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.

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.

Today I did a presentation on web design and design process to my daughters’ gate classes. It was an exciting opportunity to offer their classes some insight into the exciting world of design and learning new technologies.

So for any of the kids at Taylor Street Elementary reading this… I enjoyed speaking with you today, and look forward to learning with you again.

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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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 »

It is with much regret that it has come to this. It has been almost a year since the California State Labor Commission has awarded my wife a settlement in her case against her former employer MusicTalk Inc. Sarah worked for them for a long time as a paid employee and then the paychecks stopped coming. Bobbie Brown made repeated promises that this would be resolved as soon as she got her funding check.

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Every now and then the festering issue of IE as a viable browser rears it’s ugly head. This eventuality usually occurs right around the release of a new version. Microsofts latest iteration, IE8, was slated to be released without standards mode being the default rendering mode. With all the progress that the web comunity has made with standards why wouldn’t this be the default? Continue Reading »