Archive for the 'Web Standards' Category

Internet Explorer 7 has tabs

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 16/5/2005
in Browsers, Technology, Web Standards and Windows
. 0 Comments

The internet Explorer 7 blog is reporting that Internet Explorer 7 will have tabs when released.

What’s funny about the blog is that they say:

In general, I think tabs are a great idea. I liked them a lot in Office dialogs and in Excel in the early 90’s.

No mention of the tabs in Firefox, Safari or Opera (the other main browsers)! it is almost as if they are trying to say - “we had tabs in the early 90’s, we invented tabs”

‘Fess up, Microsoft is dead late with tabbed browsing and the current Internet Explorer 6 is a lame duck.

As one commenter on the blog said:

Stop gloating about how you’ve caught up with five years ago and begin addressing the bigger issues, i.e.: CSS and XHTML

Safari passes the Acid2 test

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/4/2005
in Mac and Web Standards
. 0 Comments

Acid2 is a page created by webstandards.org to test the web standards’ compliance of browsers as reported here on the 15th.

David Hyatt, a Safari developer, is reporting that Safari is now passing the Acid2 test.

Safari passes the Acid2 test

If this is so, then Safari is the first browser to pass this test - Kudos to David. The version of Safari David is working on hasn’t been released yet but hopefully it won’t be long.

This is also a milestone for web standards and raises the bar for all other browsers.

Who will be next, Firefox or IE? I know where I’d be betting my money!

A browser standards compliance test

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 15/4/2005
in Web Standards
. 2 Comments

I note, from a post in James’ site, that The Web Standards Project have released a test (called Acid2) to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.

This test supersedes the original Acid test.

According to the Web Standards Project website -
“Acid2 is a brand new test designed to push the limits of HTML, CSS, and PNG support in browsers and authoring tools. By testing against Acid2, flaws in support for common web standards are quickly and easily exposed”

Hopefully to be “quickly and easily” fixed by the developers!

There’s a detailed technical guide in case you are curious as to how the test was developed and what it is testing.

Will the real Caoimhe please stand up

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 6/4/2005
in Blogging and Web Standards
. 6 Comments

I was browsing my blog stats this evening and I noticed that lots of people were coming to my site having searched for the term Caoimhe blog. Caoimhe is a very well known Irish blogger and she was recently interviewed on a daytime TV program called The Big Bite along with several other Irish bloggers of renown.

This program raised Caoimhe’s already high profile and so more people are searching for her blog. Currently when you search for Caoimhe blog in Google.ie, this site comes up as result no 1!

Why is this site coming up as result no. 1? Well there are several reasons, first off I have a link to Caoimhe’s blog in my list of blogs I read using the term “Caoimhe’s blog”.

Furthermore, the searchers are restricting the search to Ireland on Google.ie and my blog is hosted in Ireland. Caoimhe’s blog on the other hand, although Irish, is a Blogger blog hosted by blogspot.com in the US.

Finally, this blog is run out of WordPress, so the blog it produces is web standards compliant - this is not the case for Blogger blogs. Why is this important? Well, search engines love standards compliant sites and generally, standards compliant sites rank higher then non-compliant sites in searches (this is ironic considering Blogger is owned by Google).

Irish web standards compliant websites revisited

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 2/3/2005
in Web Standards
. 4 Comments

I wrote a post a few weeks back about Irish web standards compliant websites and development agencies. In that post I listed commercial and non-commercial Irish web standards compliant websites and development agencies who develop to the web standards, in response to queries from participants on a talk I gave for the Irish Internet Association.

In the meantime, Colm O’Riordan of Communicraft has come back to me pointing out another site developed by Communicraft which is web standards compliant. The site is called Crann - it is the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices based in Trinity College Dublin.

If there are any other Irish web standards compliant sites or development agencies out there that I have missed, feel free to contact me and I’ll happily give you a mention.

Web standards and blogging - important skills for new graduates

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 17/2/2005
in Blogging and Web Standards
. 2 Comments

I was invited to deliver a talk to the final year Computer Science students in University College Cork yesterday.

The title of my talk was Computer Science Prospects - it was a talk, from the perspective of someone who has been in the industry for a few years now (ahem!), advising prospective graduates on useful skillsets to make themselves more desirable to employers.

I pointed out that with the increasing awareness of web standards, and the advantages they confer, it is vital for graduates to be intimately aware of them and to have demonstrable experience of development using the standards.

I then went on to point out as blogging is now, fast, becoming a mainstream means of corporate customer communication (witness the blogs of Randy Baseler - VP of Marketing for Boeing, General Motor’s Blog, and even the blog of Margot Wallstrom - vice president of the European Commission!), graduates with a knowledge of blogging technologies will be increasingly in demand.

Anyway the talk is available in Powerpoint format here.

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