Jeffrey Zeldman of Happy Cog Studios and Douglas Bowman of StopDesign are working with Apple to bring standards-compliance and forwards-compatibility to Apple’s very simple, elegant, and full-of-panache website. Bowman has commented that this doesn’t necessarily imply an visual changes, but I don’t believe that they would necessarily be ruled out either. It’ll be exciting to see my favorite computer company convert to web standards with the help of two leading figures in web design. I’ve also seen comments from Eric Meyer and Todd Dominey.
Henrik Gemal has posted about a new MozDev.org project called “Spengler” that “allows you to inspect a web service based on its WSDL file, displaying it in several human readable forms. It also allows you to create sample testcases that allow testing of the web service from Mozilla.” Interestingly enough, Mozilla’s JavaScript Debugger is called “Venkman.” I’m just waiting for them to announce that the new Mozilla Firebird sidebar project will be called “Stantz.” Who you gonna call…
Gemal also notes that engineers are working to bring roaming profiles to Mozilla. That should be nice, although I have no idea how they’d go about it. As long as they make it work between Mozilla Suite and Mozilla Firebird, I’ll be happy.
Macromedia is about to release “MX 2004” versions of all of their major software applications. This includes Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash, as well as a Flash Pro. Interestingly enough, Todd Dominey notes that the Macromedia Store uses a DHTML implementation of their main navigation that is done in Flash throughout the rest of the site. Todd goes on to point out that in some ways, the DHTML version is actually superior to the Flash version.
With the advent of the Flash 7 Player, Todd Dominey also points out (I seem to be reading his blog alot more often lately, don’t I?) that many Flash detection scripts break when a new version comes out because the detection scripts only look for a specific version number instead of using parseFloat() to detect that version and newer! I happened to read that article for the first time right after I rewrote my own Flash detection script. My script will even detect up through version 9.0 (provided that Macromedia doesn’t change the way the version is sniffed for — via Netscape plug-in or ActiveX). Of course, this funtionality was part of my original code, but this version is significantly more efficient.
Steve Wozniak is at it again. First he builds the first computer for the rest any of us, and now he designs this.
Jason Kottke is right. And so is Dave Shea. Standards-compliant code isn’t always semantic. Technically, you can use <table> for layout and still validate XHTML 1.0. An introductory XHTML article from SizeFactory, as well as a related article talk about some of the most important things involved in making your sites truly XHTML/Semantically correct. It’s a great place to start. Zeldman also comments on this point, and finds an opportunity to mention his little orange book.
Mezzoblue’s “A Second Voice” has a terrific article about standards-evangelism There was also a good comment about Kottke’s article over at SimpleBits. Dan Cederholm has presented the first SimpleQuiz! Go ahead! Take it! (The answer is “B”, by the way.)
