HTML elements have associated semantics, such as tables for tabular data, and OL or UL for lists. However, both have and will continue to be abused.

No matter how you push it, DIV is not a semantic element–no more meaning than the cardboard box that contained my last Amazon order.

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, have to do with the presentation of the elements. Through these, you can make unordered lists not look like unordered lists; but this just changes the presentation, not the semantics.

What’s really meaningful? Atom feeds that don’t break and that validate. Yes, that would mean a lot to me.