Scarf*oo

The W3C announced today that the WCAG2 Candidate Recommendation is likely to go live by the end of the year. With their words, “Candidate Recommendation means that we think the technical content is stable and we want developers and designers to start using WCAG 2.0, to test it out in every-day situations.”

If you are interested to help them, you are warmly welcome to do so by building your content following the recommended guidelines outlined here.

Hey fellow web developers and designers, there is a new LinkedIn group available for your collaborating and stay-in-touch necessities called “Web Standards Design + Development“, enstablished by Greg Storey from airbagindustries.com. The membership is free, but you’ll have to be approved to join in.

And you are waiting for… what? Sign in.

There are tutorials and there are Tutorials coming from great web authors like Cameron Moll. The Highly Extensible CSS interface is a great collection of resources divided into four distinct parts, which guide you into creating a neat and sophisticated web page. Each part provides you with a working online demo, downloadable files, and links to articles and books related to each step of the tutorial.

• Part one builds a resolution-dependent page layout and demonstrates the use or a reset style sheet.
• Part two demos the use of CSS selectors and dives into the realm of scripting and adds some neat effects using the jquery library.
• Part three covers the integration of ajax technology and starts up with a shout-out on resolution dependence.
• The fourth and last part in this series is about testing for extensibility with 8 benchmarks to thoroughly bulletproof your site.

Overall this is a carefully written Tutorial worth spending time on. Thumbs up!

“We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.”
– Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager Internet Explorer

So the flames have extinguished? Read more on the subject.

After nearly two years of development, the WCAG Samurai Errata - corrections to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 - were finally released to the web development community three days ago.

The reason for the update is because version 1.0 was originally published back in 1999 and in that time both web browsers and assisting technologies have evolved considerably.

Note that the WCAG Samurai Errata is not a standalone document, you should really use it as an update along the original WCAG 1.0 guidelines.

Also note that there is a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 working draft available, lastly updated in December 2007, which you should consider to use over the 1.0 counterpart.

Sooner than later we may be dropped into a world of version targeting and forward compatibility, when it comes to web development. The basic idea is to use a meta declaration to specify which browsers and versions our web page intends to support. For example, writing:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7;FF=2" />

… would say that our page was tested and works on IE version 7 and Firefox version 2, for example.

Now, the problem I see here is in actual browser support for backwards-compatibility rendering. Do we really believe that once IE 10 is out, our IE=7 will still work? If you ask me, this is a recipe for failure.

Read more on the subject on alistapart.com, for some enlightening articles on the subject.