MY GLAMOROUS LIFE: Tragicomic fodder from the life of Zeldman. A LIST APART: Design, code, content. For people who make websites. LES MISC: Articles, essays, and miscellanies. TAKING YOUR TALENT TO THE WEB: A Guide for the Transitioning Designer.
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Happy Cog.

Current ALA: Time Management: The Pickle Jar Theory
Current Relaunch: Happy Cog Studios
Recent Glamour: Life During Wartime
Recent Essentials (clickety-click)

25–26 June 2002
[10 am | 10 am]
Porter Glendinning sent us this screen capture of webstandards.org as seen in his Palm Pilot. Worth noting: The Web Standards Project is built with XHTML 1.0 Strict. CSS is used for layout. There is no Palm version. There is no WAP version. Multiple versions are not needed. When you design and build with standards, one document serves all. Thanks, Porter.

Similarly: Here’s how The WaSP’s site looks in Microsoft’s PocketPC. (Thanks, Anil.) Again, no special version was required or built.

But wait, there’s more. Care of Grant Hutchinson, here’s the same site on a Newton, Apple’s long-discontinued predecessor to the Palm Pilot. “There’s nothing like viewing a modern site using a piece-meal browser on a vintage operating system.”

The bad news: even the latest versions of certain off-brand browsers deliver incorrect and incomplete support for CSS, and no support at all for the W3C DOM. Folks who use these browsers will have inferior experiences on sites built with anything beyond HTML table layouts and 1997-era JavaScript. This may not bother you or your clients, but it will certainly distress these users.
        Take OmniWeb. Please. As screenshots prepared by Waferbaby show, the newly released OmniWeb 4.1 fares reasonably well with transitional layouts like the one used at zeldman.com. OmniWeb fudges some CSS layouts without impairing usability: Waferbaby’s navigation bar explodes on impact, and ALA’s leading and borders are missing, but both sites can still be read.
        The WaSP’s new site fares worse. Among other woes, its left-side navigation is almost entirely hidden. It may seem odd that a site so friendly to Palm users could prove so troublesome to a fancy-pants graphical browser like OmniWeb, but that’s how it is when browsers meet a web standard halfway. No CSS is better than incomplete and incorrect CSS. We can only hope that Omni Group will continue to improve its promising but problematic product.

Likewise, here’s a snap of webstandards.org in iCab 2.8, a Mac-only browser that claims to offer standards support comparable to that in IE and Opera. (To be fair, iCab’s has always provided superb support for HTML. Which may not sound like much, but is. It’s those other standards iCab still needs to work on.) Thanks, Eric. :::

23–24 June 2002
In Issue 146 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites: Time management theories come and go, and we’re glad when most of them leave. But this one caught our fancy. No charts, no grids, no five syllable words — just a simple idea that can help you get more done with less stress. New ALA contributing writer Jeremy Wright uncorks the Pickle Jar Theory of Time Management.

Monkey.

Stilleye offers scripts you can download and use on your own sites. Includes expanding menus, a pixelated text generator, and a fix for MSIE’s automatic margin bug.

Of late we’ve found ourselves bemusedly contemplating the abstract thoughts and equally abstract layouts of WebActivism.

SDG, a newly launched web agency, has taken WaSP’s challenge to heart, and will offer its clients only standards-compliant work. The agency’s corporate site complies with XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS, and the Section 508 guidelines, and is not a bad looker.

Recent essentials you may have missed: “Flash Player 6 & broken detection scripts” covers a problem on numerous Flash-based sites, where old browser detection scripts prevent visitors who’ve installed the Flash 6 player from viewing Flash content. “Dingbats instead of text” explores an MSIE problem in which text on web pages shows up as visual symbols instead of words. :::
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