Category Archives: standards

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

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Microsoft has finally release the final version (1.0) of the infamous Internet Explorer Developer Tooolbar, which works exactly copies the functionality of the Web Developer Toolbar extension for Firefox. After 2 years of development, the first (1.0) version has arrived and is available for every web developer. Microsoft has promised to release a couple of free tools for web developers, and as a matter of a fact, i consider they are doing nice job (even when copying efforts of others) of fulfilling their promise.

Developer Toolbar simplifies a lot of functions for web developers, such as selectively disables some of the Internet Explorer functionalities, validates the content of xHTML and CSS, DOM handling, window resolution resizing, between others. My favorite and most useful functionality for Internet Explorer 6.0 is a ruler – for measuring size and distance of the xHTML elements. Having a lot of bugs, IE6 needs this functionality desperately, especially for the pages, with a lot of content. The other very useful functionality of this toolbar is the object id outlining – when editing CSS it is extremely useful to be able to consult the name of the specific object or objects, without digging into the HTML code.

If you don’t have, then get it as soon as you can, and if you are a beta user, then it is a time to upgrade, since it should bring some of the bug fixes.

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar 1.0 download

A List Apart 2007 Web Design Survey

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I took 2007 Web Design Survey

Spend 10 minutes of your precious time and take a web design survey at the “A List Apart” page, which is just 37 questions, and the most of them are multiple choice. After that, we will hopefully get to see, what kind of people are working all around the web. This might give a slightly idea, about the professionals working on and perfecting the same goal.

There are currently several prizes, all to be won by random participants: a ticket to “An Event Apart”, an IPod or a funky “A List Apart” T-shirt, for example. Thus survey will remain open until 22 May, 2007, so do not waste any time, participate and invite people you know.

Visual Studio 2007 beta

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Microsoft has officialy released a new beta of Visual Studio 2007 (codename Orcas) as a part of the Community Technology Preview (CTP). In the past years, Microsoft has finally started more open process with the community on their development tools like Visual Studio. Being a regular Microsoft development tools user since Visual Studio 97, i am really excited to try out this new version, which includes .NET version 3.5, as well as much improved data management (with each version of Visual Studio, Microsoft improves this area greatly, in my opinion. Visual Studio 2005 made some very good steps with a better data-presentation separation). Another important change is ASP.NET Ajax integration, and if someone managed to miss all the Ajax buzz, then this is your chance to check it out. Every web developer, working on Windows, should check out the new Visual Studio 2007 beta at least to see if there are any improvements for better web standards handling, as well some very important fixes(there are billions of developers all around the world, crying for finally fixing the visual developer part).

Interesting is that beta1 of Visual Studio is not “feature complete”, which means that there are still some features, not integrated into this version, which is unusual, since normally “alpha” is a version with not all features available, while “beta” is a feature complete version with some functionalities having problems. Anyway, it does not really matter how they name this version, but Microsoft has hinted, that the second beta of Visual Studio, this time with all features available, will appear on MSDN until the end of this year.

If you do not have MSDN access, then you can just experiment with an Express Edition of the Visual Studio 2007, which is freely available for everyone.

I am still busy with a lot of web projects to find time to test it, as well as with PHP for Delphi, but as soon as i can, i am going to publish some kind of a review on both of the tools.

Portuguese Government blog

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Portuguese Government has their official blog now. It is called “A Nossa Opinhão” (in transl. our opinion), which is quite a serious name for a blog. =O) No politic opinions will be ever published on my blog, so do please not make any interpretation about my personal opinion. The fact, that the Portuguese government has finally started reaching out to the internet, is a very important pass into the future.

Just like the vast majority of the bloggers at the moment, the Portuguese government blog is based on WordPress, but their blog implementation is quite an interesting subject for an investigation – first of all is the question, which version of WordPress is it running, is it the infamous 2.11 with all the bugs and back doors inside ? Secondly, Andreas Viklund should not be very happy about his theme been used for the portuguese government blog, but no credits were left on their page, the only thing that points out to him is the commentary, which was probably forgotten at the footer of the blog’s page.Well, i think that he should know about this fact right at this moment, as i have left a commentary on his page =O) Third is the accesibility of the page is quite frankly forgotten – it is quite clear, that the text is being inserted into the blog, directly from the Word – by copy and paste, otherwise such nasty things like this:

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 18pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 200%"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 200%; font-family: Verdana">

or having code like that:

<o:p></o:p>

A very interesting aspect is a design of the site, as right now it has no archives and has no menu what so ever, but with the time it should have them, or at least i hope, that the site “designer” will include them on the main page. The title of the blog is all caps “A NOSSA OPINHÃO”, which stays for screaming, but may be it is the idea of this blog… to scream at the readers, which are uncapable to comment on any of the subjects. This is a good idea, since there would be way too many comments not on the subject from all the scam of the net and from the opposite parties as well =O)

Anyway i just want to congratulate António Costa, the portuguese minister of internal affairs, with a creation of a this blog, with advancing and pushing the others into the digital age, as it is extremely important. Good luck with the exploring and facing the reaction of the net. =O)

The WaSP Street Team

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The WaSP has announced that at their annual meeting a few days ago at SXSW, they have decided to create a WaSP Street Team. The aim of the new team is to give ways to get involved with web standards evangelism in the local areas and in the places of work and online.

The information that is published is very few at the moment, basically what the Web Standards Project is doing is encouraging the people to put their names and addresses on the list, which will distribute the information, in some near future. The most important message is that the WaSP Street Teams will help the promotion of web standards in local communities.

I am quite excited about this, and this is a measure i believe that that was needed for quite a long time. Making big topic of the standards will make people talk of them, making a group will help to spread it out. I have to confess, that besides some portuguese names and portuguese sites on the net, that i find, there are just 2 people in real life, that i know capable of maintaining the conversation on the topic of XHTML/CSS standards. It is a very sad statistic, since i know quite a lot developers working in a lot of big portuguese companies. Only by the local teams it will be possible to reach some of the minds, which are still living in a long and forgotten 90s.

I hope there are some Portuguese interested in this project, so there will be a positive result (wider standards adoption) out of this idea.

Joining W3C HTML working group

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As Ian Hickson has suggested, i will try to join W3C HTML working group, though i do not consider myself a big expert in this area, i have certainly read a couple of W3C’s documents and as a software developer and a project manager, i have had a lot of things to do with specifications based on the W3C standards. The most important thing about working in such group should be a common sense and being more or less reasonable which i hope to be. =O) HTML and xHTML represent a very big interest for me, all web design is based on them and there are so many elements and functionalities that all web developers are missing.

I have already completed the first step by signing to the W3C’s page requesting an access to the reserved area, so theoretically in the next couple of days i should receive some response from them, and hopefully they will allow me to proceed and to join the HTML group.

HTML 5 and xHTML 5

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W3C new working group is starting recruiting members for a new HTML working group, which will dedicate itself to the development of HTML5 and xHTML 5. Last october, W3C’s director Tim Berners-Lee has announced that a new group will be created which will work in the direction of a new HTML development. The new HTML is going to publish their results somewhere in 2010 which means that in 3 years, we will have something new to talk about. It is quite fast remembering other W3C specifications and standards which takes much more then 3 or 5 years, a good one is a CSS 3, which is still under development for a couple of year already.

Chris Wilson (Internet Explorer 7) and Dan Connolly (W3C) are the main leaders, which should publish new draft HTML and xHTML specifications already this July (2007). I believe that the large part of their work will be based on the WHAT-WG group, simply because there is no time for reinventing the wheel, and the first draft should be published in about 3 monthes. I hope that this group will include the parts from all major browser developers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari, because we need a stable progress from all browser developers to advance to the new specifications in the future. Mozilla Firefox has “conquered” something between 10 and 20% of the market, depending on the country and statistics, so excluding them will make no sense, as well as Safari, which is almost completely controls growing Apple’s market.

Interesting is that the old group working for xHTML 2 for already 5 years, will continue their work independently. Here i do not agree with W3C ideas, since forming a new group dissolves an elder one, otherwise we are risking to have 2 standards reigning and fighting against each other, and even the fact, that the main Internet Explorer man Chris Wilson is participating in a new HTML5 group does not change the fact, that so many decision are taken in upper echelons by people who has no knowledge about technology.

My voice and support goes to the new HTML 5 and xHTML 5 group, i am not a big fan of xHTML 2, since it breaks a lot of compatibility and introduces not so much of the elder xHTML things and being quite an old trouble maker. I feel that a lot of the new stuff from the HTML5 specification proposed by WHAT-WG, is desperately needed by the webdesigners. As for xHTML 5 – it can and should take the best ideas out of the xHTML 2 and implement them together with new changes of the HTML 5.

In the battle of HTML 5 vs xHTML 2 the first round is certainly for the HTML 5 and that is fine in my opinion, since the web desperately needs to move on from the state and standards of the last century.