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 have been working on a plugin for WordPress recently that involves the use of custom fields to store data on events and output them on your blog in the hCalendar microformat. I am a big fan of microformats, I look forward to being able to use a program to retrieve contact details, event details or other bits of information solely from a well marked up web page and that is why I wanted to contribute with a plugin that helps people use them.

I am also a big fan of accessibility on the Internet too, so try to imagine my surprise when I came across Bruce Lawson and James Craig’s article on the Web Standards Project about hCalendar’s inaccessible dates. Two movements on the web are now working against each other? Are we pushing in opposite directions and still trying to achieve the same result? Here’s my opinion.

Continue reading “Aren’t Microformats Supposed To Be Accessible?” »

HTML is great, anyone can make a website due to the simplicity of marking up a page and the leniency of web browsers. The idea that anyone could be on the lead to the huge growth of the Internet in it’s early days with personal pages and static sites popping up everywhere and again now with blogs and wikis.

As the Internet has grown so has it’s basis. HTML is much more than what IE or Netscape deem it to be, it has it’s own standards, it’s own structure and it’s own meaning. I’m not talking about the intricate complexities of Microformats, just about POSH.

Continue reading “The Internet’s Upper Class Or Why Your Site Should Be POSH” »

April 5th is CSS Naked Day! What does this mean? If you visit Unintentionally Blank, or any other of the sites on the Naked Day List on April 5th you won’t see any of the design that we all put so much effort into. Instead, you will see the bare HTML.

Why Would You Do That?

No CSS? Won’t that make the site unusable, unreadable, unbearable? The simple answer is, “No”. As this site follows web standards and uses semantic markup, you will still be able to use and read this site as intended. It will all be in black and white and standard fonts, sidebar underneath the main content and none of these fancy gradients, but the text will be there, the headings will be obvious and the underlying structure of the site will shine through.

The aim of the exercise is to prove the benefits of separating content from design, the ability of markup to describe a site in a perfectly readable way and being a bit of a geek. I’d have taken part last year, but this blog was merely a twinkle in my eye then. Still, I remember reading about it last year and wishing I had the ability to take part, not just the site, but the markup too. This year both goals have been achieved and I will be proud to be naked.

Join In!

Is your naked <body> good enough to take part too? Are you going to strip off this week? If you are proud of your code and want to support web standards, join in. If you’re using WordPress, there’s even a Naked Day plugin available.

Come on, let’s get naked!

Thanks to Roger Johansson’s post on false accessibility claims on public sector websites I came across Bruce Lawson and Dan Champion’s campaign to find out what went wrong in the recent £200,000 redesign of the DTI website. The short story is that after redesigning, the DTI displayed a message on the accessibility area of their site, claiming to conform to AA-level standard of the WCAG 1.0. Bruce and Dan’s problem was that it didn’t, quite, quite obviously.

What’s This About Alt Attributes Then?

I only just found out about this awful use of taxpayers money, especially as I am about to start paying taxes myself, I decided to have a look at the DTI website to see what was wrong. To start with, I noted a table based, tag soup layout (a automatic failure of WCAG 1.0 guidelines 3.3 [use CSS for layout] and 5.3 [Do not use tables for layout]) and 69 errors (on the front page) when run through the W3C’s validator. Then I disabled images and almost fell off my chair.

Continue reading “Learning By Mistakes - The ALT Attribute” »