Mad Web Skills - Web design in Melbourne and Shepparton

In a post I wrote almost a year ago (and in the ensuing comments), I pondered the possibility of someday being able to define variables natively in a CSS document without the use of server-side scripting.

Well it seems that in their most recent nightly build, WebKit has added support for this.

@variables {
    CorporateLogoBGColor: #fe8d12;
}
div.logoContainer {
    background-color: var(CorporateLogoBGColor);
}

I’m not sure if this is based on any particular official CSS3 recommendation or if its something that WebKit has just grabbed and ran with in the hope of it going mainstream, but its certainly a step in the right direction.

For those who haven’t been following the recent drama regarding the proposed web standards behaviour in IE8, here’s a re-cap:

• Microsoft announces that IE8 can render the ACID2 test perfectly in IE8. Web devs get excited.
• In the name of “not breaking the web” (read: “not pissing off corporate clients that have spent many thousands of dollars on Microsoft CMS, Sharepoint, .NET controls and other web interfaces”) Microsoft announce a version targeting mechanism that allows web pages to be rendered using the IE version of choice. So far so good, however, by default, IE8 will render nearly all web pages exactly the same as if it were IE7. Standards-savvy developers would have to opt-in to IE8’s standards rendering engine.
• The web development community splits into two; those that believe the default behaviour is wrong and goes against the very nature of building valid, forwards-compatible websites; and those who believe it is in the best interest of the internets, protecting Microsoft’s partners who use thier dodgy web technologies and the vast majority of web designers who still use invalid markup, spacer gifs, layout tables and blink tags.

Now, I fit somewhere in the middle. I believed the default behaviour is wrong, but honestly thought it was not big deal. I understood that Microsoft was protecting their own interests. We’ve been accomodating IE since the dawn of time, so why stop now.

Anyway, none of that matters any more.

In Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 on the IEBlog, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch has announced:

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

I actually thought it was kind of silly that folks like Jeremy Keith were jumping up and down about the default behaviour, like they actually thought it was going to do anything about the situation. Trying to pressure Microsoft into doing anything would be like trying to convince an elephant to walk through a doorway. It just doesnt fit.

So, colour me flabbergasted. Kudos to Jeremy and others like him for championing for the cause rather than (like myself) be prepared to just grin and bear it. Also big snaps for Microsoft and the IE Team for actually listening to the developer community and making the right decision.

The Shepparton Show Me and Show MeBay websites have finally gone live. Mad Web Skills has been responsible for almost every aspect of development for these websites including web design, information architecture, user interface design, database development and php scripting.

The Shepparton Show Me website is running on Mad Web Skills’ own cmsharp content management system, so the client was able to update and manage all website content, including file download areas and photo galleries (with a little help from myself to polish up the content and apply some consistent styling). There’s a few more areas still to be developed for this website over the coming months, including a weblog and secured password-protected areas for committee memebers to use for internal communication.

Shepparton Show MeBay is a promotional website running under the Shepparton Show Me banner for a couple of weeks. It’s an online auction with a difference! Instead of bidding with money, you bid with specially coded Shepparton Show Me Dollars which you can get by shopping locally at participating retailers. Users can then register on the website and redeem these Show Me Dollars into their account balance and use them to bid on some great prizes! (Mad Web Skills is also providing one of the prizes — domain name, web hosting and weblog for one year!)

This is the first time such a promotion has been run by the Shepparton Show Me Committee so it’s a bit experimental. Personally I think it’s a great idea and I hope it really takes off and we see it again soon.

Not really a workshop per se, but the W3C SIG day where various working groups presented a look into what they were up to, and where they were headed. I’ve had bugger-all to do with W3C and it’s inner workings so I was intrigued as to what they actually did. In retrospect however, I should have went to the Javascript workshop which from all reports was pretty good.

Bert Bos (CSS3) covered some of what Andy Clarke spoke about at his workshop yesterday, echoing some of the more cooler features of the CSS3 specification. He illustrated how the advanced layout and grid positioning modules worked, which is super exciting for designer types. This new methodology, along with the new CSS3 selectors module, makes the selector alias theory I had the other week kinda redundant, as markup will no longer require any reference to where the content fits in the the grid, and also makes selecting specific elements easy, even if they are not marked up with a class or id. Bert also touched on the new advanced background images and borders (especially using images for borders). This really excites me (as much as a W3C spec can, I guess).

David Ratcliffe (GRDDL) spoke on a subject that I have no knowledge of and little interest in. GRDDL stands for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Language which is basically a stupid way of saying “bridging the gap between semantic markups” (but I guess BTGBSM is not a very good acronym). I got lost a few times here, looking off into the distance with circus music playing in my head…

Sofia Celic (WCAG 2.0 Draft) first covered the principles of the new draft for accessibility guidelines. There’s some new terminology used, with Checkpoints now being called Success Criteria. Also, some of these criteria are now worded to include more specific values (such as text-sizing should be resizable to between 50% and 200% without loss of content or functionality). This brought the comment “That’s a load of crap” from one audience member. Apparently these values were not based on any real research, illustrating that perhaps some wording may need to be reviewed. Finally, the new draft has the focus moving away from making content accessible to everyone, now targeting solely people with disabilities. A few hard questions from the audience were met with shrugs.

Anne Cregan (Semantec Web) spoke of a framework for sharing data led by the W3C based on RDF. This session reminded me of a comment I heard yesterday that the W3C is run mainly by academics and researchers and doesn’t really relate to web workers in the field. This is where I realised that I’d perhaps chosen the wrong workshop for today, as the circus music returned to my head. Lots of big words like ontology and axioms. Anne believes that this framework needs a killer app before people will see how cool this stuff is, but I just saw a solution where no problems exist (for me anyway).

Chris Wilson from Microsoft (HTML5 and the HTMLWG)started off with a bit of history about the WHATWG and the HTMLWG, then explained that the HTMLWG operates under the W3C Patent Policy, so Chris spent a bit of time talking about how the open standards the HTMLWG deals with needs to be free from IP complications. HTML5 aims to evolve from HTML4 to better describe the semantics of documents and applications, as well as integrate new UI controls such as datagrids etc. They concentrate on a few main principles: compatibility (graceful degradation, supporting existing content, not reinventing the wheel), utility (solving real problems, media independence, security, design, etc) and interoperability (well defined behaviour, avoiding needless complexity, error handling, etc). Chris also spoke of some of the challenges the group faces such as dealing with the openness of of the group which has over 400 members, so understandably there are problems with tone/politeness as well as evaluating the consensus of a subject.

Renato Iannella (The Policy Aware Web) gave a very political presentation about… *cue circus music* doo doo do-do do doo dooo… Huh? What? Yeah, I kinda lost the plot at the start, but he kinda looks like Eugene Levy, which amused me enough to keep me going to the interesting stuff. His talk was about supporting the varied policy languages to control various infrastructures of web usage. The privacy policies you see everywhere are part of this, but there are so many other areas that need to be supported such as accessibility, DRM, mobile sector, content licensing (eg. creative commons, GPL) etc.

Marcos Caceres (Widgets 1.0 Spec) was interesting enough, as he covered something that I’d never really thought about: standardising widgets (single function application often based on web technologies). A widget engine is the software on which widgets run, be it OSX dashboard, YahooUI, etc. but there is currently no interoperability between widget engines. The Widget 1.0 Spec addresses areas such as packaging up widgets, auto updates, embedding widgets in HTML pages, how they’re coded and rendered.

Dean Jackson (SVG) is an entertaining speaker. His talk was on a topic I’d had very little interest in, but by the end I was sold on the idea. SVG isn’t particularly relative to me at the moment, but it was interesting to see how SVG is in use on the web right now in ways that we might not be aware of, such as routes and polygons in Google Maps. Also SVG comes standard on many mobile devices today, especially 3G devices. Desktop UI’s such as Gnome or KDE use SVG for their icons too which was surprising, so it’s fast becoming a vendor-neutral, open standard for vector graphics. Dean suggested that we all go out and have a go at authoring something in SVG, as it’s simply an XML format. SVG is implemented at the same level as HTML, CSS and Javascript, not by plugin, so it can also be styled by CSS natively by the browser, but unfortunately, as usual, IE falls behind with its non-existent support.

So while my look into the world of W3C and it’s various special interest groups was interesting in parts, I think I’ll stay in the trenches, and leave the groundwork to the boffins.

Technorati Tags: wds07 w3c

It’s that time of year again when the ol’ weblog gets it’s yearly workout. I arrived in Sydney this afternoon, and after settling into my hotel room (with LCD TV! Yay!), getting all showered up (By the way, WTF? What kind of hotel has the hot tap turn on anti-clockwise, and the cold tap turn on clockwise?), I’m about to venture forth for bite to eat then take a walk to get my bearings to the Powerhouse Museum (the venue for tomorrow’s workshop with Andy Clarke. I’m really looking forward to this conference, as I’m not only a fan of Andy’s work, but also of his way of thinking. He’s very inspiring.

Also as part of the pre-conference buzz-building is all the social network web gizmos that go along with it. I’ve got the Flickr tagged, the Twitter feed, the Technorati tagged, the Facebook group, along with the official website, all bookmarked and open in my Firefox tabs. If I’ve missed anything, let me know

On a similar note, I’m a little saddened that last year’s Web Connections website wasn’t re-jigged for this year’s conference. Although, as illustrated above, there’s no shortage of networking apps linked to the conference, it was handy to have everything in the one place. Perhaps if the Facebook group was utilised a little more… Anyhoo, I’ll be kicking around Sydney throughout the conference, so if you want to catch up, give me a hoy-hoy.

Technorati Tags: wds07