This is the monthly archive for October 2006.
29 October 2006
A test to see if the FTSE 100 company web sites were ready for IE7. Conclusion: 13 weren't, but the damage is slight. Most of these sites were saved by the fact they're not standards compliant, anyway, and IE Quirks Mode has seen little change.
IE | Permalink
28 October 2006
Tim Berners-Lee replies to the recent critique on W3C and announces the formation of a new HTML Working Group.
The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.
An excellent reply. I look forward to the first incremental improvement.
HTML, Standards/W3C | Permalink
25 October 2006
David Flanagan discovers that an event object is passed to event handlers set with the Microsoft proprietary attachEvent() method. This object is not the same as window.event, but contains the same properties.
Everybody kind of assumed that IE only used window.event, but nobody ever seems to have tested it. My book doesn't mention this fact, although I don't think I ever denied the existence of these event objects, either.
I wonder how many more of these curiosities are hidden deep in the browsers' bowels.
Events, IE | Permalink
19 October 2006
A W3C DOM vs. innerHTML benchmark. Its conclusions match mine: innerHTML is much faster than "real" W3C DOM methods.
Benchmarks, DOM | Permalink
Brendan Eich on Mozilla 2 and what went before. Expected release date: 2008.
So the goals for Mozilla 2 are:
- Clean up our APIs to be fewer, better, and "on the outside."
- Simplify the Mozilla codebase to make it smaller, faster, and easier to approach and maintain.
- Take advantage of standard language features and fast paths instead of XPCOM and ad hoc code.
- Optimization including JIT compilation for JS2 with very fast DOM access and low memory costs.
- Tool-time and runtime enforcement of important safety properties.
I don't quite get all this, except for the "simplicity" bit, and I like that bit quite a lot.
Mozilla | Permalink
John Allsopp feels that blogging will change fundamentally in the next year or so. Where previously people followed several popular blogs, which as a result became even more popular, they'll increasingly pick the entries that interest them; and never mind which blog they appeared on.
I'm not sure I agree; before finding a good entry, someone first has to find the blog that contains that entry. But if everyone only reads the blogs that everyone else reads, it's hard to find a good entry on a less well known blog.
I'm afraid the blogosphere has reached a state of equilibrium that's hard to upset. People have to start looking outside the well known blogs, but the problem is that there's so much boring and outright bad stuff out there that most people will hurriedly return to the well known blogs.
I mean, there's a reasons some blogs are well known and others aren't: constant quality. Not just one good article, but a whole series of them stretching over months; sometimes years.
Although there will certainly be at least one high-quality blog that isn't as well known as it deserves to be, there are also millions of blogs that deserve to remain unknown. Conversely, how many of the well known blogs have seen a marked decline in quality?
I don't think we'll see a significant change, although I'd welcome a few more voices in web development land. Setting up a popular blog, however, is (and should be) more demanding than just publishing one good article.
Blogging | Permalink
Zeldman on the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0
Web 1.0: Joshua Davis on the cover of Art News.
Web 2.0: 37signals on the cover of Forbes.Web 1.0: Users create the content (Slashdot).
Web 2.0: Users create the content (Flickr).Web 1.0: Crap sites on Geocities.
Web 2.0: Crap sites on MySpace.
Truly, Web 2.0 is conquering the world.
Fun | Permalink
Isofarro feels accessibility is in trouble, and has written a sequence of four articles about the problems. It seems there's a split in the accessibility world, and that fundamental questions have to be answered. I myself have no opinion on all of this yet; I've been sufficiently asleep for the past months to completely miss the split.
Besides, the topic that interests me most, JavaScript and accessibility, remains something of a special case.
Accessibility | Permalink
IE 7 has been launched officially. The only thing I wonder is: can we still uninstall it and get our IE6 back? Before that has been made clear I hesitate to install IE7.
IE | Permalink
It turns out that JSON requires you to use double quotes everywhere, even for your property names. JavaScript object literal notation does not require this; but it turns out JSON is a subset of the JS object literal.
I didn't know this; and as a consequence my book doesn't treat this rule. In fact, I have doubts about its practical necessity. A JavaScript object is a JavaScript object, whatever kind of quotes you use. OK, with the wrong quotes it isn't "JSON" any more, but all scripts will happily read and parse the objects, and do whatever they need to do.
Data Retrieval | Permalink
11 October 2006
43 social bookmarking icons on one site? Time to get rid of the whole social bookmarking thing, I'd say. In a year or so we'll see that social bookmarking is one of those Web 2.0 concepts that just failed.
Society | Permalink
Excellent overview of recent thinking on Ajax and accessibility.
Accessibility, Data Retrieval | Permalink
Stuart points out an important usability requirement of Ajax sites: no discernible load time.
There is no point in using Ajax if you have to pop up a “Loading” screen and wait ten seconds when a link is clicked.
Spot on.
Data Retrieval, Usability | Permalink
7 October 2006
Mark Boulton discusses the problems inherent in teaching good web design, and possible actions for a professional body of web designers to take.
I think this industry needs a professional body who has a narrow remit. I don’t think certification, especially web standards, is workable. I’d like to see best design, development and business practice addressed. Although maybe all three of those would be too much to bite off. I’d like to see it as membership by peer review and I wouldn’t mind paying for it annually.
I'm not entirely sure if I'm behind this idea, mainly for practical reasons. If it doesn't allow us to reach out to the 90% of web developers who don't get it, does such a body have a point?
Nonetheless, this certainly should be discussed.
Professionalism | Permalink
What can a professional body do for a web designer? Richard quotes examples from similar bodies in the design and chemistry world.
Professionalism | Permalink
See the September 2006 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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