Not only do I get a lot of email every day, I have a lot of email going back many years. I have an IMAP folder for each client of edgeofmyseat.com and some of those folders have now got so big the only mail client that seems able to cope with them is KMail on KDE, Mail.app on OS X gave up some time ago. This is a problem as I need to be able to get into that mail, but I don’t want to download it all from IMAP as I like to be able to get at it from numerous locations.

My other problem with archiving my mail is that I have a curious memory for where things are. My email structure is a bit like my bookcase. If I’m writing something and need a quote from a book I will know exactly where on the bookcase the book is, and where in the book the line of text I need is. This works just fine until someone moves a book and I start to wonder if I’m going insane! Email is the same. If a client phones up and asks me about some project that happened 2 years ago, I know where in my folder structure and how many messages into the mailbox that email will be … I can see it. I’m afraid that moving the messages could throw my peculiar mental systems into disarray.

However I need to do something about the situation, as it has got to the point where I can’t open some of these mailboxes. Knowing the location of individual messages within them isn’t helpful if I can’t view the things. Also I would like to be able to give Drew access to the back history of edgeofmyseat.com clients prior to his joining the company last year, and much of that is tied up in my mail.

I can’t be the only person who has found themselves with this problem, so I ask the lazyweb - what should I do with all this email? My requirements are:

• To be able to create an archive of the email in a format that still resembles the email structure so I can find things as I do now
• The archive needs to be stored centrally on a server so I can get to it wherever I happen to be working
• I would like Drew to be able to read and search this archive without needing to download it all
• I don’t want a single platform solution, I work on a Mac at home and Linux in the office

“When WaSP was at its most effective, we all knew who the “bad guy” was. We had a common mission, our goals were easily articulated and everyone involved was passionate about them. When you can say “X is bad Y is good” it’s pretty
easy […] Things are not so black and white now, and not only are we trying to cover a vast landscape of different issues - and a huge range of abilities and understandings within the designer/developer community, but we don’t all agree on what the big problems are. Ask a group of WaSP members what they think about HTML5 (for example) and you’ll get totally opposing opinions. WaSP members have never spoken for WaSP - we speak for ourselves as members of WaSP - but in the past you could have been sure that 95% of the group were behind you. That isn’t the case now.”

When Drew McLellan and I were asked to join WaSP we did so to form the Dreamweaver Task Force. We had already both been vocal about our support for web standards within the Dreamweaver community, and were part of the group of developers that Macromedia invited onto their Beta programs. With WaSP backing we went through the Beta of Dreamweaver pointing out the things that didn’t validate and logging them as bugs. To their credit Macromedia were receptive and fixed a lot of those problems and continued improving Dreamweaver to the point where it could produce standards compliant code “out of the box”.

However, it was pretty easy back then. The great work WaSP had already done meant that companies were starting to get it, were starting to realise that this was ultimately going to be important for their bottom line and there was plenty of low hanging fruit. We were just going down a list of things that were obviously incorrect and asking for them to be fixed - no argument there, there wasn’t another point of view - the only issue was whether there was a feasible way to fix something in that version of the product. The relationship between WaSP members and Macromedia was open and understood by both parties - they never attempted to use our involvement as an endorsement of their product and we honoured their NDA during Beta and in what we discussed once the new product was launched.

For Zeldman (a person I greatly respect and who invited Drew and myself onto WaSP all those years ago) to call out Drew and compare the current issue to the work that we did with Dreamweaver under his leadership, is unfair. Although the work we did for Macromedia was under NDA, other people in WaSP were also asked to be under NDA and we had a member of the main steering group (Dori Smith) working with us. So if we started to do anything contrary to the spirit of WaSP we had a more senior member there to pull us up about it. When we posted any announcement about the product we would get approval of the content first. No-one told us we had to do that, it just seemed like the right thing to do if something was to be put out as an announcement on the WaSP website.

In contrast the announcement made on ALA was done without even passing the eyes of the steering committee meaning that WaSP members who didn’t agree could only post to their own blogs to disclaim responsibility. It is not the case (as far as I know) that people refused to sign NDAs. What reason would anyone have for doing that? Most of us sign numerous NDAs in a year in the course of business. No-one is “running away from a broken window shouting ‘I didn’t do it’”, we just don’t want people who are now feeling very let down by WaSP for seeming to endorse this proposal thinking that WaSP as a whole think its a great idea.

Personally I think WaSP have been played by Microsoft. I don’t know whether the non-invitation by Microsoft to co-leads was a deliberate thing, it has certainly worked in Microsoft’s favour. It doesn’t wash with me that the pending announcement could not have been shared with more WaSP members in the few days prior to it being made. A List Apart had it in their hands at that point, why not WaSP? I feel that ALA could have presented the issue in a more even-handed way, perhaps also posting an article from someone who disagreed with the proposal and could argue their case in a coherent way. I believe that approach would have engendered more useful discussion.

So what happens now? Today there are many issues that WaSP could and should be involved in. However I don’t believe it will ever be the grand campaigning movement of times past because times have changed. The ideas pushed by WaSP in the early days have become part of the mainstream view. That isn’t to say that every web developer is committed to or cares about “web standards”, but in terms of authoring tools, platforms and browsers there is generally a goal to attain standards support - along with lots of excuses why we didn’t quite make it! WaSP members are still doing great work with Adobe, within education and in other areas, however we seem to have lost that cohesive drive to get visible things done, which leads to apathy, and I’m as much at fault there as anyone.

So, a question. If there was one thing you would want to see WaSP tackling, what is it and why? Is it simply more education within the developer community? A particular issue within browsers or authoring tools? If WaSP members are supposed to represent the web standards community in some way (and I’ve always felt that to be my remit - I’m just a web developer, no ivory towers here) then I’d like to know what the community feels are the hot topics right now. Perhaps we can find consensus from the wider web standards movement, and use all the passion generated in the last few days to really get things moving again.

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 you can place a meta element into the head of your document that tells Internet Explorer to render that page as IE7. When IE8 comes out, your page will still render as it did in IE7 regardless of whether rendering bugs have been fixed or support has been added for things in IE8, the page will still display as in the earlier browser.

So what is wrong with this picture? I believe that it will encourage the practice of developing for specific browsers. A practice we have tried to discourage since the days we all had to build two versions of our sites, one for Netscape and one for IE. It will also mean that the large number of developers who code solely for Internet Explorer and who, in the last couple of years, have been forced to update their methods due to IE7 having better standards support can now code purely for a specific version of IE, thus leaving large chunks of the web frozen in time - not taking advantage of improvements that would benefit all of their users.

However it gets worse. This feature isn’t simply lurking in Internet Explorer, ready to be invoked by people who think it is a good idea. By default, if you do not add any meta tag to your document, or send it as a header from the server, then your website will display as IE7 … forever. As Jeremy Keith explains so well, this means that if you have used a CSS feature currently unsupported in IE7, when IE8 comes out - despite it supporting that feature - it won’t render your page with it as it will be rendering as IE7. I know this sounds bizarre, but IE8 will only render your pages as IE8 if you tell it to. There is the ability to set IE=edge so you get the terrifying unknown thing that is the latest version of the browser, but how many people will know or care enough to do this?

I feel this is a huge step back, and if it does happen, the full implications won’t be seen until a few years down the line when we are dealing with JavaScript libraries and widgets hugely bloated in size due to the need to maintain support for legacy browser versions because current browser versions still render as them despite the actual browser having very little usage. When we are seeing sites strangely frozen in time along with development teams with skills similarly stagnated. Once of the good things about Microsoft beginning browser development once again with IE7 was that it meant people did have to update their skills to support the latest Microsoft browser.

New versions of browsers should behave, by default, as the version that they are. If there is to be any rendering engine switch, and I believe it to be a bad thing entirely, it should involve opting out of the default standards compliant mode. I also believe that any ’solution’ like this, should be a solution developed by all major browser vendors, along with the W3C. This all feels like the browser wars all over again, and I don’t want to go back there!

Finally, I believe this is a solution to a problem that was actually becoming less of a problem since IE7. It is a problem that is going away. The “broken sites” caused by the release of IE7 seem to have been, in the main, fairly small differences in rendering and those of us who developed to web standards found we had very few changes to make, if any. The move to Web Standards is the solution to the problem of new browsers “breaking” sites, and just as it starts to look as if there could be a light at the end of the tunnel Microsoft appear to want to call a feature freeze on the web.

Since finishing Project 365 however I’ve found myself hardly taking any photos. Doing a bit of self-analysis, one reason is that with Project 365 I had to take a photo, it didn’t have to be a good photo, I just had to take one. I could upload it to Flickr and if it was rubbish I had the excuse of Project 365 - any photo better than none! Over the course of the year I did become better at photography, and also in looking at photos and being aware of what a “good photograph” was. A year ago if a photo was in focus and vaguely the correct exposure I was pleased with it, now I delete photos that are easily as good as some of those early ones.

So I need a new project, something that makes me take photos and gives me an excuse to not worry about dodgy ones. Perhaps to learn about some specific area of photography, with the weather in the UK recently it had probably better be an indoor project, or one that involves dirty great clouds and drizzly rain! One of the nice things about Project 365 was the Flickr community surrounding it and everyone commenting on each others photos, so something that has a bunch of people doing it would be great - any suggestions?

One of the things we were asked on the day and have been asked while advertising this course is whether we will do an “advanced CSS” course. The problem I see with “advanced CSS” whether that be a book or a course is that getting good at CSS just takes practice. The concepts we teach in Beginners CSS and that I have written about in my books are the building blocks that are needed to work with CSS - everything else is just combinations of those same techniques - and a lot of practice!

However, given that I’ve not built a layout using tables since 2001, I’m probably not the best person to decide that there is no need for more advanced courses so I’m asking the question of you. Particularly if you would consider yourself an intermediate standard CSS developer. What would you want to see in an “advanced” CSS course - or book for that matter?

With Drew joining me in the company one of the things we are going to be able to offer is CSS training. I’ve had frequent requests to offer training but haven’t been able to offer it as a service until now due to all the other commitments that we have as a company. However we have now designed a beginners CSS training course, and will be offering this as an Open Course. The next presentation of this course will be on 29th October, 2007 - all the information can be found on the edgeofmyseat.com website. I really enjoy helping people to learn web development skills and so am very much looking forward to being able to do that in training courses as well as in my books.

Technorati Tags: CSS training, edgeofmyseat.com, Rachel Andrew, Drew McLellan

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 to those using older browsers or alternate devices.

This book is published in full colour making the examples far easier to follow, having received my author copies I’m really impressed with how it looks and the difference that colour makes to a book like this.

It was, as always, good fun working with Sitepoint on the book and I hope that the end result is useful to people trying to learn or improve their CSS skills.

When I do run I look like a twit. I managed to avoid most sport at school and concentrated on dance, yet I become bizarrely uncoordinated when running, as if I’ve suddenly been blessed with additional arms and legs to keep in check.

Given the above two pieces of information, it may surprise you to know that I’ve signed up to do a 10K run on October 14th. However the cause is The Prince’s Trust, and I may never have started edgeofmyseat.com had it not been for the Trust’s support, so I think I owe it to them to get out of my chair and round the course, trying to raise some funds - and maybe get a bit fitter in the process.

I ran 4K during a fight with a treadmill in the gym today and am still alive but I have some way to go if I’m actually going to run the full 10K in October. Advice from the athletically-inclined appreciated - or go to JustGiving to sponsor me.

There were many more highlights than lowlights for me during the two days. I felt that the quality of speakers was excellent and it was well pitched for the mixed crowd. It felt less crowded and busy than last year, one didn’t have to queue for ages to get food or coffee, and there were plenty of places to have a quiet chat with people between sessions. The biggest downside was the lack of wi-fi. I’m not going to have a big rant about it here but we are connected people, more so every year, the things we use and need are online. I can completely understand the issues surrounding providing internet access for so many people, however I can’t believe that in 2007 this isn’t a solved or solvable problem.
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