On Standards

Has anyone seen this problem before and have any idea how to solve it? In firefox, the text wraps around both floats correctly. In IE6/7, the text only wraps around the second float. Read More...

Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post ). “In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting ‘Standards’ mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s ‘IE7 Standards mode’ will... Read More...

Previously on Web Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by using a valid DOCTYPE. A lot of people, including Jeremy Keith, think this is a bad idea. Here are some of the more interesting points that have been raised in the discussion so far. “If IE8 acts like IE8 by default, then IE8 might break... Read More...

In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind. This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards in email clients. The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email... Read More...

"You’ll sometimes hear people joke that good programmers are 'lazy', and what this means is simply that good programmers tend to see duplicated work as a bug, and try to fix it." -- James Bennett, discussing CSS frameworks Read More...

I was clearing out my bookmarks recently, and noticed that I had a pretty large collection of web development and CSS-related bookmarks that I never refer to any more, but might be useful to people who are just getting started with CSS. So with that in mind, here’s a collection of links, and I hope it helps you out! Browser Testing You’ll probably be spending a lot of time testing your designs in different browsers. The old-school way to do this is to physically install every browser you might have... Read More...

I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that the extra money we charged them to upgrade their site to web standards will make future updates easier, the Client Services team is afraid the client will come back and say that we should charge them less for updates. For a standards zealot like myself, this... Read More...

Wanna get a headache? Go type “ html book titles italic em ” into Google and read for about 15 minutes. What you’re looking at is an intense debate over the best way to mark up a book title using HTML. I’ll save you some time and tell you that after several hours, my conclusion is that you should use the <cite> element for book titles. If that’s all you need, then feel free to save yourself the trouble of reading the rest of this, but if you’re curious about... Read More...

Last year, I attended An Event Apart 2006 in Seattle . It was a great event, although I remember it being really rushed, because they seven sessions packed into one day. So when I heard that they were coming back to Seattle, and had changed the format to two days, I signed up right away. I’m happy to tell you that the new format is a huge improvement. The event no longer feels rushed, and even though there are six sessions every day, there’s a 15 minute break between each one, and a 1½... Read More...

Having already written a book introducing readers to the web standards movement, Dan Cedarholm returns to cover more advanced material. While his first focused on markup and basic scenarios like grocery lists, this book focuses on CSS and accessibility. In particular, he explores how to let a web page flex around things like large font sizes or lengthy headlines without breaking - hence, bulletproof. While this material is all certainly all available online, this is a handy reference to some of the... Read More...

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