Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Opera Software has released the latest version (9.5) of its browser. In case you want to get started playing with some of the CSS 3 properties, it supports text-shadow, media queries, nth-child, and background sizing.
Firefox for Mobile. Speaking of browsers, Firefox is developing a mobile browser meant for touch screen devices. You can see some video of what they’re doing at Aza’ Thoughts.
Going Fast on the Mobile Web is a slideshow presentation by Jason Grigsby from his Web Visions session. Even without the narrative, it’s a great presentation. Anybody see this in Portland and have a report or post about it to share?
Browsers are a battleground once again in the New York Times raises the specter of another browser war. Aaccckk!
Who is a senior? Someone over 65? Boomers are between 44 and 62. Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By defines elders as anyone over age 50. Does being of a certain age mean that you require special accomodations in the form of a “Senior PC” or an extra simple cell phone or an adapted elderbrowser?
Microsoft Corporation just announced a project in the UK that will start development of what they are called a Senior PC.
Read the full post at BlogHer.
Shelley says, “I promise to kiss Chris Wilson as soon as IE supports XHTML AND SVG.”
This is in response to a couple of kissing stories here on Web Teacher. First, this Useful Links post, in which I offered hugs and kisses to Microsoft in general, not Chris Wilson in particular. Skye commented that I needed to reserve my enthusiasm for a while. The second kissing story involved an actual kiss for Chris Wilson: WaSP Annual Meeting–Don’t Break the Web.
I think we should begin planning an unconference dedicated to delivering kisses to Chris Wilson when Microsoft finally gets the support for web standards in IE 8 done right. I suggest some rules. 1) The unconference should be in a really fun place, so we could all enjoy being there. 2) Chris must extend a cheek for a kiss to all comers—women, men, young, old. No fair letting Steph deliver the kiss for all of us. 3) After that, we all talk shop and drink Margaritas or MochaChocaLattes or Diet Coke for the rest of the day. 4) Kisses will be relayed back to Microsoft using Chris’ own two lips—during a widely publicized photo op.
In this way, popular support for web standards will receive the warmth and attention it deserves.
Let’s say you have an HTML page that weighs in at 8K. You have some CSS that might contain 32K. And you have a couple of JavaScripts that are 4K and 12K. That adds up to 56K.
If you put the CSS and the JavaScript information in the HTML, you still have 56K. One would assume 56K is 56K no matter what. However, there’s a little thing known as browser cache to take into account.
Let’s say every page in your site uses the CSS and JavaScripts we’re talking about. If those are externalized, then the very first time a page from your site is downloaded, all 56K gets downloaded. But the external CSS and JavaScript files get cached. Which means, for all subsequent pages that are downloaded, all the browser sends out a request for is the HTML. If the HTML is all content (no presentation, no scripting), speed rules.
Testing for Accessibility – CalWAC 2008 is Jim Thatcher’s presentation and includes the slides and all sorts of accessibility testing resources. Organized in Thatcher’s customary clear and easy style, and full of goodies.
Compatbility and IE at Laura Carlson’s Web Design References will keep you on top of the list of posts and articles discussing the raging question around Microsoft introducing a meta tag that would look for a specific IE 8 rendering mode. At last count, she had 23 links already, but I don’t see Burningbird’s Tyranny of Microsoft among them yet. It’s a firestorm out there!
Education 2.0: Top Online Learning Resources should be of interest to educators and students. From Wired Magazine.
Web Worker Daily has a great set of links to online browser testing services. They list seven, some of them free, such as IE NetRenderer, which will show your page in IE 5.5, 6, or 7.
Flocking to the pictures, in TiKouka, gives an excellent overview of what the social media browser Flock is all about. If you are a big user of social media, Flock sounds like a good app to investigate and perhaps use.
Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet provides some good advice from Internet Duct Tape. Don’t let yourself get disemvoweled.
The Kimberly Blessing Interview by Christopher Schmitt is worth a read. Blessing started as an Interactive Developer for AOL. She currently works for PayPal as the manager of their Web Development Platform Team. Kimberly authored the “The Circle of Standards” chapter for the book, Adapting to Web Standards. She’s also a co-leader of the Web Standards Project. The conversation ranges from web standards, to coping with SXSWi when you’re an introvert, to fan sites. (This last was of interest to me, since I’ve been running a fan site for years, but mine is a definite Web 1.0 site.)