Archive for the 'Web Standards' Category

IE DOM Bugs

Posted by Tom on February 7th, 2006

I’ve been working on a Javascript project where it’s necessary to create input elements (radio buttons and checkboxes) dynamically. With a functional DOM, it takes only a couple of lines of code, and works fine in Firefox and Safari. Too bad IE isn’t as DOM compatible as it claims to be.
After several searches, I discovered […]

PHP Bugs, Headers, and Such

Posted by Tom on January 10th, 2006

We just resolved a series of related bugs in the web product we’re developing. I’m hoping by documenting the symptoms and solutions it may ease someone else’s fruitless search.
The application has a “skin” feature allowing non-technical users to customize colors, font, and a handful of other things easily accomplished with CSS. Rather than edit more […]

Web Standards Are For Corporations Too

Posted by Tom on November 15th, 2005

I like web standards. But I think there are many standards proponents whose advocacy misses the mark when it comes to business.
Being able to easily replicate presentational effects across multiple browsers, from IE or Firefox, to a PDA or cell phone is a web developer’s Utopia. The ability to use semantic markup to not only […]

Back to Blogging

Posted by Tom on September 8th, 2005

Nearly a year after a rather abortive attempt at blogging, I’ve decided to try again. I’ve chosen to violate one of Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design, by removing a handful of my old posts (it’s number six on his list). They weren’t me; they lacked personality, and tended to […]

Standards and Search Engines

Posted by Tom on September 8th, 2005

Molly Holzschlag has posted an interesting comparison of web standards as used by popular search engines. Of particular interest were the comments regarding Google, whose site does not validate, uses tables for layout, and generally violates the sensibilities of hard core standards proponents. The following comment to Molly’s post by "Frank" says it […]

Accessible Resources

Posted by Tom on August 6th, 2004

I have been documenting some coding best-practices to be followed by web programmers I work with. Two of the best resources on HTML accessibility that I have come across so far are:

Dive Into Accessibility by Mark Pilgrim
Accessible HTML/XHTML Forms found at The Web Standards Project

Found on Amazon.com:

Constructing Accessible Websites

Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey […]

Code Lite

Posted by Tom on August 4th, 2004

By way of an article at The Web Standards Project, I came across a good piece by Douglas Bowman, which he presented at Digital Design World, called "Throwing Tables Out the Window."
In it he walks through the benefits of redesigning the presentation layer of a corporate web site (in this case, Microsoft.com), and not only […]