I downloaded Macromedia Central today. I was browsing the Macromedia website when I came across it, and I thought it looked interesting. One of the features that they have is a listing of movies playing, and movie times in your area. “That’s awfully useful”, I thought, “but it would be better for me if this information was available as an RSS feed of some sort. I did a bit of digging around, and looked up some movie and video rental sites, when I decided to visit Blockbuster.

I was going to write something up about the problem I have with Lockergnome regressing back to table-based layouts recently, but the I came across this, and although I would have written something completely different, this still sums it all up quite nicely.

Dave Shea recently asked, Support the standards and nothing but the standards, regardless of whether or not browsers get them right? or - Support what standards are available given today’s browser support, and kludge together markup/script/CSS hacks to overcome deficiencies in implementations? I am all-for the extensive use of web standards. Anyone who’s talked to me for more than two minutes when I’m in geek-mode, or who has read anything I’ve written on the subject knows this.

An Introduction Ever since I rolled out version 21.0 of my website in early August (dubbed “Oxygen 2003”), I’ve been using FIR technique to swap out text for images in CSS browsers. Today, I realized that it presents accessibility problems for screen readers such as JAWS and IBM Home Page Reader. They understand the CSS display:none;, but they don’t understand media types (same issue with WebTV/MSN-TV — they understand @import, but not media types — doh!). Also, FIR fails in IE5/Mac.

After checking out this post over at Mezzoblue, I must comment that this has been my process for building websites for the last year-and-a-half or so. Call it preaching if you will, but it is always better to design sites in standards-compliant browsers first (Mozilla, Firebird, Safari, Netscape 7, IE5/Mac), then almost-compliant browsers next (IE6/Win), then the subpar browsers (IE5.x/Win), then in crap browsers (Netscape 4.x). I always develop in Mozilla or Firebird. Often times, I completely forget to check to see if IE can swallow the valid code.

A guy from Coding Forums commented on my recent article “Play By The Rules” on his blog. The only problem is that it’s in German. I did some digging around on Yahoo! and found a translation service. I punched in the URL for Morded’s blog, and came up with this (rather rough) translation. Ryan Parman wrote an interesting Rant, suitable title: Play By The Rules. In the reason I understand the motives for such an article, and the constant discussion “why standards?

I keep ending up having these discussions debates with people a person that is beginning to irritate me. They keep going on and on about how modern web design styles suck, that there are no good-looking XHTML+CSS sites on the web (except, of course, for CSS Zen Garden), and that the all-mighty W3C is just making new rules (aka “standards”) for web design to shove the poor common people out of the market. I have since decided that this individual is a lost cause in the case of web standards, and as such, I am boycotting their website in protest.

I posted on Coding Forums asking to get some critiquing on a few of my site designs. I’m working towards standards-compliance, both in syntax and structure, and I think I’ve come a long way over the last few months. I received a couple of posts in response that seemed like they were straight out of the dark ages of web design. I just cringed when he began talking about ImageReady splices. Here are his two posts (edited for spelling and grammar):

I was browsing the internet the other day looking at a variety of articles written by Jeffrey Zeldman. I happened to come across an article at The Noodle Incident, where I found this GIF. I got to the bottom of the article, and came across this GIF. Ahhh, web standards…