Matthew Knott

Web standards is a passion of mine. They are the guidelines set down for a document type, and should be followed. Being a devout standards follower can bring you kudos and appreciation, but your efforts may be let down by the web browser used to view the site.

Poor support for web standards in Internet Explorer mainly, and older versions of Safari, amongst others, means that your site may loose much of it's shape and pizzaz.

Until now, the challenge of the web designer has been to tailor their styles and code to be cross-browser compatible. Ultimately, you may have to reign back some of your design and functionality, sacrificing the overall product, but what if the situation was turned upside down.

Imagine if some of the biggest websites started blocking browsers that would not display their site correctly? It's not unheard of for a site to carry a disclaimer that it will only work properly in Internet Explorer, but you just do not see complete blocking at browser level, and because of this, there is no incentive for Microsoft to release patches for their slightly older browsers (which still dominate the browser demographic).

This type of motion would have to be started by a major site, one that could sway enough opinion and also encourage more users to upgrade, faster than if the smaller sites embarked on such a mission.

Legally, the site ultimately has impunity from prosecution on the grounds of discrimination because the browsers are not technically capable of displaying the content correctly and consitently, and therefore can be blcoked from viewing the content.

Morally, there is always going to be the desire to be open to all, but I think a day will come when major sites will force a browser upgrade before granting access.

Technically, there is a level of satisfaction derived from creating a site that renders near identically on multiple browsers, but the time it takes to achieve this compatibility, and time is money.

Tags: Standards Safari Web_Standards Browser Internet Explorer Leverage Web Giant Accessibility Blocking Discrimination

I've been looking around for a rich text editor that works with the iPhone / iPod Touch Safari browser. I sometimes make posts when I'm out and about and manually creating html tags is a real bind, so my options, at a high level are:

• Use a rich text editor
• Add buttons to insert common tags
• Dynamically add paragraph tags based on carriage returns

The problem with the iPhone is that the keyboard is only displayed when the cursor is inside a textarea, which rules out rich text editing, beside the fact that you can't currently highligh a block of text.

The next reasonable option would invove a textarea and using javascript to insert html tags at the cursor point. The only problem with this approach is that although it works it removes focus from the textarea and the keyboard disapears. This is an inconvenience but is the best available option available currently.

Dynamically adding paragraph tags is a time saver, as you just need to focus on typing. The problem occurs when you don't want to automatically add paragraph tags, say around a block of code.

A solution we haven't discussed, which would be ideal, is a custom key / keyboard feature. If you could have a keyboard set aside for custom, complex phrases, that were user programmable, then you could add your html syntax this was. Alternatively, a html key, which when held down, lists 5 / 6 common html tags.

Hopefully, within the next year or so this issue will be addressed for Safari, otherwise, native os html editors will need to be used and the content pasted into the web page, which is far from ideal.

Tags: Javascript Safari iPhone Apple HTML Rich Text Editor Webkit

Just a quick note before bed. Over the coming weeks I'm going to be running a detailed report on CSS3 properties supported in Mobile Safari, as part of my iPhone dev work. I will screenshot each effect and compile a guide here.

Additionally, I'm working on a charting kit using canvas for advanced statistical reporting, including rate of change etc.

Tags: Safari css Mobile Mobile_Safari Canvas CSS3 HTML5 Charting Graphing

This article really encapsulates a lot of the things that frustrate me about Microsoft's "I know best" attitude to it's web browsers. The purpose of the W3C Standards is to facilitate a common experience across all-platforms and browsers.

This site is something of an ongoing project for me, I've tackled advanced apache configuration through my work with mod_rewrite, cloud trees, which were mild challenges, but nothing compares to the sheer hair-pulling that comes from trying to get your site looking good cross-browser. This site, for example, great in Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, and Opera, yet I have margin issues in Internet Explorer 6.

This is frustrating as a developer because it means valuable time is wasted trying to flush out happy mediums, often forcing compromises on excellent designs.

IE 7 represented a step forwards in terms of compatibility, but there is still a long way to go before developers can rest assured that their site will look the same in each and every major browser.

My particular problem related to the infamous margin-doubling bug in IE6 when working with floated elements. This is documented in numerous websites, and the recomended fix is to use display: inline.

This resolves the issue, although totally against W3C guidelines. Plus, if you're using an element that requires the display property to be set to block, you have even more tinkering to do that will probably force you to deviate further from the set standards.

After some experimentation, I found that the display: inline-block existed, fixed the bug, and retained the properties of a block element insofar as the padding etc was still correct.

Tags: Standards Browsers Microsoft Design Safari Firefox Opera IE Internet_explorer css inline-block inline display property