This is the monthly archive for June 2007.
26 June 2007
Comparison of search engine popularity in several countries. Very interesting.
Since Dutch figures are absent, here are some according to Sigma Solutions:
Yahoo and Lycos score 0% (which probably means less than 0.5%).
Business | Permalink
Excellent idea.
"Write better emails. Make more moneys."
(Via Simon.)
In maybe-related news: today I read that the Dutch police have arrested a Nigerian musician who had a #1 hit in Nigeria about ... email scams!
Conferences, Fun | Permalink
23 June 2007
... Kestrel being Opera 9.5 . I'm curious.
Apart from being the best standard compliant browser, Opera 9.5 will also display even more webpages with bad coding.
An excellent summary of the glorious life of a browser vendor.
(Via Jon Hicks.)
Opera | Permalink
A week ago I encountered some problems with Safari 3.0b Windows. The 3.0.2 version has solved most of these problems. My site looks normal on my desktop computer.
Kudos to the Safari team for their quick response.
Safari | Permalink
21 June 2007
Turns out some mobile carriers mess with the HTML of web sites. Good to know.
HTML, Mobile | Permalink
Zeldman thinks the "Maybe" option should be removed from Yes/No questions.
In addition, he feels we should be starting to use a four-star rating system instead of the ubiquitous five-star one. I've never experienced such a rapid conversion in my life. It took me exactly three seconds to go from "Why does he say that?" to "Of course we should!", and from now on I'm going to recommend a four-star system to everybody who's willing to listen.
Usability | Permalink
Molly presents some unscientific and probably not-quite-representative numbers on the standards awareness of MS conference visitors in Budapest, Amsterdam and Zürich. (Incidentally, the local patriot in me is gratified that the Amsterdam visitors scored best, or at least, least bad.)
Molly wonders how to continue the standards movement. We have to reach these people, that's clear, but exactly how are we going to do that? Education, obviously, but that's pretty hard to set up due to university bureaucracy. But do we have more options?
One, I feel, is making clear to everyone that front-end programming (or whatever you want to call it) is a separate discipline that cannot be left to designers or database programmers, because they already have a demanding job and don't have time for another one.
As soon as this realization becomes common, we'll find our task becoming much easier. In another year or so, companies may start to understand that if they want to offer front-end development to their clients, they need to have competent front-enders on the payroll. That would be an important step.
And yes, I'm currently working on such an approach. More news when I have it.
Society | Permalink
20 June 2007
An employee of accessibility.nl, the most important Dutch accessibility company, appears not to be allowed to blog without his employer's permission and is closing down his recently opened blog.
That's extra sad because I talked to Wilco a while ago, and I was looking forward to hearing his thoughts on web accessibility. Wilco has a visual impairment, and I hoped he'd describe how the web looks to him (pun somewhat intended), and which technical problems he runs into.
Anyway, it seems I have to have a little more patience. (Unless Wilco and everybody else misunderstood accessibility.nl's intent.)
Accessibility | Permalink
18 June 2007
Bruce comments on WCAG + Samurai, pointing out a few of his best practices that go against the errata document. I disagree with his use of the noscript tag; see comment 5.
Accessibility, Standards/W3C | Permalink
Andy Budd gives an excellent overview of the strained relation between W3C and the web development community.
In addition he has some useful things to say about mailing lists. Although anyone can help the HTML and CSS WG's by subscribing to the public mailing lists, the traffic on those lists is so high that you really have to be a full-time spec writer in order to really follow the discussion.
Although I'm not sure that this is an intrinsic problem of mailing lists in general (I'm subscribed to a few low-volume high-quality lists), it's certainly true for the W3C lists.
Solution? I have no idea.
Standards/W3C | Permalink
16 June 2007
The resize event fires also when the <body> element is resized. I knew that, but I forgot it. Thanks to Jonathan for reminding me.
Events, IE | Permalink
15 June 2007
Chris wonders about company bashing. Personally I haven't really noticed this problem. Apple deserves to be bashed because of its outdated secrecy nonsense; W3C deserved (past tense!) to be bashed because of its inactivity, which is fortunately disappearing; and long ago Microsoft deserved to be bashed because of its strategy of doing nothing, which has been succeeded by a strategy of doing rather a lot of things.
So personally I'd say this is not as huge a problem as Chris thinks it is. On the other hand, that's just my opinion, and maybe I'm missing something because I don't work for a large company.
Society | Permalink
Anne van Kesteren has gone through the trouble of describing the differences between HTML 4 and 5.
HTML, Standards/W3C | Permalink
Joe's advice for budding speakers.
Public speaking | Permalink
13 June 2007
Stephen Hay on vigilantism, self-censoring, and the ethics of responding to site piracy. Interesting!
Society | Permalink
Dan Cederholm's wrap-up. Interestingly, he had the same problems with pronouncing "Islington" as I had.
@media 2007 Europe | Permalink
Nate posts his presentations, which turns out to have originally contained 14 rules, and not 12. The book's coming up, too.
@media 2007 Europe | Permalink
Richard's wrap-up. Includes lots of interesting links to presentations and wrap-ups.
@media 2007 Europe | Permalink
Alastair Campbell's wrap-up. Interestingly, he visited exactly the same sessions as I did, and made many more notes.
@media 2007 Europe | Permalink
Jeremy's wrap-up. He also mentions a slight disagreement with Patrick Griffiths about the Hot Topics panel. His rules for finding speakers for a conference (in which the speaker's gender is one factor among many) are worth a read.
@media 2007 Europe | Permalink
12 June 2007
John Gruber on Jobs' keynote.
It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. (Ever notice the “client=safari” string in the URL query?)
My somewhat-informed understanding is that Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more.
This was exactly the information I needed to understand the deeper whys of Safari Windows.
Business, Safari | Permalink
10 June 2007
Dan's wrap-up. I enjoyed his presentation and even learned two new tricks.
@media 2007 Europe | Permalink
Jon 'Creative Hicks' Sponge wraps up @media, at which he did an excellent presentation, which turned out to be his first major one. Next October I'll be in the same position, and I hope I can bring it off as smoothly as he did.
@media 2007 Europe | Permalink
A new website dedicated to the evolving ECMAScript specification.
Core | Permalink
Over on the YUI blog Nicholas Zakas takes a look at dynamically generating a <style> element. Appending a text node with new style rules works in all browsers but IE; while in IE you should use the cssText property of the element.
DOM | Permalink
We all know the four traditional link states should go in the order :link, :visited, :hover, :active. But where does :focus fit in? Eric asks for your opinion.
CSS | Permalink
9 June 2007
... says Ian Hickson, who's actually a member of said working group.
CSS, Standards/W3C | Permalink
Joe Clark pretty much quits web accessibility. Sad, but not entirely unexpected.
Accessibility | Permalink
1 June 2007
John Resig on JavaScript Core updates in the upcoming Firefox.
Core | Permalink
Chris on the difference between online and offline articles. He certainly has a point (several points, in fact).
See the May 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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