Recent Buzz

Opera 9, Acid2 and Web Forms 2.0

It seems the latest release of Opera comes pretty close to passing the Acid2 test. Apparently there is only one bug left to fix.

After the initial announcement of the second acid test, a race began to become the first browser to pass it. Safari won by a streak and was followed by iCab and Konquerer. However, these were internal builds only and since then there has been no officially released browser that passes the test.

Also included in this release of Opera is support for some of the Web Forms 2.0 extensions. I’m sorry to report that this is one ugly implementation. Worse than that, the new controls (date pickers etc) are completely inaccessible by keyboard. I assume that this will be sorted out by the time this release is final.

IEBlog: Clean up your CSS hacks

The IEBlog today issued a call to action, asking developers to help "clean up" CSS hacks that are failing in strict mode in IE7.

Whether you're interested in helping the IE development team or not, consider this: a review of your code could help to clean out some bad CSS hacks, and to identify where good CSS hacks could be used instead. A code review (and maybe some documentation?) could also help you if:

• you have code that you haven't looked at in a while,
• you're working with code that was written by someone else,
• you've added some hacks as bug fixes without planning a backout strategy, or
• you're in need of something to do at work that qualifies as training/self-development.

Knowing what hacks you have in your code now will make your life a little easier later, when it's time to start addressing issues in IE7!

Web Essentials 05

The Web Essentials 05 event has made available several audio and slide presentations of last week's keynote (by our own group leader Molly) and sessions at the WE05 PodCasts link. Links to other presentations may also be found listed at the program link. Session topics cover standards, CSS, accessibility, semantics, SVG, user experience, workflow, microformats, and web applications.

Build Your Own Standards Compliant Website Using Dreamweaver 8

If you're working with the new version of Dreamweaver, you may be interested in a new book from SitePoint aimed at those who wish to build standards compliant sites.

Written by WaSP member Rachel Andrew of the Dreamweaver Task Force, and tech edited by Group Leader Molly E. Holzschlag, Build Your Own Standards Compliant Website Using Dreamweaver 8 is apparently everything you need to create standards compliant, accessible, cross-browser compatible websites with - you guessed it - Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.

Sample chapters are available, and the book is shipping right away. When asked to say something witty for the folks at home, Rachel uttered:

My aim was not only to show existing Dreamweaver users how to work with web standards, but to also help out those who are already up to speed with standards but need to know how to apply that within Dreamweaver.

Of course, Rachel isn't the only DWTF member to be working on book projects, and we hope to have more exciting announcements for Dreamweaver users later in the year.

Got Browser Woes? Think Again.

If you've been losing hair due to browser incompatibilities on the desktop, blame your remaining gray hairs on IE 6.0, Safari or Opera bugs and implementation problems, and have felt the calcium leeching from your tired bones while trying to make standards-based sites compatible in older browsers, you may wish to stop reading right now.

As we expand our horizons from desktop to wireless, browser support isn’t going to get easier. In fact, anyone who has done wireless development already knows cross-device and wireless agent development is much more insane than anything we deal with on the desktop.

The battles we’ve fought and ultimately appear to be winning for screen-based browsers have done nothing to inspire those in the wireless manufacturing and user agent environment to think standards. Add to that literally thousands of unique wireless devices, many with proprietary user agent implementations, and if you haven’t gone bald, gray or lost bone mass, you’re about to.

Here’s a little taste, and I do mean a little, of what kind of XHTML support major agents sport.

“Okay,” you’re thinking. “That doesn’t look so bad! It’s pretty much either XHTML MP or XHTML Basic, right?”

Wrong. Despite the simplicity of both the XHTML MP and XHTML Basic specifications, there’s such inconsistent implementation between the individual devices and browsers it’s enough to make a standardista give up the old holy ghost.

Ready for another morsel? If you’ve read this far, you know you are. So here’s a little taste (and I do mean little) of mobile device and browser inconsistencies:

• title element woes. Some browsers render it as text, some use it properly within existing agent chrome, some use it for bookmarking. Which does what? You’ll have to test to find out, because even devices coming from the same manufacturer are likely to have different rendering capabilities
• Device manufacturers like to confuse us. Samsung, for example, uses the AU System browser but, get this, implements their own rendering engine. That’s almost as weird as Netscape 8.0 and its dual Trident / Gecko rendering engines
• Provider gateways are not our friend. If MIME types and content negotiation in XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 annoy you, try this on for size. Provider gateways can totally influence the rendering of your documents. Some are sophisticated: They let only valid, conforming XHTML through. Some don’t. Some might translate any graphics, or drop them all together

I did say this was only a little taste, right? Well, we haven’t even covered mobile CSS support, which is either very limited or downright non-existent in most mobile environments. Where it does exist, what happens to many of the best practices we teach for the screen? Out the window! Why? Because most existing mobile browsers that support CSS do not cache CSS! As a result, any CSS in use must be embedded or inline.

I’ll revisit CSS in mobile devices on another day. Right now I think I need to go color my hair.

This entry cross-posted to take your comments.

Developer Toolbar for IE

As mentioned in a previous post, Microsoft have been at work on a web developer toolbar similar to the one available for Firefox. The toolbar has now been made fully available and can be used on IE6 and IE7. I often find myself trying to resolve issues in IE but having to use Firefox, just for the developer toolbar so that I can reveal the page structure or whatever, then going back to IE and trying to map what I just saw in Firefox on to IE. A developer toolbar for IE, therefore, is a welcome addition for me (even if it is not quite as fully featured as my precious!)

Validation, meet Unit Testing. Unit Testing, meet Validation.

Are you "test infected"? Do you work on dynamic sites and wish there was an automated way to run the output through the W3C validator? Do you wish it was integrated nicely with your unit testing framework?

Scott Raymond has come up with a nice bit of code to add automated validation to the unit tests for a Ruby on Rails application.

If you're not on Rails, the technique should be pretty straightforward to adapt to your prefered language/framework. Just make a POST request to http://validator.w3.org/check sending parameters fragment (your page, encoded) and output=xml. Then check the response for a header called x-w3c-validator-status to see if it says Valid. If so, your test passed.

This entry cross-posted to take your comments.