This week, Mark Pilgrim posted an extraordinary rant entitled "Semantic Obsolescence", about the direction that XHTML standards are going, and his frustration with compatibility issues.
The post quickly climbed to the number one spot on Daypop, the weblog popularity index, and has prompted response and discussion throughout the "blogosphere."
One interesting response comes from Jonathan Delacour. Another comes from Shelley Powers. I'm sure there'll be more.
I've been working on the midterm and was using the Validator. It doesn't seem to like my use of frames. Are we allowed to use frames on our websites?
I also found out that when trying to position objects on a site, IE and Netscape come out looking completely different. It's hard to get both looking the way I want.
Stephanie
This week, Jonathon Delacour is reviewing Joe Clark's book Building Accessible Websites, which I mentioned in class. He's also interviewing Joe about the book and accessibility in general. Along with Jonathon's excellent posts, you can find comments by people like Mark Pilgrim, whom I also mentioned in class.
We'll "dive into accessibility" in more depth after the break, but these are great "bite-sized" pieces of content for you to chew on until then.
Both articles on typography talk about visual differences in the presentation of html code accross multiple browsers and platforms. This is a great resource that gives all the specs on sizes accross browsers and provides useful hints on how you can make everything look the same or at least close on the Mac and PC.
-Ryan
I just wanted to comment in general about the article entitled "99.9% of Websites are Obsolete." I read this entire article and I agree with the fact that everyone should be developing using web standards. The author makes point to show how convoluted the html on yahoo.com is. He also comments on another site where someone misspelled the font tag and forgot to put a space between the javascript value and the src attribute.
I could be under the wrong impression here, but I thought that businesses use development tools in order to layout their pages exactly how they want them. Someone did not just sit down with notepad and make yahoo.com, they probably used some graphical WYSIWYG tool. Then that tool is what produced all the html. Admittedly, I am sure that there was some tweaking of the html or even some businesses that do not use these tools and code everything themselves, but more than likely most of that html was produced by some tool.
What I think that this author should be commenting on, is making all the tools out there produce standards compliant html.