Unintentionally Blank

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!

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.

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.

I was shocked and horrified yesterday, when I read some of the comments under Ajaxian’s interview with Christian Heilmann on unobtrusive JavaScript. There is an air of selfishness (unobtrusive JavaScript “takes too long to develop”), misunderstanding (it “adds complexity”) or general pigheadedness (”target audience is lame”) about the comments from those who are against the idea of unobtrusive JavaScript. There are people out there without JavaScript enabled and, if your site does not work without JavaScript, it causes problems.

So, just as accessibility was getting a kicking by certain individuals over at Ajaxian, Jonathon Snook stood up and asked, consequently answering from his point of view, what does accessibility mean? I liked the analogy that accessibility is a spectrum, covering lots of cases, lots of people. It is not just about blind people, it is not just about making sites work without JavaScript enabled, it covers topics as wide ranging as colour blindness to quadriplegia. There are a lot of things that everyone can do to make sites accessible to more people, the simplest often having the biggest results (like ensuring all images have meaningful alt attributes defined) and reading Jonathon’s view as someone who doesn’t preach accessibility, but uses the tools available in the best way he knows, is refreshing.

If you are interested in web design and development (I’m hoping this is the case anyway, otherwise I’m doing something wrong!) you definitely want to check out this list of the Top 100 User Centered Blogs by the Virtual Hosting Blog. There are some top names on the list that everyone has heard about as well as many other passionate writers about subjects including accessibility, usability, design and web standards.

Admittedly, I am very touched to have been included on the list, but I also think that the list could be a very good starting point for anyone wanting to learn more about the important side of design for the web: the users. I will be going through the list myself, inevitably picking up a lot of knowledge from the wealth of great bloggers/developers available. Let me know of any gems that you find.