Coffee on the Keyboard

The W3C Sucks

“If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.”

If you want to remain the standard-setting body for the web, promise new recommendations, never deliver. Read the rest of this article »

Tags: CSS, dom, html, mathml, things that suck, w3c, xhtml, xml
Posted in CSS, Code, Design, Standards

The New Blog

I made myself sit down today and finish work on the blog design. I am very happy with how it came out. Read the rest of this article »

Tags: advice, Articles, blogging, Design, theft
Posted in Articles, CSS, Design, My Site, Standards

Skinning(/Leatherworking)

I’m (finally) working on the new theme. It’s obviously a work-in-progress, so just appreciate the effort for now.

I’m starting with the default WordPress theme by Michael Heilemann. I’m not going to lie: I really dislike this particular theme. Read the rest of this article »

Posted in Articles, Design, My Site, WordPress

Microsoft Listened

We all complained, and Microsoft listened to the community: IE8 will now render in IE8-mode by default, and “developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly.”

Obviously, this is good news for all forward-looking, standards-aware, progressively-enhancing developers out there.

But even more important is the action from Microsoft: the community voiced an opinion and Microsoft listened and responded. To see any major corporation rethink their position because of community pressure is rare enough, but to see a complete reversal is truly an occasion to celebrate.

Hopefully this is indicative of a new attitude at Microsoft, one that supports or even embraces standards and the goals of progressive enhancement.

Now that we’ve seen what community outrage can do, we should turn our attention to the closed platforms of the iPhone and PSP. It’s a long shot but we can try!

Tags: 8, ie, microsoft, version targeting
Posted in Browsers, CSS, Design, Standards

There’s a special place…

…in hell for designers and business-types who feel the need to put full-screen advertisements before the website. The same goes to those who put random ads in the way while navigating between two pages, though perhaps these do not end up quite as deep.

I understand the motivation: full-screen advertisements can pull in far more revenue than gutter ads or even banner ads, just like full-page ads in a newspaper pull in far more than classifieds. But no newspaper would put a full-page ad on the front page. (Frankly, newspapers don’t put any ads on their front pages.)

So, what? This isn’t print. Well, let’s look at, by far, the most successful advertising model on the internet: Google. Google has essentially made a multi-billion-dollar market out of classified ads. Unobtrusive, text-based ads appear around your search results or, thanks to the AdSense program, on various third-party sites.

Meanwhile, visitors coming to your site, probably from Google, are coming face-to-face with the latest movie poster, only to turn around and go back to Google and the next result in the list.

So, please, ignore your advertising department’s pleas to put up splash-page ads, and remember that conversion rate is far more important than forcing a pay-per-click splash-screen on unsuspecting visitors.

Posted in Design