Web stuff

Back in November I wrote the following in an email to a mailing list as part of a discussion about The Web Standards Project, reading some of the fallout on the web over the last few days reminded me of that discussion, which seems more relevant now than before,
“When WaSP was at its most effective, […]

By now most of you will probably have read the article posted today on A List Apart, Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8.
In a nutshell, the new http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” instruction will let you tell Internet Explorer to render the page in the manner of a particular IE version. If you have developed for IE7 […]

Drew McLellan and I presented our first Beginners CSS Course last week here in Maidenhead. We really enjoyed the day and, from the feedback received so far, our delegates did too. We had a mix of attendees - from those who had done very little HTML to those who were comfortable with the basics of […]

I started edgeofmyseat.com in September 2001, which makes it a pretty established company at this point. So it’s really exciting that Drew McLellan will be joining the company in September. We’re looking forward to working together full time as Drew has worked on a freelance basis for edgeofmyseat.com already, and we work well as a […]

The 2nd edition of my book ‘The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks’ has now been released and is available from Sitepoint.
This updated version covers Internet Explorer 7 and newer techniques made possible by widespread use of standards compliant browsers – while always bearing in mind how to ensure accessibility of your content […]

On Thursday and Friday of last week I attended the @media2007 Europe conference in London. I took a ridiculous amount of notes (using OmniOutliner which I am loving for taking meeting notes right now) but will try and condense those into a brief round-up of the sessions I attended.
There were many more highlights than […]

Yesterday the Web Standards Project held our Annual Meeting at SXSW in Austin. Not all of us could be there in person, so while the conference-attending WaSPs answered questions at the open meeting, the virtual attendees launched the WaSP Street Team site as it was announced.
The Street Team is based on the concept of […]

The debate regarding the lack of women speakers at conferences continues. I have added to this conversation in the past, and a few people have picked up on that post during this current round of debate. On that post Lori gives some of the reasons why she doesn’t speak at conferences often. One reason being,
Lack […]

As a parent of a pre-teen I’ve been reading with interest the commentary over the last few days with regard to the different way in which teenagers typically relate to their online identities. In common with most of my peers I have used the same online identity for years, so if you come across a […]

Congratulations to my Dad - Mike Douglass - and everyone working on Bedework, an open-source institutional calendar system, on winning a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. The awards were presented on Monday 4th December by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The Mellon Foundation’s Press Release gives details of all award winners, and there are photos and more […]

Drew has begun his geek Christmas countdown once again on 24 Ways, kicking off with an article demonstrating how to use the YUI Slider widget to dynamically trim text on the page, and today’s article is a round up of methods for implementing ”CSS Constants’ by yours truly.
The list of authors is top secret until […]

I’ve written a fair old bit about CSS, and continue to do so. The time honoured method of starting a CSS article or book for beginners, is to start out with a comparison between font tags and CSS for simple text styling. I have a bunch of CSS books on my shelves, including my own, […]

The familiar issue of diversity - particularly in terms of those speaking at industry conferences has been raised again. As a female web developer I almost feel duty bound to weigh in! It occured to me that I know why I don’t get to many events, but I’d be interested to know if my experience […]

I’ve had so many interesting discussions with people at @media, as these were prompted by the topics discussed by panels or in presentations it’s probably not surprising that I was often having the same conversation a number of times with different people! However one topic that kept coming up was how we decide which methods […]

Drew and I got back from @media 2006 late this afternoon, and it really has been a fantastic few days. The conference for me started with a speakers dinner on Wednesday night, I’ve not attended SXSW, nor last year’s @media and so this was the first time I’d met most of the attendees ‘in real […]

Natalie makes some excellent points in her post Women in technology and Ubuntu,
“Another great barrier to entry is a partner with similar interests in the field, naturally a common occurrence due to similar social circles and shared interests, it can happen many people overlook the female partner’s geeky credentials, unintentionally perhaps but noticeable none the […]

In the run up to Christmas, learn a new web development tip every day at 24 ways … by Christmas Day you’ll have a whole bunch of new exciting knowledge with which to impress your Aunties over the festive meal.

Not only does Dustin Diaz know how to cut up a pineapple, he also understands CSS Shorthand, and has produced this handy guide to the CSS Shorthand property values, which is a great reference to something not often thoroughly discussed.

The latest version of Dreamweaver - Dreamweaver 8 - has been launched today. I was lucky enough to be involved with the Beta and so have been working with this new version for several months. So, is it worth the upgrade?
If you use Dreamweaver for visual design, and in particular for CSS based layouts, then […]

This morning the BBC reports on a survey made of 100 leading consumer web sites - revealing that 3% were turning away non-IE users and a further 7% were using IE-specific code. The article then went on to explain why web standards were important - not only to users of Firefox but also in terms […]

Browsing the UK Channel 4 website this evening I came across what seems to be a great idea - ORIGINATION:INSITE,

“Over the next two years ORIGINATION INSITE, working with a number of outstanding cultural partners and in collaboration with Culture Online, will help people develop websites that reflect the diversity and makeup of modern Britain. These […]

The Small Person has had a computer since she was three and a half, she is pretty good with it and very rarely needs parental technical support. Recently she has been begging me to teach her to “make a web page”. I did hunt around the web and (probably not surprisingly) found nothing that would […]

We’re waking up this morning to the news that Adobe has acquired Macromedia. What this means for the product lines of both companies remains to be seen - Dreamweaver and GoLive were direct competitors and, as Drew has already pointed out, the functionality of Fireworks can be found in Illustrator and Photoshop (even if not […]

Advent is a time of great expectation and waiting for many Open University students, as the exam results for the October examinations are published just a few days before Christmas. The OU have always embraced the web as a way to publish information about their courses; and for students to keep up to date with […]

Derek Featherstone describes something that seems to be a common feeling among “web standards advocates” right now. For those of us who have been using and evangelising web standards for the last few years it all seems so obvious. In my own company our use of web standards saves us time. Over and over again […]

A while back I wrote an article about forms and CSS and covered displaying forms in tables, for this impropriety I was immediately lynched by the purists. As an application developer I still maintain that sometimes a table is the most appropriate way to layout a complex form. In fact, very often, a complex form […]

Firefox 1.0 has been released today. If you are an Internet Explorer user and concerned about spyware and viruses getting onto your machine via your web browser then there has never been a better time to switch away from IE - Firefox will happily import all your favorites and settings and it’s free […]

The Firefox Preview Release has now been released, download it and help to meet the target of 1 million downloads in 10 days and more importantly protect your computer from nasties that are all too easily installed when browsing the web using Internet Explorer.
I love Firefox, but if you want to see what other options […]

Drew launches a very pink version of his personal web site, allinthehead.com. I’ve also been bitten by the redesign bug and created a new version of my business web site edgeofmyseat.com, which is slightly less purple than the previous incarnation, and hopefully more flexible in terms of the type of content that I can add […]

If you have read some of the recent security scares surrounding Internet Explorer and are at all concerned about continuing to use this browser, then check out Browse Happy, the lastest initiative to come out of the Web Standards Project.
No deep technical discussions here, just some case studies of people who have switched to different […]

As reported by Jeremy, Andy and Jon, last weekend was a chance for that rare creature - the UK Web Standards Geek - to meet with others of their kind, and marvellous fun it was too. Everyone seems to have survived their encounter with The Small Person, who was terribly excited to have all […]

I have a lot of computer books, I work on various platforms and with several different languages and need my reference books to remind of of syntax as I swap from one language to another in the course of working on the various projects I have on the go at any one time. However, […]

I started writing a comment in response to Molly’s blog “Where are the women of CSS” but when it started to become something of an essay I thought I’d move it here!
Molly asks why are there so few women ‘names’ in the CSS community and as a woman … who happens to have just […]

Bruce Lawson argues that JavaScript pop-up windows are a tool of Satan himself, I think he may have a point, portals to the underworld they could well be …

I stopped using Internet Explorer in favour of Firefox some time ago, not because I hate everything to do with Microsoft - I’m writing this post on machine running Windows XP, and still do a lot of work developing solutions using Microsoft technologies - but because Firefox is a better browser. Internet Explorer always […]

Today The Web Standards Project have launched a survey with the aim of finding out who is using web standards, why they visit the WaSP web site and what would they like to see on the site that would help them when using web standards. From the press release:
In the biggest survey since WaSP’s inception, […]

My membership of The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) was accepted today. I wanted to join GAWDS because it seems like a great idea at a time when many people are confused and concerned about accessibility - particularly in terms of accessibility legislation - and there is an awful lot of spurious advice flying […]

I’ve been submerged in work for the last few days and haven’t been reading my usual blogs, yesterday however I clicked through to catch up on Maggi Dawn’s Blog and immediately spotted her sharp new design using one of the new Blogger templates.
This is old news, but the new Blogger templates - designed by […]

“With these kinds of arguments, the only type of person who’d say no to an accessible Website would be an unethical, money-hating individual. If your client’s one of them, I suggest you run.”

Excellent article on how to sell accessible web site development to your clients on Sitepoint.

In addition to causing me problems buying underwear and wine, my browser is stopping me from wasting my money on the stupid tax. A reader of my blog pointed out that the web site for The National Lottery does not take kindly to people visiting their site using Mozilla Firefox, and while I can visit […]

I wanted to buy wine, I have bought wine before from Virgin Wines and so went to their site and tried to log in, and failed to log in, so I assumed I had forgotten my password and requested that it was emailed to me. This action resulted in them deleting my card details from […]

… or can other Firebird/Mozilla users access the Marks & Spencers site without getting the disallowed message today?

So, this morning I wanted to check whether a certain item was available from Marks & Spencer, so I visited their web site. I’m watching the page load when Bam! I’m redirected to the following friendly message.
“To protect you from certain usability and/or security issues we currently do not support Opera, Mozilla, earlier versions of […]

Craig Saila interviews Dave Shea (of CSS Zen Garden fame) in the latest issue of Digital Web Magazine.
It’s a good read, Dave does fantastic work in pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved with CSS, and I really liked his comments when asked what his advice would be to those launching public sites,
“Develop a […]

Today I watched the Heathrow departures board, from the comfort of my desk, until I saw that the plane my parents were on had started to taxi down the runway. The Small Person and I then watched at the window to see the plane fly overhead - we are directly on the flight path from […]

“Every time you write an inappropriate selector, it makes the Baby Carolyn cry.” … congratulations on your new baby Eric, but with the amount of dodgy CSS out there, you’re going to be getting many sleepless nights

More proof that our country is being run by fools … Derek Wyatt MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey unleashes his brilliant anti-spam plan … postcodes as email addresses … no, it’s not a joke. More on El Reg. Via Radiac.

A List Apart has relaunched with a shiny new design and it’s much easier to get around the content now. The new articles are worth a read too.

Apparantly Office 2003 will contain the ability for users to set emails to self-destruct after a certain amount of time … great. I take it we shall have to return to paper to be able to keep an accurate track of requests backwards and forwards - something I can use email for at present.

The latest version of Dreamweaver is now available for download. If you work extensively with CSS, care about accessibility and web standards then it is well worth the upgrade, I’ve been working with it for some time and there have been real steps forward made in these areas.
My other half Drew, has written an article […]

The Web design postcards site is a nice idea - short, concise snippets of information presented in an easy to read manner. Via Meryl.net.

Strange Banana is an automatic page layout generator that uses CSS and XHTML. Being computer generated some of the layouts are a little odd to say the least but it’s great fun and could give a starting point for a layout - especially if you are new to CSS layouts.

So Netscape is no more. To me as a web developer it probably makes little difference, the Mozilla Project continues, there are lots of good alternatives to Internet Explorer around … but it does seem like the end of an era, and its sad that the work that was going on at DevEdge will stop […]

Drew has just launched a new blog - somewhere he doesn’t just have to write about Dreamweaver.
Visit all in the head

Macromedia launched their site redesign today, make sure you have those speakers turned up nice and loud for the full comedy Casio keyboard effect … (needs Flash, in fact you won’t get far without it)

… and care about “web standards” then you might like to check out this week’s A List Apart, written by my other half, Drew McLellan.

The Reg have been running stories on one of my pet hates the last few days - banks and online services that lock out those using alternative (or anything other than Internet Explorer on Windows) browsers and operating systems.
I’m not surprised that Natwest has been named as the most villainous site in this respect. I […]

I got me one of these and now I have to figure out how to use it! The idea is to use it as a development server here and I have managed to get Solaris 9 installed on it, but it’s going to take a bit of getting used to.

Debian GNU/Linux version 3 was officially released last night. Install it, you know you want to…

Since I still get a load of people finding this site by searching for Dreamweaver related stuff (that’s all now on edgeofmyseat.com folks) here are some more Dreamweaver related blogs that you might like to visit - as I noticed there have been a few new ones springing up in the last week or so.
Dreamweaverfever […]

… posted to a list today was this, and scarily enough I don’t think its a joke.
UK online for business are a government supported organisation and appear to be running workshops on how to create your own, badly designed and developed mess of a web site for only 10 quid. Hmmm…

The Web Standards Project returns with a new look and a load of new content. Yay!
I have been involved with the WaSP on the Dreamweaver Task Force, along with my boyfriend, Drew and am well pleased to see the site live, now I can just send people there instead of writing the same email about […]

Mozilla hits version 1. I’m downloading now.

Macromedia announced the Dreamweaver MX Preview Release this morning.
If you are interested in the CSS support of the new product you might like to read my article Best Practices with CSS in Dreamweaver MX on the Macromedia Designer and developer Center, and a couple of related tutorials on my own site, edgeofmyseat.com.

The Community Managers over at Macromedia have set up blogs to keep everyone up to date with what’s going on with MX - check out Matt Brown and John Dowdell’s coverage.

I’m so jealous. Why does the UK get no decent web conferences? No Fair
The people upstairs here seem to have developed a strange and eclectic taste in music. For several months all I have heard from the people upstairs has been strange singing at 11pm on a Sunday evening, the occasional episode of bad […]

Some good CSS tests for designers caught my eye over at chriscassell.net, nice site too.

Ben Charlton redesigns - in standards compliant XHTML and CSS, which is what we like =)

“.. we need to step back from our endless battle to make it look the same across all platforms. We can’t make our site look the same on a PDA as a 21″ monitor, we can’t make our site ‘the same’ for someone on a speaking browser, and although things are improving there are still […]

Mozilla 0.9.7 has been released. I’m using it now and its lovely and fast. My one niggle with Netscape 6.2 is the fact that it is slow on my system in comparison to IE6 - Mozilla is beating IE6 hands down in terms of speed.. this is good.

… it’s been a good day for good stuff.
Zeldman - Principles and Personalities
The Noodle Incident - … about Validating

The Web Standards Project announce they are taking a break… old news perhaps but it happened to coincide with my going to a UltraDev meet to talk about the future, about standards, XHTML and CSS… about the things that in part I have learned from The Web Standards Project.
6 months ago I built and was […]

The Internet Archive - you will not believe the number of sites indexed by this site. Type in your own domain, or a favourite site.
Fascinating, and cool because they have indexed all sites - not just the big names. Just when you thought that design horror you created three years ago was gone for […]

I’m going to be teaching Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver UltraDev classes at the Eclectic Academy, there are a whole host of interesting classes lined up with some great tutors, and the full curriculum should be going online any time soon, check it out if you fancy learning something new over the winter months as the first […]

Eric Meyer - CSS God - has launched a new section of his site dedicated to CSS experimentation, Css / edge. Some good stuff there already and definately one to watch.
While on the subject of Eric Meyer, you might like to read his article The CSS Anarchist’s Cookbook for fun ways to play with […]

I refined and improved one of my Dreamweaver extensions (Old Style New Style) which has just been approved by Macromedia and is now available on the Macromedia Exchange and also on edgeofmyseat.com.
There really isn’t any other news, apart from the fact that I allowed an insane Frenchwoman to cut my hair today and add […]

.. written by yours truly has now been published on the Women Designers Group website. If you aren’t interested in web development its probably not your thing!
If you fancy checking it out then it is currently here.

I’m testing media-types over at edgeofmyseat.com
If you don’t know what media types can do for you, then check out the tutorial, then go on to visit the media types testing pages, and find out if your browser supports this.
I’m particularly looking for anyone with any kind of unusual browsing device - web TV, PDAs, braille […]

The Web Standards Project replies to the misunderstandings and generally unresearched comments made by some people about the need for Standards in our authoring environment.
My recent project - which will launch any day now - wound up being totally handcoded. Why? Dreamweaver couldn’t cope with the Standards Compliant CSS layout and XHTML. I eventually decided […]

edgeofmyseat.com
This will be the new home of all my web development tutorials, Dreamweaver extensions and web development based articles and also the home of my Web Design and Development services.
I have created redirects from all the pages on this site directly into the correct place on the new site, but if you do link […]

Webmaster Base seems to have a whole range of useful tutorials in all aspects of web development.
The Register informs us that IE6 will be launched on 15 August, I’ve been using the beta for the last few weeks and am really impressed with it, so looking forwrad to downloading the final version.

I only received 4 random documents from the norty worm this evening. In related virus news The Register made me giggle with this line
“We hate to point out that patching systems is what IT staff do, so we don’t quite see the dreadful loss of productivity here. One might as easily say that police […]

I was dragged out of my blogging silence by this.
Methinks Mr. Sparber (a very clever man) has missed the point. If you are reading this you are here in a reasonably Standards Compliant Browser, but you can visit my Web development and Dreamweaver pages in anything you like and you can read the content. […]

Drew has built a neat little Dreamweaver extension which inserts the necessary code to prevent Smart Tags being displayed in your pages. Microsoft have had a bit of a turnaround on this ‘feature’ but I doubt we have heard the last of it…. Smart Tags Fever!

Excellent interview with Dori Smith, a steering committee member of The Webstandards Project.

The PHP and MySQL install was eventually a success so I have something new to play with - hence my silence here!
While battling with MySQL I came across Developer Shed which is fullof interesting and well written articles and tutorials on open source web development topics.

After a brief respite from the RPC errors, they seem to be becoming more frequent again. They either manifest as a message saying ‘The RPC Server is unavailable’ or just a blank page is displayed, on refreshing the page they go away so if you see that - hit refresh.
It’s an error seen on […]

Mo Morgan (dot com) goes tableless on his site’s default (blue dot) skin.
Its Sunday, I’m trying to work and am thoroughly uninspired by the task at hand… ah well, the sooner I do this the sooner it will be finished and I’ll have time for more fun stuff.

The more observant of my readers may have noticed the new ‘non mystery-meat’ navigation on the right. Enjoy your new found freedom to roam this vast expanse of purple, happy in the knowledge that you will always be able to get back again…
If it breaks in your (W3C DOM supporting) browser, you know the drill, […]

Ben Charlton, after a long and valiant battle with CSS has gone tableless. Yay!

Today’s article on A List Apart talks about why your prospective client might have gone for a cheap and tatty option for their site, rather than your well thought out idea. An excellent read for any freelance developer out there pitching for clients.

Glish.com has a funky new entry page. Very cool… if you haven’t found them already check out the css layouts on the site.
Eric Meyer, the author of ‘Cascading Style Sheets, the Definitive Guide’ has some useful links to css info on his site.

I noticed some referers from this site in my server logs this morning. Mmmmmmm … so pretty =)

My Dreamweaver page has been honoured with another link from Zeldman. I’m glad that people have found my Web Standards related extensions useful, if you have any comments, ways they could be improved, ideas for further things in this vein.. I’d love to hear from you.

Wise words from Zeldman on the publicity regarding the dot com meltdown and the supposed death of the web.
I couldn’t agree more. Things are much harder now than they were in the employment market which is scary for us who make our living here, but I am fed up of people who don’t understand the […]

My Add Old Browser Message Dreamweaver extension has received Macromedia approval. There were some small changes to the extension interface so, although the code it inserts is the same and the old version won’t do anything evil to your copy of Dreamweaver, you might want to grab the new copy at the Macromedia Exchange.
The […]

Drew redesigns dreamweaverfever, and has joined us tableless folk with a totally css positioned layout. Marvellous stuff.
If you are using (or thinking about learning) Dreamweaver or Ultradev get thee over there and have a looksee.

… this site has a new stylesheet, which has hopefully stopped the problems experienced by visitors using Netscape 6. I have also changed the image at the top of this page into text in preparation for my latest fiendish plan!
Its perfectly possible that the changes have broken something else, so if you spot any […]

I had a trip down memory lane this evening and hunted out some of my old web design work. One thing that struck me was that some of the things I gave up on, or was talked out of by people I looked up to, were actually better that some of the stuff that went […]

I have got the latest in my series of Dreamweaver extensions relating to Web Standards and inspired by The Web Standards Project, completed.
This one gives Dreamweaver users a quick way to add a message to their pages, viewable only to those with old browsers, which explains why the site looks shonky to them.
It has […]