Together with a collection of other people, I've been one of those that have promoted using HTML4 and serving the text/html media type for web pages unless you have some direct benefit to gain from XHTML being XML. I've also argued that said benefit would be lost as soon as conforming to Appendix C and serving the document as text/html became a must.
One of the often heard arguments in favor of XHTML 1.0 is the promise of future compatibility with browsers on mobile devices. Indeed, accessing non-table driven XHTML 1.0 sites with a (in my case, Japanese) mobile phone is perfectly possible. This should come as a surprise though—mobile phones usually only support XHTML Basic (actually most of them support XHTML-MP, which is a superset of XHTML Basic, but let's keep things simple and say they support XHTML Basic). The reason you can browse through XHTML 1.0 sites is that most mobile browsers are not too strict about doctypes and mimetypes—they just try to render all elements that look sort of familiar, resulting in reasonably displayed content.
Hello friends. A new Web-Graphics redesign is in the works. As part of my planning phase, I am looking to gather some input from regular readers. Apart from being strange, the current design is getting a bit long in the tooth and I feel it's time to freshen things up a bit.
Erik writes in about a new design contest.
The Wikinews citizen journalism project (by the people who created the Wikipedia encyclopedia) is holding a design contest for its multilingual portal and website stylesheets. The contest will run over two months. In true wiki-fashion, everyone can contribute prizes to the contest. If you'd like your work to be used in a project that might become as big as Wikipedia, this could be a good opportunity.
For those unaware of what wiki is - quick rough translation = everyone can add and edit. The Wikipedia is probably the most successful implementation of a Wiki because so many folks are involved in keeping it up to date, despite being open to the fancy of naredowells, it's "self-healing" rate is legendary.
Interesting thing to note about this contest, is it's Wikiness - you can test out your design entry on the actual content. Those not feeling inspired, or those too busy to write a blog post (hi!) can contribute a prize offering to up the stakes.
Well, what do you know, even a heavy juggernaut like Microsoft can turn around. Bill Gates stated at the RSA Conference 2005 that a beta/test version of Internet Explorer 7, not bound to the upcoming Longhorn OS release, will be made available this summer. Of course, we've seen that they loosened the ties of Avalon to Longhorn already, so this shouldn't be seen entirely as a surprise, but still, it's good news.
I just wish there were more information on things other than security - sure, security is important, but that's what you have cumulative patches for, and this is a new major version. I want to know about feature changes, updates to underlying technologies (JScript, MSXML etc.), standards support improvements...
The most you ever got out of $20 is now available from Todd Dominey: SlideShow Pro.
Slideshow is a Macromedia Flash based photo gallery that is completely customizable, loads photos from XML, and can sync up your favorite MP3s to play. The gallery actually holds multiple galleries, so you can literally have thousands of photos organized however you wish. Heck, you can even tie it into your Flickr account!
Todd's outdone himself with this one, check out the well organized and resourceful website at http://www.slideshowpro.net/, you'll find a million ways to use this.
Pat writes in to recommend Unobtrusive Javascript, a five chapter narrative form tutorial on Javascript and the ways it "should" be used. As a Javascript lightweight, I found valuable info almost immediately. There may not be any breakthrough info here, but the format is a comfortable to read, and nicely organized.
That is everyone's reaction to Google Maps. What is truly impressive is it's speed. It's fast. Way faster than any other mapping utility I have used AND it loads it's tiles inside to outside. So the info you are most likely to need, loads first.
My only gripe, the zoom and directional widgets get lost a bit. What I think would really be nice is if a modifier key could enact the zoom and pan (much like QTVR) and the ability to reference saved addresses.
All in all... for a "Beta" it rocks. Kudos to Google - they have redefined yet another web utility. In it's current state, Google Maps works only with IE 5.5 (Win), FireFox 0.8 , Netscape 7.1 and Mozilla 1.4.
Will Firefox supplant IE as the dominant browser, just as IE replaced the once dominant Netscape? John Allsopp has some interesting things to say on the subject.
Accesskeys, like 'em or don't like 'em. The Brooklyn Museum Website is using them, and in a big, bold way. While I'm on the subject, here's a way to underline them dynamically, from the ever-resourceful clagnut. [thanks Noah!]
MSN.com has gone all XHTMLish? Sort of? I'm not a big validation stickler (it's a tool, not a label), but 130 errors on the home page is a lot. Weirdly, many are font tags rendered through javascript in an inline script intended to open a popup and populate it with a HTML 4.0 markup. Several things render differently in different browsers - which is not a critique, but it is a little extra ugly in Safari. I don't have time to pick it apart further, but it's an interesting redesign to note.
While you're there, take a look at those search results! Clean, fast, and easy to read - and with RSS at the bottom! Also, only 2 small validation errors on the search result page.
Do you have more time to investigate and analyze? I'd enjoy hearing what you find, leave notes in a comment to this post.
UPDATE: also read this much more comprehensive review at stopdesign.
UPDATE: To clarify - what I found weird was that HTML 4 was used within that survey popup, when the site is generally written in XHTML. Not that there is anything weird or wrong with HTML 4 itself.