This is the monthly archive for February 2007.
23 February 2007
Always an interesting question: should high end personal sites of web developers still support IE6 fully? QuirksMode.org doesn't, but I dropped IE6 support as much to save time as for any other reason. Maybe it's time to discuss this question more formally and in more depth.
Browsers, Theory | Permalink
20 February 2007
Steve Yegge, who cannot be accused of being un-opinionated, talks about the Next Big Language, without revealing exactly which language he means. Curiously, many people seem to assume he talks about JavaScript 2.0 . I don't think I agree; social factors heavily weigh against JavaScript becoming an important server side language any time soon. Nonetheless it's an interesting thought.
(Via Web Graphics.)
Theory | Permalink
14 February 2007
Interesting entry on the difference between graceful degradation and progressive enhancement.
Briefly, graceful degradation starts with a whistle-and-bells page and then makes sure it can be viewed without the whistles, without the bells, and without the whistles and bells.
Progessive enhancement starts with a bare-bones page and slowly adds new layers of functionality for those who happen to support it.
Although the net result should be roughly the same, all in all progressive enhancement seems like the way to go.
(Via Naar Voren.)
Accessibility, Theory | Permalink
Bruce Lawson, whom nobody can accuse of being indifferent to web standards, decides to use an invalid attribute in order to combat an IE accessibility problem. As a result his latest sites use invalid HTML.
I wasn't aware of the problem, but now that I encountered it I completely agree with Bruce's line of thought.
As everybody knows I'm not above adding invalid or custom attributes whenever I see the need. My general rule is that I must be able to explain any validation error a page contains; that is, I won't use custom attributes just for the heck of it, but only if they serve a narrowly defined purpose that I can explain in two or three sentences.
Bruce's use of tabindex="-1" adheres to this de facto guideline of mine, so I'm all in favour of it. I assume that, other than the spurious tabindex, the HTML is clean and valid.
Accessibility, Standards/W3C | Permalink
11 February 2007
Joe Clark doesn't thing WCAG 2.0 is a good idea. In itself that's nothing new, but now he follows up by an official Open Letter.
Over on WaSP Derek Featherstone asks What to do with WCAG 2. A consensus seems to be that the document is impractical, but other than that there's no real agreement.
Accessibility, Standards/W3C | Permalink
10 February 2007
Eric asks for the most important and/or overlooked events in the history of CSS and web design. I thought about it for a while, but frankly I couldn't think of something that, to me, was much more important than all other events.
Fortunately most commenters aren't similarly inhibited. This promises to be a useful list for future historians.
CSS, History | Permalink
Useful overview of where JavaScript and accessibility stand.
Accessibility, JavaScript, Theory | Permalink
8 February 2007
One of the better descriptions of "web developer" I've read.
[...] e-commerce developers wrote web applications in Java. HTML was just beneath them, and it was a task well suited for the most junior member of the team.
This is one of the largest problems in building web sites with a strong server side component.
Web development isn't one skill, its an aggregation of many skills and knowledge - almost anything used in the context of the web counts as a web development skill.
True. I generally use a narrowed-down definition (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), but Isofarro names several related techniques that you're going to need one day—and are going to need a specialist for. This specialist is also a web developer, though with a different skillset.
Skillset | Permalink
6 February 2007
Bobby van der Sluis on Flash embedding. The article gives an overview of all methods, and explains why none of them is quite perfect.
Flash, HTML, Reference | Permalink
4 February 2007
Scott Andrew points out bugs in Safari's handling of dynamic <script> elements.
JavaScript, Safari | Permalink
From now on Molly will help the IE team maintain its standards compliance.
IE, Standards/W3C | Permalink
See the January 2007 archive.
This is the linklog of Peter-Paul Koch, mobile platform strategist, consultant, and trainer. You can also visit his QuirksBlog, or you can follow him on Twitter.
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