It's Blue Beanie Day on the Web and we've all joined the fray by donning our indigo toques and updating our avatars. But what does it all mean? Advocacy without action is meaningless. The purpose of Blue Beanie Day is to raise awareness and adoption of Web Standards . We all updated our Twitter avatars and placed the azul cap on our Websites to show support, but how many of... continue »

There is a lot of commotion over the state of markup specifications these days. Many strong opinions have been voiced, and objected to vehemently. The debate has raged for years and shows no signs of slowing. You may come away from the banter asking “which is the one to rule them all?”, or perhaps your opinion is already solid. You want to use XHTML 1.1? Go for it. HTML 4.01... continue »

Jeff Croft started a fire. A fire that needed to be set. I've watched luminaries within the Web community jump on and off the standards soapbox. There is so much fragmentation on this topic, no wonder the proposed finalization date for HTML 5 is 13 years away . I think the value of the firestorm that came from all of this is it brings attention to the fact that somewhere,... continue »

Yesterday Google announced that they enhanced Gmail for IE 6 users. Really? Google updated the Gmail core almost a year ago. According to the post “IE6 wasn’t able to handle the complexity of the new code in a way that met our performance and stability goals”. So now, 10 months later they release new code saying “we’ve been working with the IE engineers at... continue »

So it seems IE8 is petting the cat backwards already. Hakon Lie’s article bashes IE for its use of a broken page icon to denote standards compliant pages. This is a epic misapplication of an icon — but, is it truly a sign of Microsoft denouncing the use of Web Standards? No. As Hakon says in his post, and others have pointed out the default is to render Intranet pages in... continue »

During a session at SXSW on Web Standards and SEO ( transcribed here ), the conversation revolved around how search engines treat semantically correct, valid pages versus the spaghetti mess of code that makes up the bulk of the web. Tim Mayer from Yahoo! said that they do look at valid markup as a 'signal of quality', but can't give extra weight to pages using web standards yet because there... continue »

Using classic FIR or similar Image replacement techniques is fabulous except that IE doesn't follow the rules on image caching and CSS. Here's how to configure your server to force IE to behave.Thanks to Dean Edwards and Ryan Carver for figuring this out. It took me a while to find the two pages linked above so I've included this here for fast reference. Here's a lightweight overview: ... continue »

When specifying colors in HTML or CSS it's best to use the hex code which is something that browsers understand and convert into colors. Choose a color from the list below and look to its right to get the hex code. If you wanted a nice blue for example, you could use "#0000cc". You can print this chart if you like, just make sure that "Print background colors and images" option is on in... continue »

It's always a good idea to have all the traffic for your site go to www.yourdomain.com. Through the magic of Apache mod_rewrite, you can keep your URLs clean and tidy. Often times people will just type your domain name (i.e. "yourdomain.com") into their browser to get to your website. This can cause some interesting and undesired issues, especially if you plan to do any detailed log... continue »