Unintentionally Blank

Breaking news! Internet Explorer General Manager, Dean Hachamovitch has posted on the IEBlog to say that IE8 passes the famous Acid2 test.

Acid2 does not guarantee support for any specification, however it does test for support for certain features that are both important to web developers and not yet supported well across the board. According to Wikipedia, the only browsers to pass the test at the moment are:

WebCore-based applications

Safari, the web browser included in Mac OS X

OmniWeb, a web browser for Mac OS X

Shiira, a web browser for Mac OS X

Konqueror, a web browser for Linux

Prince, an XML-to-PDF converter for Windows and Linux

iCab, a web browser for Mac OS and Mac OS X

Presto-based browsers

Opera, a web browser for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and BSD

Internet Channel, a version of the Opera browser for the Nintendo Wii game console.

Gecko-based browsers (1.9 or higher)

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 beta 1

A Good Result and Some Bad Timing

Passing Acid2 represents a fantastic step towards compliance and standards support for the Internet Explorer team, quite a turnaround from the news last week that Opera were taking Microsoft to court over their monopoly in the browser department and their lack of support for standards (which caused some ripples around the rest of the Internet).

It turns out that the IE team are probably the ones laughing now though, since the Acid2 test was passed on 12th December, the day Opera filed their complaint with the European Union. At least, it seems like Molly Holzschlag is excited about it, and so should she be, part of her job is to get the IE team concentrating on standards support. I’d like to congratulate all of them and hope to hear more announcements about IE8 soon, as I’m sure any other developer who has had to deal with incarnations of IE in the past. Standards support in the latest IE won’t solve all our problems, but it will go towards making our lives easier in the future.

For now, all I can say is well done IE team and keep up the good work!

I nearly did!

Check out 24 Ways 2007 for this year’s advent calendar of web development tips. This year already includes simple accessibility with CSS, an explanation of the proper use of definition lists (which I don’t agree with), a font matrix to help with finding out how popular certain fonts are and a method for smart loading of JavaScript components.

Go have a look now, just like Christmas, there’s something for everyone.

Chris Pederick’s Firefox extension, the Web Developer extension, does almost anything you can imagine will help you get under the skin of a website. Since its release in June 2003 it has become the standard in any web developer’s tool box because it does so much that everyone can find a use for it. It has so many options that I haven’t used all of them, but I have my favourites and the ones I use daily and I’m sure that there are things that I would use if I had the time to find them!

So What Does It Do?

The toolbar is massive, there are menus with sub menus and sub menus, Disable, Cookies, CSS, Forms, Images, Information, Miscellaneous, Outline, Tools, View Source and Options are the top levels. I would go through each one but that would take forever, so I’ll let you know a few of my favourite uses of the toolbar. If you use the extension, please let me know if I am missing out on any really useful parts in the comments.

Disable Anything!

Great for testing your site against all sorts of user set ups, you can disable images, JavaScript, CSS, the cache, cookies, Java and the list goes on. I particularly like the quick ability to turn off JavaScript to test that a site is accessible without JavaScript enabled.

Display Anything!

You can display anything from image alt attributes to information about any element (much like XRAY). I like the quick access that you have to view all of the CSS or all of the JavaScript for a page with just a couple of clicks, especially when dealing with code written by others.

Outlines

It’s remarkable, but being able to draw an outline around any element, group of elements or all elements, can really help in debugging style sheets. Seeing where the element is on the page by surrounding it with a red border, just by hovering over it is much easier than adding debugging code to your style sheets.

External Tools

The Tools menu allows you to use external validators and other measures to test your site. You can even add tools to the list, though quick links to W3C validators are sufficient for me at the moment.

Edit On The Fly

Editing the CSS or HTML and seeing the results instantly can help enormously when developing. CSS editing is my top use for the Web Developer extension.

There are quite literally hundreds of uses for the Web Developer extension, my thanks must go to Chris Pederick, I hope he continues to maintain this fantastic bit of kit for use in Firefox as long as I’m developing.

If you haven’t used the extension, install it now, if you do, what are your favourite functions?

It has been a busy couple of weeks! I have been finishing my first full project at work, finishing a side project for work in my spare time, polishing off a couple of sites that I had ideas about a while ago and generally ignoring this blog! The web development world keeps spinning though so I have thrown together a few important stories that have happened since my last post, just in case you missed them.

WCAG 2.0 Last Working Draft In Call For Review

The once slated WCAG 2.0 working draft came up for public review again yesterday. It has been through review once and is ready for more scrutinizing from the public. See the call for review for all the details.

The Next Version Of IE Gets A Name

It might have seemed obvious to most, but the next version of everybody’s favourite browser, Internet Explorer, will be called IE8. It took Bill Gates to break it, but it is official now, IE.Next is IE8.

The Bizarre And Oh So Far Away HTML 5

Lachlan Hunt previewed HTML5 over at A List Apart. There is a lot to HTML5, new elements, new ways of thinking, semantics, structure and I admit that, even after reading the article there is still a lot to think about. Is this the right path to take? What about XHTML? Will the expected 10 - 15 years it is likely to take to come into play going to kill it before it even makes it to a recommendation? At the moment, I don’t know what to think.

A Race?

So, December has seen steps taken for HTML5, WCAG2.0 and IE8, but which will we see in use first? HTML5 looks out of the running, IE6 is still the world’s most used browser over IE7 and WCAG 2.0 took a beating last year, has it improved enough to get a more pleasant reception now? 2008 should be an interesting year for web development.

A bit of fun for a Saturday, how many HTML 4 elements can you name in 5 minutes?

I made some silly mistakes, forgot some essential elements and only guessed a couple out of sheer luck, when the pressure is on everything flies out of your head!

I got 56 out of 91, let me know how you do.

(Found via Webomatica)

Warning: if you really enjoy the test and want to use the badge they make available for your site/blog, watch out for the advertising link. I was quite disappointed to see it, but enjoyed the challenge enough to mention it anyway.