I started to download Safari 5 for mac to see what it would offer when I discovered that Senior Jobs started forgetting usability…

Oops.

Looking into the code it turns out that these are all different versions. So users are going to accidentally download the Snow Leopard version by default, because it’s not labeled properly.

The really sad thing is this page is still a giant table based layout nightmare. For Steve Jobs to be so adamant about standards and HTML5 they need to learn how to code first… Hell even for a tables based layout this is craptacular!

Apple has this great site they just opened, touting the glories of web standards. Yee-haw I say, a publicly facing, corporate campaign to push web standards and tear down the failures of the past… Oops, I was wrong:

The good news is that you can bypass their stupid JavaScript hack browser detection. Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher plugin and switch to Safari. Now you can get in. Some of the content works, but Apple cut corners when they developed this so only their standards based browsers will fully work. Other standards based browsers like Firefox, and Opera will only be able to see some of the effects.

This is what we must not conform to. If we want a truly standardized experience on the web, we must not let corporations drive it. Fight corporate skewing of open standards to improve their bottom line. Stop them from dictating the terms of our development platform to serve their ends. We must not let them start the browser wars again. A fractured inaccessible web is not tolerable anymore.

This is a direct parody of Steve Jobs letter about Flash.It is intended to be thought provoking, insightful, and inciting.

Being a Macintosh SE, iPhone, iPad, PowerMac, PowerBook, home built PC, Windows using web, Flash, print developer that has working in the training development, corporate marketing, and software development industries for too long… I couldn’t read Steve’s letter without calling BS. Read this with an open mind and consider the end user, not the corporations. I want Flash, my kids want Flash, why because some developer’s do amazing work on this platform and we should have access to it. Content is king. Enjoy…

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new proprietary, Mac only, Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years, hoping to keep them from helping Microsoft take our Design and Publishing customers from considering Windows as a viable platform. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience and I abandoned them, and Adobe was able to expand into the corporate market with their products, and deliver all their software to our Microsoft Windows competitors. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests because we can’t control what Adobe produces, or who their target customer is.

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The saddest news this month was the IE9 announcement. Microsoft came out of the closet and announced that IE9 would support standards. Whoo-hoo! Except…

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I don’t know about anyone else but I’m so excited about CSS 3 and web standards that I’m not even waiting for Microsoft to catch up. Heck four out of five of the most popular browsers on the market support CSS 3 so why wouldn’t I? The time it saves in producing sites is amazing. No more nested divs and sliced up images just to make rounded boxes. I’ve been using CSS for a few years now and can’t say enough good things about the results. My whole blog is built on standards. But since I’ve be employed at my present job I’ve neglected my own blog. It’s getting to be that time again and I’m getting the itch to redo this site ( and another site I started working on) in full HTML and CSS 3. So stay tuned, I’ve got big ideas running around in my head.

I was talking to a co-worker today and had a realization. HTML5 can never replace flash.

One of the primary goals of HTML and JavaScript is transparency, the accessibility to the code that drives the page. Exposing code so that others can learn from it. In fact this attribute is credited with the proliferation of the web. This poses a serious risk for some web content. If you produced a highly interactive, community driven game would you want you intelectual property (ip) exposed? Web sites don’t expose their business logic. No one expects Amazon to expose how they drive their shopping logic. If Poptropica, a popular game/community for kids, was produces in HTML and JavaScript anyone that visited your site could copy the code, modify it, republish it, and monetize that ip. Who would want that? So think twice before wishing that HTML5 should replace Flash.

Handcrafted CSS, the latest contribution of Dan Cederholm to the world of Web Design and Development is a fantastic book! To say that I’m a fan of his work is a bit of an understatement. No web designer or developer should be without these books; Bulletproof Web Design, Handcrafted CSS, as well as Designing With Web Standards, and DOM Scripting. These books are fantastic resources, and push web development out of the dark ages of table based layout, css hacks, and duplicating sites for each browser version. But there is a particular philosophy the makes Handcrafted CSS special. Continue Reading »

I’m not much different than most designers and developers, I loath Internet Explorer. But I understand why they are slow to embrace change, specifically standards.
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There has been a lot of advertising lately indicating that the browser wars have resumed their assaults on our senses and reasoning skills. Just for kicks I thought I would verify the latest Acid3 scores posted in some recent press. Let’s just say I can’t find a 100% to match the WWDC screens…Not that the competition in Redmond is doing anywhere near as well. 3/100 cough cough 20/100 cough. Pathetic.

In pondering my Google analytics I discovered that 26% of my IE readers this last month still use IE6…WHY? I thought there might be a lot of Windows 98 users still bouncing around the interwebs. After all computers are expensive and XP and Vista are hard to find. Hmmm.. That can’t be it. Here are some facts: Continue Reading »