Professional Web Developer, Apprentice Photographer
Some of the most powerful CSS2 and CSS3 selectors defined in the specs are avoided by web developers because they’re not supported by commonly used web browsers. Sometimes in order to work around these shortfalls solutions with large overhead such as javascript libraries are used or code becomes littered with many specialized classes and sites become difficult to maintain.
Over time I’ve developed the habit of using specifically named class attributes to represent exactly where a pseudo-class would have applied. To aid in clarity and maintenance these classes are named with the same text as the name of the pseudo-class being represented.
So here I am a couple weeks after the IE team announced through a variety of different channels their proposal to help cushion the blow of their next browser release through the use of a META declaration and HTTP header, “X-UA-Compatible” describing what browser(s) the page and its associated styles and javascript files target.
I’ve got plenty of thoughts on why vendor extensions and related adjustments to behavior are bad. I also have some concerns over this one in particular. Extensions, and more general workarounds and hacks of all kinds [vendor driven or not] get buried into code, reused, copy and pasted, dropped in application templates, removed by accident, and generally used by people who don’t know why they’re doing it, but instead just because it works. As anything other then a very temporary, one time use solution this doesn’t seem to me to solve any problems that are inherent with either web standards or an ecosystem where content publishers are open to who they let see their content. But let me not get too far off onto that tangent and consider first that the proposed solution goes through.
For the moment I want to focus on the practical — what does the additional rendering mode and the ability to switch to it via META declaration mean to me as a working web developer?
I didn’t want to let today go by without a post acknowledging the 2nd birthday of Microformats.org and the related community.
Thought the first year was huge for microformats, the second one has seen additional growth in all areas from format maturity, to huge growth in the community and sites using various markup constructs, to greater support from application vendors.
Here’s a recap of a few recent news items or tidbits incase you missed them.
I’ve just updated my microformat plugin for the textpattern CMS and blogging tool. This update is a maintenance fix to add support for Textpattern v1.0.4 and some changes made in the way tag helpers are built. Users of older versions of TXP should stick with the 1.0 version of the plugin.
Hey look, I did it!
After roughly six months of sitting on a design I was happy with I’ve found both the time and ambition to finish building an update to Place Name Here. Not quite sure what version of the site this is, but 6 seemed like a good number when I started.
Like with all previous versions of the site the new layout is fairly simple, and doesn’t use a lot of images or tricks to play things up. This site always proves to be difficult to rebuild in a uniform way because of the patchwork of different side projects, and technical demos that have been posted since the site first launched in late 1998. The new design and slightly rearranged navigation will hopefully help give a better perspective of what is hiding on the site.