Archive for the 'browsers' category.
Jul 11 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment
theMechanism follows Yahoo!'s Graded Browser Support and agrees with the GBS approach:
In the first 10 years of professional web development, back in the early '90s, browser support was binary: Do you—or don't you—support a given browser? When the answer was "No," user access to the site was often actively prevented. In the years following IE5's release in 1998, professional web designers and developers have become accustomed to asking at the outset of any new undertaking, "Do I have to support Netscape 4.x browsers for this project?"
By contrast, in modern web development we must support all browsers. Choosing to exclude a segment of users is inappropriate, and, with a "Graded Browser Support" strategy, unnecessary.
The two principal concepts of GBS are a broader and more reasonable definition of "support" and the notion of "grades" of support.
Read the rest of this entry »
Jul 9 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | Add a Comment
As Jan Odvarko notes, "I was surprised how many Firebug extensions … exist out there." Check out his list of 12 extensions at http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/list-of-firebug-extensions/. All extensions include a brief summary of what they do, a screen capture and a link to the download page.
Two that I use are YSlow and Odvarko's own Firecookie.. YSlow analyzes Web pages and determines why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites. Firecookie makes it possible to view and manage cookies within the familiar Firebug UI.
Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.
Jul 3 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 1 Comment
via Webmonkey:
Variables in cascading stylesheets are now available in the nightly WebKit build.
CSS without variables:
//Sets the background of the page and tables to the hex code for the color grey
body {
background-color: #eceae1;
}
table {
background-color: #eceae1;
}
With CSS variables:
//Defines "DefaultBGColor" to light gray
@variables {
DefaultBGColor: #eceae1;
}
//Sets the background and any table on the page to the default background color
body {
background-color: var(DefaultBGColor);
}
table {
background-color: var(DefaultBGColor);
}
Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.
Jun 27 | Posted by Dave Fletcher | Add a Comment
One of our loyal monthly attendees of the New York Web Standards Meetup sent us a link to a video by Victor Tsaran, an accessibility engineer at Yahoo! who focuses on developing best practices for the creation of websites that work well with screen readers. In this video, he provides an important introduction to some of the things that work well in the world of screen readers and others that do not. Web designers and programmers who are curious about how people use software like JAWS would benefit from watching this 25 minute video of Victor navigating his desktop and explaining the process. It’s encouraging to see that Yahoo! has a proactive stance on accessibility.
Thanks again to Joe Devon for sending this around to our list:
Jun 17 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 3 comments
Help the Firefox community set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours by downloading Firefox 3 on Download Day (some time in June).
You can pledge and get buttons and banners at the Download Day Headquarters.
Update 2008-06-12: The date of the download day has been set: Tuesday, 17 June 2008. While you wait, check out Deb Richardson's Field Guide to Firefox 3 to get an overview of all the new features and improvements.
Update 2008-06-17: Today is the day, but Firefox 3 won't be available until 10 am PDT.
Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.
