Unintentionally Blank

Phil Nash on the Internet, Web Standards and Accessibility

Quicklinks: Mobile Web, Acid 3, iGoogle Themes

Jan 17, 2008

by Phil Nash

No time to write a full post today! A few things interested me over the last couple of days though, not just the Macworld conference (which has overwhelmed the blogosphere and crashed Twitter). Here are a couple of links you might be interested in.

If you're feeling creative and want to make your mark on potentially millions of people's home pages, Google have opened the iGoogle themes API. Now anyone with skills in HTML, CSS and a little experience with XML can create a theme for the iGoogle home page. If I was feeling creative, I might just have a go...

Now that Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid 2 test, along with Firefox 3, Safari 3 and Opera 9, those browser manufacturers need a new challenge. Ian Hickson has been putting together the Acid 3 test, which will test the dynamic abilities of the browsers. There will be 100 tests, and each latest browser is guaranteed to fail at least one of them (it's part of the criteria for the test). You can even have a go at writing a test as Ian needs 16 more tests to complete the suite. This will be something to watch as browser manufacturers stop feeling the heat over HTML and CSS!

I couldn't completely leave Apple out of this set of links. I read recently that Google saw a surge in traffic from iPhone users at Christmas. While this isn't really a surprise, the first thing I did when I saw a friend's iPhone was go online, the following days showed quite an interesting result. While the iPhone surpassed all other types of phone for visiting Google at Christmas, in the days following it dropped to second place behind Symbian based phones. Consider with this that Symbian phones account for 63% of the market for smart phones and the iPhone only has 2% share. Newer and better mobile interfaces like the iPhone are causing more and more people to use the web from their mobile. If you make websites, you need to consider the small screen!

That's all for now, hope you are having a good week!

Unintentionally Blank is Phil Nash's thoughts on web development from 2006-2008. Any code or opinions may be out of date.