Whomwah.com

Now I must admit, I’d always been in the I’ll-use-Opera-like-I-use-IE ….. *ahem* Never! camp due to it’s own bunch of strange behaviours. But I’ve been playing with the Opera 9.0b2 release and you know what, it’s really very nice.

The bits I like. Oh and I’m using the Mac version__I assume the PC version is the same__. The most obvious plus for me was the speed of the thing. I find it renders pages much faster than Firefox__my current browser__ and in the relms of Safari, Omniweb or Camino. They’ve also kept the whole UI compact and un-obtrusive. Opera customisation has always been good but now it’s an art form. You appear to be able to change anything and everything. Other nice features are Session saver, Fast-forward, User styles, CSS3 support, blimey so much I like.

They also seem to have packed many different apps in. Quite a feat. Extras include Email Client, IRC, Bit Torrent, Small screen mode, Widgets the list goes on. I’ll be honest I don’t think I’ll use many of these extras__why would you not use Mail? and I have widgets__but the fact you have them available is a bonus.

But …. and there seems always to be a but with Opera, the bloody thing still doesn’t work on sites I view frequently. My first example is flickr. I visit this site a lot as it’s where I store my photos and the first thing I got was ‘your browser is not supported’ looks like the user_agent problems, I think they have set the user agent back to ‘Opera’ in this one. Anyway. Next, after I have forced my way in I try and organise some photos and the brower either hangs or does does nothing, oh and the DHTML menus don’t work.

I realise these are likely not Opera problems but not a great start. I don’t know how Opera fix this, after all they are well known for their Standards Support and it’s one of the rare few that passes the Acid2 test. I know this browser is good, no infact I know this browser is great, but if the big sites break it then where’s the confidence. I wonder if they can make it more flexible in certain situations maybe a toggle should/will work. Hmm, I guess that goes against the grain. You see I really want to use this browser, but viewing the sites I like is far more inportant.

So, in summary I think this browser’s fantastic but I won’t be using it just yet, lets hope some of the problems are addressed in the final release.

I’m just really giving another heads up for this article about creating the definitive multi column layout. I had read it a while back but went through it again yesterday. Really good stuff and nice detailed explanations through-out. If you build websites for a living then this should be read.

The IE blog has just in the last couple of days posted information titled ‘Standards and CSS in IE‘. Before actually reading it, the title got me excited. There was a word here you don’t often hear associated with IE, Standards. Even as I read through the article things looked good,

In IE7, we will fix as many of the worst bugs that web developers hit as we can

The thing is, as you get to the bottom you begin to realise that ‘bug fixing’ is not addressing the things that me as a web developer want them to fix ‘STANDARDS SUPPORT‘. They seem to be once again saying ‘we think the standards are wrong and we’re gonna do it our way‘. This is not helping! How are we ever going to be able to build websites that we know will just work because they comply to standards when the major player in the web market decides themselves whether a standard is good or bad, important or not important. Now I imagine the backward compatibility and making sure the corporate community is happy has a lot to do with these decisions so I don’t expect them to change soon.

I don’t know what to think about the new IE at the moment. I know one thing though from my point of view; I don’t really care if you have tabbed browsing and support for RSS feeds in your new browser, if it can’t render a regular page correctly I won’t be using it.

Got back from @Media 2005 today. This was a 2 day conference held in a College near Waterloo, London. There were presentations from Jeffery Zeldman, Douglas Bowman, Andy Budd, Molly E. Holzschlag and Jeremy Keith. There were more, of which you can find via the link above.

The first day was not as good as the second; A lot of speaker back slapping and product placement. I couldn’t believe Douglas Bowman spoke about Wired.com. I know it was a very important site when it came out, but it came out 3 years ago and he must have done much cooler and advanced sites since. He made up for it on the second day with his walk through the design and development of Blogger site. Everyone who spoke have their presentations available online which I will link to once I find the URL.

Final point. This conference had all the big names in CSS and Web Standards, and was full of internet geeks and nerds. But the venue had NO internet connection !!

This article suggests best practises for seperating text in the <title> tag. It is based on the speech that comes from JAWS. It is reallu useful and I have to say I will be changing my habits. I used to use « a lot as I thought it looked nice but it seems that when JAWS sees this it explains it in a long winded way which can not be fin for the user.

The article finally comes to the conclusion that the best seperators to use are the vertical bar (|), the dot (.) and the dash (-).

Read the article here

Tim Berners-Lee has been appointed a professor at Southampton University, England. He’ll become chair of computer science at the university’s School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Southampton University in England, the first university to award him an honorary degree (in 1996) is going to be the new base for Sir Tim Berners-Lee, “Father of the World Wide Web.”

Although born in London, Sir Tim will now become chair of computer science at the university’s School of Electronics and Computer Science.

He will remain director of W3C, and will use his new position as the springboard for further development of the Semantic Web, his vision for the next-generation Internet.

“Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee” – what next, a peerage? (Lord Berner-Lee has a ring to it, wouldn’t you say?)

The ISO standards body will take the unprecedented step of withdrawing the JPEG image format as a formal standard if Forgent Networks, a small Texan company, continues to demand royalties on a seventeen-year old patent.Read the full story here.