Google Doctype

Google unveils its new project: Google Doctype; a reference for web developers. They've decided on the wiki format, which means that anyone can add content. And that's good, obviously.

Speaking from long experience I know how hard it is to create proper documentation pages and test pages, so I wish Google the best of luck with this venture.

And who knows, later I might start adding stuff, too. (Many pages already refer to this site for more information).

Reference | Permalink

noscript

Derek and me disagreeing.

Fun, Photos, d.construct 2006 | Permalink

user-agents.org

A list of known user agent strings and their meaning. Impressive!

Reference | Permalink

Opera Dragonfly

... and Opera, too, unveils its own CSS/JavaScript debugger. Haven't studied it closely yet, but this is obviously a step in the right direction.

Opera, Tools | Permalink

line-height: abnormal

Exactly how does line-height: normal work? It's a confused mess. I'm SO glad we've got Eric Meyer to figure this out for us; I wouldn't want to do it.

CSS | Permalink

Oh look, using Ajax in a stupid way is not a good idea?

Chris Heilmann hits quite a few nails on their respective heads. Part of the problem is causd by software firms:

Well, the truth is that we have been preaching far too long to the choir. I've been in the web accessibility and standards preaching community for a long time and whenever I asked what about enterprise development and CMS I was told that it is not worth fighting that fight as "We will never reach them".

Part of the problem is caused by the web developers:

When people ask for accessibility or Ajax usability advice you’ll get a lot of bashing and “go validate then come back” answers but not much information that can be used immediately or even questions that ask what lead to the state of the product.

All in all a must to read if you want to follow this discussion.

I'll repeat my comment here:

What's the fundamental problem? Software developers refuse to see front-end programming as a separate discipline.

All other problems you (and others) mention are just refinements on that central theme. What we say doesn't count because we do web development instead of software development, and somehow that's "less".

The next step the web standards revolution has to take is quietly, patiently positioning front-end programming as a separate technical discipline that other disciplines have to argue and compromise with; instead of just being the guys who do colours and graphics and Ajax and such.

Theory | Permalink

Cuzillion

Steve Souders brings us a useful tool to check page performance. Create an HTML page with a few assets and see how quickly (or slowly) it loads.

Now if I could only find the time to run lots of tests...

Tools | Permalink

Stop using Ajax!

James Edwards think we should stop using Ajax. I agree that it's over-used, but abolishing it altogether is not the solution. What we need is the hype to end, so that we can review Ajax's usefulness and uselessness in peace.

Theory | Permalink

Speed test: innerHTML versus DOM manipulation

Another DOM vs. innerHTML test. This series of tests suggests that DOM is faster in Safari and Opera, though innerHTML remains faster in Firefox and IE.

Benchmarks | Permalink