bucketFountain » html

The HTML 5 and standards crisis

ben — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:13:37 +0000

A really intriguing thread about the crisis facing the future of HTML/client-side/standards at Molly Holzschlag’s site. I don’t quite grasp what the issues are, but a lot of commentors inferred that they understood the problem/s. I guess I’ll have to do a little more homework to find out what she meant. I want to understand. She even uses the ‘F’ word. Snicker.

Joe Clark injects a little humour into the discussion and simultaneously reminds me of an hilarious Eddie Murphy gag:

What *has* Tantek Çelik done for us lately?

Zeldman has a response of sorts on his site, indicating that he’d like specifics. Do those two not get along? And speaking of people not getting along, there’s some real love, respect and admiration being shown if you scroll down the thread.

Update There’s a follow-up from Molly here.

XHTML and Domino

wakeme — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 12:30:00 +0000

Done it! The site is now XHTML 1.0 transitional. I wimped out of going the whole hog to 1.1 but I will give that a go when I understand it better. Syntactically it’s not much different from XHTML 1.0, but the MIME type is application/xhtml+xml instead of plain old text/html which apparently has implications of some sort. There are still a few things missing (most notable the search) but I should be back to normal in the next week or so.

UPDATED: Back to HTML 4.01 Transitional….
I read these two articles and realised that I would be misusing XHTML and that HTML was really what this site needed. And although I dislike ‘browser-sniffers’, I may consider checking the UA and serving XHTML with a MIME type of application/xhtml+xml to Mozilla and friends and text/html to everything else. Or I might just stick to HTML – it does the job for this simple site just fine.

Oh yeah – and thanks again to Ferdy for his excellent article on doing this stuff in Domino.

Search box

wakeme — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 12:30:00 +0000

The search box is back after a short holiday. Why did it go? When I hacked rejigged the way Domino served the pages I found that the search page wouldn’t work any more – I got a “HTTP Web Server: Application Exception – Documents treated as HTML cannot be edited” error. After guessing likely URLs I still couldn’t get it working so back to the less than perfect but usable current search page.

I rebuilt it using Jake’s most excellent article. However, the nasty work around I’ve resorted to to get this working is to leave the search page as it was: unpleasant, un-accessible, quirks-mode HTML. But at least the search is there in the meantime.

blockquote and cite

wakeme — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 12:30:00 +0000

Noticed a comment from Henrick on 456bereastreet.com about using the “cite” attribute in the blockquote element. Sounds like a good idea to me. Don’t think I’d ever heard of it before – so I guess I should really have a look through the html element list and brush up on my attributes….

HTML element madness

wakeme — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 12:30:00 +0000

After a quick brush up on my html element attributes by having a look at the W3 Schools html element list, I made a few discoveries. There are several areas that I need to revisit, mostly related to forms.

I also found an alternative to W3 Schools html reference at www.htmlref.com.

Some things I learnt:

There are elements that have only a subtle difference from one another. For instance, abbr and acronym. One is for abbreviations (say wgtn instead of Wellington), the other for acronyms (WCC instead of Wellington City Council). I couldn’t help wondering if it was really necessary to have both.

Likewise, q is similar to blockquote, but more straight-forward in that the former is a short quote and the latter is a long quote.

The head element has an attribute ‘profile’. Profile points to a URL containing a meta data profile. I could not find a concise explanation of this – although the best description is in the HTML spec itself. If you have a practical example, let me know.

And I discovered the joys of the dir attribute. Freaking great!

Some useful links if you’re a webonaut

wakeme — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 12:30:00 +0000

Accessibility Links

wakeme — Mon, 17 May 2004 12:30:00 +0000

That old chestnut, the corporate web site re-design has come around again. It was about this time last year that we were working on the upgrade. We rebuilt a hopelessly crap web-shite so that all layout and formatting was done with CSS, it was HTML 4.01 compliant, cross browser compatible back to IE4 and NN6 (the earlier Netscape efforts get text only) and gave a nod to accessibility (without embracing it whole-heartedly).

This time we’ll hopefully iron out more of the accessibility issues. I’ve found these links on accessibility really useful, and if you haven’t considered accessible web design before, these may act as a useful starting point: