Failed Redesigns
Joe Clark recently wrote about several Failed Redesigns. His post has such a classic WaSP tone, that I hope he doesn't mind that I quote a couple of paragraphs here.
A failed redesign is a Web page created from scratch, or substantially updated, during the era of Web standards that nonetheless ignores or misuses those standards. A failed redesign pretends that valid code and accessibility guidelines do not exist; it pretends that the 21st century is frozen in the amber of the year 1999. It indicates not merely unprofessional Web-development practices but outright incompetence. For if you are producing tag-soup code and using tables for layout in the 21st century, that's what you are: Incompetent.
When teenagers' hobbyist blogs (short for "Web logs") have better code than brand-new Web sites, somebody's doing something wrong. And that somebody is you, the developer. In a just society you would simply be fired; in an Orwellian society you would be sent to a reëducation camp. Failing either of those, you could at least read a fucking book and upgrade your skills to a point where you are no longer a total laughingstock.
Classic. Read on for Joe's list of failed redesigns. What in particular set me off was some of the recent crop of self-hyped "Web 2.0" startups. Joe zings TagWorld in particular. My advice: next time you get pitched or hyped to check out a self-proclaimed "Web 2.0" site, pop the hood, view the source, and see if all they've done is put some lipstick on a Web 1.0 pig of a site. And then call them on it ... on your blog of course.
Star HTML and Microsoft IE7
Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager for IE Platform and Security at Microsoft, and Position is Everything's Big John Gallant have been having a conversation about * html in Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 7 for Windows (IE7). Wilson has been encouraging CSS designers and developers to repair any bug-specific hacks for several months now. Gallant remains unconvinced the solution is that easy and is afraid countless, unpaid hours of repair work will wind up on the shoulders of those designers and developers who have employed * html related hacks in their designs.
Continued...
A Final End to IE/Mac
Microsoft has announced that they will cease all support for IE/Mac as of December 31, 2005 and will cease all distribution of the software on January 31, 2006.
While IE/Mac has become something of a red-headed stepchild in the past couple years, it has a proud history of standards-related achievements, most of which were the result of now-WaSP, then Microsoftie Tantek Çelik.
This milestone doesn't actually mean much for working web developers — how much effort to put into supporting a given browser is best determined by audience share, not whether the browser is currently 'supported' or not. Nevertheless, it's a bittersweet reminder of the creeping obsolescence of what was arguably the single piece of software most responsible for kicking off the CSS layout revolution.
The Bad Old Days Linger On
Most professional web developers understand why browser sniffing sucks, and have long since moved on to more robust techniques like object or property testing to make their sites degrade gracefully in less-capable user agents. But apparently Yahoo! Music didn't get the memo: their site still sniffs browsers, urging Firefox users on Windows to 'upgrade' to Netscape 7.1 or higher (actually a downgrade, since Netscape 7.1 uses an older version of the Gecko rendering engine than does Firefox 1.x) when one tries to watch a video. Visit Yahoo! music on a Mac, and the situation is even grimmer: Yahoo! music requires Netscape Communicator 4.7 for Mac viewing.
Upgraded your browser (or OS — Communicator 4.x only runs on the long-deprecated OS 9) recently? No video for you!
Lame.
Prince 5.1 Passes Acid2
Prince, a program that converts XML documents styled with CSS into PDF files for printing, has passed the Acid2 test. While Prince isn't a browser per se — it's a file converter — it does join Konqueror and Apple's Safari as the first CSS & HTML implementations to pass the WaSP's Acid2 Test (disclosure: Håkon Wium Lie, one of the authors of the Acid2 Test, is on the board of YesLogic Pty Ltd).
Congratulations, guys! Nice work.
Microsoft Tweaks IE's Handling of ActiveX, Java
Microsoft has announced that they'll be changing the way IE handles ActiveX controls and Java applets to avoid liability in the Eolas patent suit.
The suit, you'll recall, is about a patent held by the University of California and licenced to a company called Eolas. The patent ostensibly covers embedding multimedia and interactive widgets within web pages. Eolas and the UC say that Microsoft (and presumably just about every other browser maker on the planet) violates their patent with the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX controls (such as the Flash plugin) and Java applets. The patent is viewed by many people as too vague, overly broad and in fact not valid due to other people's prior work in this field. In fact, the W3C and Tim Berners Lee filed evidence against the patent with the U.S. patent office.
Nevertheless, the courts seem to be less persuaded of Microsoft's case than does the W3C and Microsoft is now changing IE to avoid continuing liability. As a result, millions of web pages will have to be modified lest visitors be forced to click a button on a dialogue in order to view, say, Flash banner ads. While some may see blocking Flash banners by default as a feature, advertisers — and consequently the folks buidling web pages that carry their ads — disagree quite strongly.
24 Ways to Impress Your Friends
It's an online advent calender, and behind each door* you'll find a web development tip/tutorial (all standards-based goodness, of course) to impress your friends with - 24 of them, to be precise. I'd prefer that to a piece of chocolate any day. 24 ways to impress your friends kicks off with some easy ajax prototyping.
[* OK, so there aren't really doors .. it's just a metaphor. And no, Drew will not be adding reindeers and snowmen to make it all festive.]
