I don’t how many people even remember the olden days of web development. I’m talking about the time when under construction GIFs were accepted, even if a site had been “under construction” for over a year. It was during this era that what has been known as the “browser wars.” We pretty much all took a side, and our pages advertised quite obviously what side we chose. These ubiquitous banners saying “This Site Designed For…” inhabit some dark and painful corner of our minds. When the wars were over, it stopped mattering if you were a Netscape supporter or a Microsoft supporter. You survived and that was all that mattered.

People talk about the war; they say that Firefox started it up again. I don’t think I believe that. Microsoft and Netscape worked very hard at pushing the differences. These days, all of the major players (even Microsoft) work towards a standard. This makes all of our lives easier. I wake up and realize that one day in the future I won’t have to worry about whether or not my design works in both browsers.

Don’t misunderstand; it already has gotten much better, and we are continuing on that path, even if our progress isn’t always in the direction I would hope. But then I see something like this(theregister.co.uk), and I lose much of that faith. For even a small manufacturer to say that the standards are “too hard” or able to be compromised is a statement of arrogance. For it to come out of one of the major players is unforgivable. As a developer and designer, I want to know that by working with one set of rules I can reach the most people. As I have a number of Mac users in this audience (a member am I), as well as an important minority at my full time gig, I can assure you that any solution for me will address them. That solution has historically been the standards.

Reading this article, I find myself imagining a new series of website badges proliferating. It is this vision that shows that, despite all talk towards progress, we still feel the need to homogenize. Microsoft has made some unique strides as of late, and the corporate dialog is one of working together. They have sat on a broken html renderer for the better part of a decade. If Trident cannot be expected to handle web content correctly, it is past time to replace it. And if there are sites that get broken by this fact, it is time they were made to uphold the standards we have all agreed upon years ago.

Bandying around the term “backwards compatibility” is a disingenuous way to say that you are above the standards the community has set.

You are not.

It’s good to see that my website does handle IE7 fine.  Aside from that, I should post a bit of an update.  In the past two months, I got a new job and moved up to Boston.  i will be strating everything back up again soon, in case you are still waiting patiently.  (If so, thanks)

In my new job, I am blessed (HA) with a Windows development box.  This has been awhile for me.  I thinks that it has been five years since I have done web development on a Windows machine.  The world has changed a bit since I left; I’m just trying to figure out how.

For development, I have been working with Dreamweaver (pretty much the same as five years ago, except that I now strictly use code view).  Photoshop is the same throughout. 

In a month, I have lost at least two days of total time to Windows Update and AV updates.  The OS is still slow and feels cludgy (more so than Linux even).  I come home at night and enjoy simple acts of checking mail and surfing the web on the Mac.

Being on the OS does allow me to try out some of the new toys (reviews of which are forth coming).  I am actually writing this on Windows Live Writer and it actually seems to be fairly intuitive.  Here’s to a brave new world.

This moment is the one I have feared for months: IE7 is here. Along with this momentous day comes the possible breaking of a great many sites.

If you haven’t figured this out about me yet, well, I’ll just tell you. I see the worst possible end result constantly, and, in this case, my Powerbook is of no use in determining if I have reason to be frightened. I have heard good things about the betas, but I do understand that the rendering engine, while much better, has some different behaviors when playing with compliant sites. If you are a Windows user who has upgraded, please let me know if anything isn’t working with my site…

Wow, what an exciting entry I’m writing for you guys today. That’s right; I’ve switched my text editor. I know that some people out there are what I like to call “text sluts,” but I’ve been fairly true to my BBEdit. It has been my standard for years, even with its blemishes.

The difficulty in getting line numbers has constantly made debugging painful, and don’t even get me started on the lack of tabs. I could write an entire entry on how every application needs tabs, but I digress.

Regardless for those complaints, every time I’ve tried a new application, I find myself missing BBEdit. Maybe it comes from my old Emacs days, a desire to cause myself pain, or just fear of change, but nothing has been able to tear me away. Until now.

Smultron has quickly eased any fears I have had from moving away from BBEdit. I couldn’t have found a text editor that just “feels” right any more. If you are a Mac web developer, download it and give it a shot. It’s open source, but only works on Mac OS 10.4.5 or later. If you can run it, you will love it.

I suspect that I have had a career change, or at the very least a career refocusing. I’ve come to this conclusion quite suddenly, although it could have something to do with the complete lack of sleep I have had as of late. I have been a web developer in one form or another for quite some time. I suppose the change began during my senior year in college.

It started with my thesis for my Writing minor, “Conversations: Social Computing and Collaboration in Online Writing Labs.” All of a sudden, I was pulling Web 2.0 (of course, before the term was created and trademarked) content into an academic environment. My professor was rather impressed and I had no problem getting a nice strong grade in the class. I thought that was the end of my social computing forays, but I was wrong.

Aside from this site, which is in its third incarnation, I have had a number of blogs (some before the name was common) beginning in ‘99. Again, having a personal presence on the internet has been something I’ve been proud of (despite a strong desire to change some of my early opinions), but I always kept that stuff out of my professional work.

My web development work has an interesting subtext; I left the field just when table-based design was beginning to catch on and returned as standards-based design was taking off. My return to the industry had me reading Zeldman, Hicks, and others. They also had blogs, so I learned that this personal soapbox of mine could be used for more professional ends (it took me awhile to figure out a strong implementation - hence, 3rd incarnation). It still didn’t make it into my work, but some concepts started creeping in.

I created the building manager log where I worked. It was a blog without many features, but pretty much had all the standard features (minus commenting). Today, I went back to help after the webserver had crashed. The database would need to be rebuilt and a couple of files were not in any production-level shape. We installed WordPress. It’s a bit much, but it does what is needed.

This is a situation I have found myself in time and again as of late. A problem is presented, and I modify WP to fit the need. At my current job, I built a WP-powered internal CMS just a couple of weeks ago. Thinking on all of this has led me to one question: did I accidentally become a Blog Designer/Developer?

On the project I am currently working on, I have a specific singular instance where I have one page on my CMS that needs to push content into a sidebar. Unfortunately, I am only able to directly affect the main content div, so a dirty solution was needed.

At first, I simply tried to add the content into the sidebar, a beginner mistake I know.  That worked, but left an unwieldy space within the main content div. So, I needed to try something else.

Next, I floated the material to the right. I knew that this plan had some flaws, but I wanted to see if it would work, as the sidebar itself is empty within these pages. That worked pretty much exactly as planned, so I needed to tweak it. I figured out the width of the content I needed within the sidebar and created a negative margin matching that. I tested my solution in Safari and Firefox. Everything worked. I took a break. Changing display to block didn’t make any difference.
I came back and tested in IE. It was as if the material never existed in the first place. Now, I’ve given up on pushing the content outside the main div. So, once again, thank you IE very much for making my life exciting once again.

Alright, so we already have a design that I’ve said that I liked. Why ae we back here with yet another design? The answer is simple: I still don’t have enough to do with my life. Aside from that, I have found Mr. Martin Belam’s most recent entry on the reboot blog inspiring in some sense.

One of the areas that comp 3 was lacking in was search (it was also browse, but we will get to that later). I had the standard search bar, but I removed one of the few items that followed the whole “wisdom of crowds” theory in the current design of the site. Today, it makes a triumphant return.

You will notice a blue bar under the news breakout I designed. Within this bar is a split up search box that has everything the current search has. You will also notice the A-Z index added under browse. This is the inspiration I was speaking of.

By including the A-Z widget right there with search, I was able to remove the old blue sidebar. With that content gone, I changed the “My BBC” panel to a three-column layout. This enhances the usefulness of the homepage as a portal.

Functionality-wise, only a small handful of changes have been made. Most of these are designed to improve usability within the system. First, the personalized greeting and login options have been moved down to the MyBBC panel. Even with the news breakout being modifiable, the most cutom content will be within the My BBC panel. Therefore, the user will see a logical connection between the two.

Next to the greeting, there is a “change this” link. In the third mock up, this link was in most of the individual widgets. Now, it will point to a specific page that will act as the customization engine. As my design relies on this link, my next mock up will be of that page.

On a more personal note, my underemployment does seem to be drawing to a close, and I will probably be forced to enter just the image mockups of both this page and the “change this” page. I don’t expect this to be a problem, but I do wish I could have had the time to actually create the XHTML shell of the site.

Maybe next time…