A common request from clients is to open all external links on their website in a new browser window. (Leave aside for now whether this is a good idea or not, and just assume that you need to do it.) … Keep reading
Tag Archives: standards
How to use jQuery to target CSS at older browsers
On a recent project where I had to support Firefox 3.6, 3.0 and 2.0, I had to find a way to target a specific version of the browser due to differences in the rendering engine. It turns out the easiest … Keep reading
Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer
Long story short, Google released a plugin for IE 6, 7 and 8 that will run Google Chrome (which uses webkit) inside a frame in the IE browser. Now IE6 can be standards-compliant, and all versions of IE get blazing … Keep reading
How to Avoid Paragraph Gaps when Using Superscript and Subscript
Frequently, when I see a webpage with superscript or subscript text, I see associated gaps in the paragraph. This is caused because the default way browsers render super and subscript text is to add enough vertical space in the paragraph … Keep reading
Key Takeaways from An Event Apart
I’ve attended An Event Apart four years running now. It is, hands-down, the finest web conference around, and if you work on the web at all, whether you’re a designer, developer, copywriter, or client-services, I cannot recommend it highly enough. … Keep reading
XHTML 2 is Dead
Wow, I didn’t see this coming. Zeldman reports that the W3C is not going to renew the XHTML 2 working group‘s charter this year. That effectively kills XHTML 2 in favor of devoting the resources to the HTML 5 working … Keep reading
An Event Apart Seattle 2009
The night before An Event Apart, I was at a party with some college friends. When they found out I was in town for a conference, they wanted to know what it was about. I said it was a web … Keep reading
Who’s Afraid of HTML Email?
Anyone who tells you creating HTML email is easy has either never done it, or is lying. Inexperienced designers tend to think, “Oh, no problem, it’s all tables and font tags!” Grizzled veterans, however, know all too well the difficulties … Keep reading
Pop Art Redesign
The redesign of the Pop Art site is live! I’m really proud of the work I did on this, and I’ll write a longer post soon with details about the process and some of the coolest features. In the meantime, … Keep reading
Detroit Diesel Redesign
About a month ago, we launched the new Detroit Diesel redesign. We were working on this site when I was first hired at Pop Art, and while I’m proud of the code we wrote the first time, our standards have … Keep reading
An Event Apart San Francisco 2008
I’ve managed to attend An Event Apart every year so far, and this year was particularly exciting because the nearest location was in San Francisco. I went to Seattle the last two times, which was fine, but I know Seattle … Keep reading
Dojo is Coming Together Nicely
I haven’t had a chance to have another coding marathon for Dojo yet, but I’ve been able to spend an hour or so here and there, and I’m really pleased with the way it’s coming together. First and foremost, I’m … Keep reading
I’m Working on Something Special
Most coders and programmers are familiar with the concept of “flow” or “getting in the zone.” In a nutshell, it’s a mental state you get in when you’re working on something where it almost becomes effortless. This state can be … Keep reading
Third Annual CSS Naked Day
Happy CSS Naked Day! Dustin Diaz started this in 2006 as a way to promote web standards. “In the spirit of promoting Web Standards along with good semantic markup and proper hierarchy structures, [today] will be a day of nakedness … Keep reading
Version Targeting and IE8 Followup
Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post). “In light of the Interoperability Principles, as … Keep reading
Version Targeting and IE8
Previously on Web Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by … Keep reading
The Email Standards Project
In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally … Keep reading
Duplicate Work is a Bug
“You’ll sometimes hear people joke that good programmers are ‘lazy’, and what this means is simply that good programmers tend to see duplicated work as a bug, and try to fix it.” – James Bennett, discussing CSS frameworks
41 Useful CSS Links
I was clearing out my bookmarks recently, and noticed that I had a pretty large collection of web development and CSS-related bookmarks that I never refer to any more, but might be useful to people who are just getting started … Keep reading
Web Design for Sara Ryan
In January, I got an email from Sara Ryan, asking if I would be interested in designing a website for her: Hi Scott — I found your site while searching for Portland web developers who use WordPress, and I really … Keep reading
Selling Web Standards is Hard
I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that … Keep reading
Citations, Emphasis and Italics
Wanna get a headache? Go type “html book titles italic em” into Google and read for about 15 minutes. What you’re looking at is an intense debate over the best way to mark up a book title using HTML. I’ll … Keep reading
An Event Apart Seattle 2007
Last year, I attended An Event Apart 2006 in Seattle. It was a great event, although I remember it being really rushed, because they seven sessions packed into one day. So when I heard that they were coming back to … Keep reading
How Web Standards Made a Better Site for LP
What started as a simple project with LP to redesign their top-level landing pages quickly grew to encompass their entire site. This brought with it some surprising logistical difficulties, which the Pop Art team overcame through clever use of web … Keep reading
CSS Naked Day ’07
It’s that time of year again when standards-conscious web designers shed their stylesheets and let their sites run around, exposing their raw markup to the world to promote web standards. The idea is that a standards-based site will be marked … Keep reading