It’s nice to know that life has a knack of knowing when to take you down a notch. Sure, I got a new job that’s just around the corner, traffic here is at the best it’s been and my rugby team were playing for the league title at the weekend, what could possibly go wrong?
Maybe I gave you a hint by mentioning the rugby, there is good and bad news. We won the game, we won the league. The bad news: I only played 10 minutes due to a misplaced tackle that caused me to twist my ankle in several wrong directions. A swollen leg, a trip to the hospital (my first time in an ambulance) and several hours later left me with a cast and still no concrete knowledge of what the real problem was. You see it is entirely possible, according to half the x-rays and half the doctors, that I had broken bones they had never seen broken before, everyone else said it was a nasty sprain.
Either way, it looks like my short walk to work has become even shorter as working from home outweighs the long journey on crutches.
I hope you had a good weekend, I spent mine getting plastered.
Ever heard web standards explained through the medium of hip hop? No? Then you need to watch this YouTube video on design coding. That’s all I need to say, enjoy
This year, April 9th is that time of year again. The time when you say, who needs CSS? Who needs fancy design at all? Who needs anything more than clean, semantic HTML to present information to the web?
Unintentionally this blog has become a chronicle of not only my thoughts and feelings on web standards but also of my journey through my career in the same field. In September 2006 I got my first job, a temporary role in the civil service that got me out of the house, but onto a hellish commute. I moved to London shortly after and then in July last year I moved into web development, starting work with VYRE.
Once again things have changed. A couple of months ago I spotted an exciting job opportunity in an advert in the sidebar of a blog. Had I not seen it, not read it, I would still be working with VYRE. However, fate had some hand in things and after reading more deeply into the offering I decided this was to be my next step. I applied and, after the interview process and my notice period, I started on Monday.
What Now?
I continue as a front end developer, but now, instead of working with VYRE’s Unify CMS framework, I will be developing with the open source Ruby on Rails. I will be working for Mint Digital who do all sorts of interesting stuff trying to bridge the gap between new media and old.
So over the last three days I’ve been learning a whole lot of stuff really quickly, installing Ruby and Rails, getting to grips with Subversion for the first time as well as familiarising myself with the OS X terminal. All along while trying to pick up as much Ruby knowledge as possible, mainly from Why’s bizarre, sorry, poignant guide to Ruby.
It’s an exciting time as I embark on this new venture. Things may slow down here for a while as I am reading a lot and taking a lot in at the moment, but they will pick up again (you may even see a couple of extra categories pop up, Ruby and Rails perhaps, we’ll see). I was also redesigning, but that might have to wait too (only because an even better design just popped into my head this evening).
It’s been an interesting journey on this blog so far and I still think things are just beginning. Let’s see what happens next.
2008 is turning out to be the year of the browser, IE8 is in beta and passes the Acid 2 test (I’ve seen it do it myself!) and Firefox 3 is in its final beta stages (also passing Acid 2) and is expected to launch in June. But this week it is the turn of the smaller, but no less important browsers, the generally well behaved, but still with single figure percentages in the share of the market, Opera and Safari.
Who Needs Acid 2? We’ve Got Acid 3!
Earlier in the week, Safari 3.1 was released bringing web fonts and, the disputed, CSS animations. The real news, however, is in the nightly builds of both Opera and Safari, both of which claimed to have passed the very new Acid 3 test. Opera posted first on Wednesday to say that they had passed with 100/100, but were closely followed by Safari claiming 100% in Webkit too. The only confusion is that to get 100, the Webkit developers actually recorded a bug in the test which was subsequently fixed before they posted, so maybe Opera only makes 99, we’ll have to see. My copy of Firefox 2 I’m writing this with made a paltry 53/100, so even nearly there is a great achievement.
Competition Rules When Everyone Competes
Competition and tests and standards have clearly had Opera and Safari developers working incredibly hard to pass Acid 3. If only this were true for Mozilla, who don’t seem to believe in it. I understand that they are readying a final release and that perhaps the intricacies of Acid 3 aren’t that important now, but blowing it off entirely is not the correct attitude (even Microsoft changed their tune about Acid 2 from when they wrote this to the recent joy of passing).
The only sad point is that neither of the two largest browsers are focused on Acid 3 at the moment, which means that regardless of all the work the Opera and Safari teams have put in, no-one will be able to safely use many of the standards, all from prior to 2004 as set out by the rules of the test, for longer still.
Congratulations
Nothing can be taken away from either of the development teams though, congratulations to both Opera and Safari, and here’s hoping that the other two take notice of these successes and get on with supporting these standards too.
