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Archive for May, 2009

Rock Stars of the Web

Posted in Learning, Websites on May 27th, 2009 by James – 1 Comment

Intel has a commercial portraying Ajay Bhatt, co-inventor of the USB, as if he was a rock star. Check it out:

If the web industry had it’s own rock star commercial it would have to feature Jeffrey Zeldman or Eric Meyer. Both are well known for starting the movement to create standard practices for web sites and making sure browsers supported those standards.

  • Zeldman is the co-founder of the Web Standards Project (WaSP), started A List Apart and his own studio, has authored several books and lectures on the topic of web standards. He was recently called “the godfather of web standards” by .net Magazine.
  • Meyer is famous for his standards evangelism at Netscape, authoring numerous books on CSS, and lecturing on CSS and web standards.

The official web standards are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards have become an integral part of professional web development, thanks to the pioneering work of Meyer and Zeldman. Standards ensure a website’s audience is viewing the site as the designer intended and also provide a benchmark for quality work. Thanks rock stars, rock on!

Further Reading:

Designing with Web Standards

Jeffery Zeldman

Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer

Browser Wars, Part Deux

Posted in Animation, Design, Photography, Websites on May 13th, 2009 by James – 1 Comment

Remember when everyone had AOL, prodigy, or Compuserve? Those were the days of the original browser wars. Internet Explorer battled it out with Netscape Navigator while websites proudly displayed badges to support their chosen weapon.

browsers

While that debate has faded, there is a new browser war going on, this time it’s Web Designers vs. Internet Explorer 6. You don’t have to look far to find blog posts by designers and developers using vile words to describe IE6. For the un-initiated, IE6 has issues displaying websites built to current standards. This makes make building websites that work for the majority of users much more difficult. Advancements have been made by Microsoft in subsequent releases of IE 7 & 8, but there are still far too many users that have not upgraded to modern browsers. Most power users have moved on from IE to Firefox, Safari or others that are built to facilitate standards based web design, but the IE6 contingency is unfortunately too large to ignore.

What’s a designer to do? Some have taken elitist stance of serving an empty page to IE6 users with a message to upgrade. Others provide a stripped down text only version of their site. This may be justified from the designer’s perspective but isolates IE6 users, many of whom are stuck with it by enterprise IT departments. Sites that must cater to a wide audience go through the tedious effort of adding IE6 specific tweaks to make things work. These tweaks add extra cost and complexity to the development process, resulting in increased distain for the enemy browser.

Some interesting new approaches have emerged that are gentler than the forced methods and bring needed attention to the issue. IE6update.com and pushuptheweb.com have devised tools that attach a message to your site that is only viewed by users of IE6. This message suggests the user upgrade their browser to get the maximum experience. I prefer this kinder approach to bringing users up to speed instead of punishing them for being out of date.

ie6update

pushuptheweb

Despite these methods, IE6 isn’t going to die as fast as designers would like, so we have to deal with it for now. It helps to reminisce about the progress that has been made in the past years thanks to the web standards movement. Be glad we are past the time when every site had a flashing “under construction” graphic, and a 56k modem was cutting edge.

More info: