Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

After working with some HTML5 web forms attributes on a small project I have come to the conclusion that for now it is best to…

Use <input required="required"> not <input required>

Some backstory — A few weeks back I was working on a small non-public web site heavy on forms and thought it would be a good fit as an HTML5 test case. For a variety of technical reasons [input formatting in particular] I didn’t go whole hog into it using all the various input type attributes, but did use the required attribute as a hook for JavaScript based form validation and styling. What I found was that generally there was adequate support for styling and selecting based on this new, and unknown to many browsers, required attribute — Yay! we can use this stuff today! However, there were a few browser CSS selector and jQuery 1.3.2 quirks that lead me to the conclusion that it is safest to use the expanded form of the required attribute and not the minimized or shorter form as HTML5 allows. This gives you the most solid and flexible options when choosing selectors in CSS or jQuery code.

Today, November 30, is the 3rd annual Blue Beanie Day — a celebration and visible show of support for Web Standards & semantic, accessible markup. Web designers, developers, and users around the world are sporting blue beanies on their avatars to show their support for doing things right.

On Friday Nov. 20th, ending a wall to wall week of conferences and general geeking out about web technologies I had the pleasure of both attending and speaking at Standards-Next at the Time-Life building in Manhattan. Industry big shots Håkon Wium Lie [inventor of CSS! OMG!], Molly Holzschlag, Andy Budd and Pete LePage of Microsoft [sans flak jacket] guided an enthusiastic audience through the tools we’ll be using to build web sites over the next few years.

With some recent projects — like the redesign of Hike New Jersey and a little Flickr View Larger tool — I’ve had the opportunity to try a few bleeding edge techniques as a means of enhancing the look of a site while keeping code and maintenance down. In his recent book Handcrafted CSS, Dan Cederholm calls this ‘progressive enrichment’ — or providing a little extra spice in the visuals for the few browsers that can follow along, while functionality, page structure, and general styling rules remain at some stated baseline across browsers. While working with these new properties like box-shadow and rgba colors I hit a few quirks that I thought I’d share.

The good folks at Carsonified have posted audio and slides of the FOWD London 2009 speakers including Molly E. Holzschlag giving an overview of the status of web standards, Simon Sankarayya on designing interfaces, both online and physical, and Robin Christopherson giving a JAWS demo and discussing design and accessibility in a Web 2.0 world.

A few weeks ago The Web Standards Project and WaSP Edu Task Force launched a new venture to help create a curriculum outline, guidelines and course samples for those teaching a variety of web related disciplines [it takes more then just good HTML coders to create a good web site]. While I may have had my hands in the code for the site, the real heavy lifting of designing the site and creating the foundation and content for the curriculum project was done by others.

This week saw the end of winter mixing with the first day of spring — in the northeast that meant snowflakes on the few flowers that have started poking out. There’s also been a flurry of activity on the net from site launches to reports from the SXSWi and MIX09 conferences and some other good stuff I thought needed to be called out.

Instead of writing about these things this week I let them fly into the twitter, IM, or news reader ether likely not to be mentioned by me again. Maybe I’ll make this recap a semi-regular features on this site as I expect to be quite busy over the next couple of months.

So its a bit of a slow work day with a few clients off for MLK day here in the states and I’ve found myself doing some pruning of the feeds I keep track of. While looking at the sites and who hasn’t update in months I’m realizing I’ve been reading a declining number of articles and tutorials on web development and web standards topics from people working on the front lines or the bleeding edge.

The big sites — Ajaxian, A List Apart, ReadWriteWeb, etc. — are prolific as they ever have been, but I’m missing the more personal insights that once filled my reader to the brim.

Not All Quiet

I do have to say its not all doom and gloom. Some of the old standbys that everyone knows pop up with a great post here and there and there are others who are still going strong. Among those I see regular interesting updates from I’d have to suggest Anne van Kesteren on the bleeding edge of the web standards world, Christopher Fahey who has picked it back up at graphpaper.com on the design & UX side, and coworkers Brian and Ben help keep me up on PHP.

Your Suggestions, Please

So what are your favorite blogs to read for keeping your skills sharp? Who is writing about experimenting with CSS, HTML, Canvas, etc? Where are you learning about the ins and outs of JavaScript techniques? Who is breaking down accessibility for the every day developer?

Even if its you and you’d like to do a bit of self promotion, please post a link in the comments.

Drew McLellan has for the 4th year running wrangled a bunch of great authors and launched the Web Development Advent Calendar 24ways.

It isn’t December yet [in this time zone anyways] but the first day’s article has been posted for your enjoyment — Easing The Path from Design to Development. This is a nice piece on interaction between different sides of the site building process, something I’m intimately familiar with. A few pointers from my experience that are worth adding to Drew’s comments…

Its another blue beanie day to show your support for web standards. Find out more from the original blue beanie wearer and Designing With Web Standards author Jeffrey Zeldman.

Sometime in the last couple weeks I started noticing that my browser would hang while loading some Flash content, and since I’ve been too busy to diagnose the error¹ or even just to reinstall the Flash player I’ve been surfing with Flash disabled via the built in Flash block feature in Camino.

A funny thing happened between noticing sites loading faster and lots of ads missing — prompted by the sight of the Razorfish redesign I noticed how many web development agencies had sites that were just big empty flash movies and thus all looked the same. Nothing but a big empty browser window, with a big “F” or play button, and sometimes a background color other then black.

Clockwise from top left: Razorfish, R/GA, Schematic, WDDG, Organic, The Chopping Block, EVB, Big Spaceship — all looking nearly identical.

Creating a site for yourself has always been a refreshing outlet for web builders. Without rooms of stakeholders, you alone have the control over which technologies to use, what features to include and what browsers to support. Part of that control is deciding how you are going to deal with browser bugs and often having the freedom to take the ‘high road’ and leave defects be so that they can be used for bug reporting, test cases, and to help prod browser vendors into maybe making those bugs a higher priority.

While I have no desire to work around them for my personal site, I think its worth it to point out and work to get these bugs fixed at the source, including the following 2 CSS bugs with visible on the new Place Name Here that I decided to let be — one in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 and the other in Google Chrome.

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?

Through ALA and the IEBlog comes a proposal for a new mechanic of handling the backwards compatibility of web sites — pushing the familiar DOCTYPE Switch aside and going with a new mechanism of declaring target browser versions via meta tag.

• Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 by Aaron Gustafson at A List Apart
• From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey by Eric Meyer at A List Apart
• Compatibility and IE8 by Chris Wilson at the IEBlog
• Opting-in to standards support and Microsoft’s Version Targeting Proposal at the WaSP

The perfect solution or the last sign of the web standards apocalypse? If you’ve got an opinion let it be heard.

A little thank you to Jeffrey and a promotion of Web Standards. More info here

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.

• John Allsopp’s book on Microformats was published
• NetNewsWire 3.0 is supporting microformats thus avoiding the need for one of my earlier hacks
• Other applications like Firefox are promising support in future releases
• Sites keep adopting various formats — from new sites like Twitter [hCard, XFN & hAtom] to older standbys like LinkedIn with 9million+ hResume based profiles!

So, Steve Jobs gives us web developers a double shot today with “One More Thing” of Safari on 3.0 on Windows and a “One Last Thing” of iPhone application development being ‘web standards’ based — just a another HTML, CSS & Ajax application.

While its absolutely great that Apple is embracing web standards in this way — great on many levels not the least of which is that it allows me as a web developer a few new avenues for work opportunities — I’m still left with a bit of a feeling of unease and anxiety.

Bulletproof Ajax is a newly released book from New Riders and author [and fellow WaSP member] Jeremy Keith. Devoted to teaching the proper way to design for and use the technologies behind everyone’s current favorite buzzword. If you’re looking for a step by step guide on how to recreate your companies Flash application click for click this probably isn’t going to help too much (other then perhaps help push you into the direction of rethinking your approach, or just going back to your old friend), but instead it does a wonderful job of breaking down the systems that make Ajax work and putting them in context — that being a new dynamic way of enhancing, interacting with and manipulating web documents.

Read on for full review

Tomorrow, April 5th, we will see the return of CSS Naked Day a novel idea where participating sites will remove all styling information in an effort to promote standards, get a little self promotion, and have a little fun. My take, reposted from the discussion at webstandards.org, is below. I said a bit more about it last year in I’m Not Naked, most of which still applies.

It’s meant to illustrate the importance of CSS and graceful degradation.

My interpretation on it is that it is meant to illustrate the importance of good HTML and markup practices as much as anything else — that CSS is great, but it should overshadow it all. Or maybe that’s just my own philosophy bleeding through. I surely would have called it “Naked HTML day” had I thought the idea up, and explicitly included scripting in the ’stripped’ category.

The Web Standards Project held our annual meeting at SXSW this evening. During the session Kimberly Blessing announced the the formation of our newest initiative, the WaSP Street Team. From the web site:

The WaSP Street Team is about you. No, not all the other YOUs reading this but YOU you, in your actual skin. The idea is that together we create a number of tasks – challenges if you will – to help the promotion of web standards in your local community. Things that will help get the word out to the businesses, educational institutions, web shops and individuals who live and operate directly near you. As a central group it’s hard for us to reach those people, but as a distributed team, it’s easy.

Get yourself on the announcement list and watch the blog for more information on how you can help contribute to the effort, and look for new tools and materials to help you get out and spread the word about Web Standards in your organizations and communities.