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XHTML2 is dead, long live HTML5
The W3 has announced today that the XHTML 2 working group will not be rechartered after its current charter expires at the end of 2009.
In many respects, this is not unexpected, and given the direction HTML5, and browsers have been taking, XHTML2 was looking like an increasingly theoretical, however … Read more »
Scott Berkun “calls BS on Social Media”
Scott Berkun, Web Directions 2007 keynote speaker, has a detailed post at his site “calling BS on social media”. Scott’s argument is not that all social media is bad, but much more nuanced (despite the provocative title).
Well worth a read (as is pretty much everything Scott writes).
Paypal Australia Developer days in July
If you need to add payment options to your sites, or those of your clients, there are many different ways of doing so. At Web Directions we know because over the years we’ve probably tried just about every way. Different solutions obviously have their particular strengths and weaknesses.
One of … Read more »
Firefox 3.5 released
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5, after the recently releases of Safari 4, and Internet Explorer 8, the third major browser release this year. With Opera 10 in beta, we should almost certainly see all four major browsers significantly upgraded in 2009.
For developers, like Safari 4, Firefox 3.5 is a … Read more »
Good reasons to install Internet Explorer 8
Hmmm, the reader thinks - where is this one going?
At the end of 2008, our State of the Web survey found that somewhat less than a third of the designers and developers responding tested their sites in IE8 (though essentially 90% tested in IE7). Granted, IE 8 was still … Read more »
First Annual Web Industry Awards - nominations close in 1 week
A quick note to let you all know that nominations for the first annual web industry awards, the national version of the long standing WA Web Industry Awards close in 1 week.
There’ll be state by state awards, (with an event Tuesday 6th October in Sydney coinciding with Web Directions) … Read more »
Andy Clarke at @media
The debate over whether, and to what extent web sites should look the same in every browser continues to rage. To the bemusement of many it must be said.
If you fall into the “yes” camp - then please go and read Andy’s latest presentation from @media. And … Read more »
@media and Web Directions
Maxine and I are really excited to let you know that from 2010, @media, one of the great web conferences in the world will be presented by Web Directions.
@media will stay right at home, in London, and feature the same mix of the world’s leading web designers, … Read more »
Firefox 3.5 accessibility features
A detailed look at the accessibility features of Firefox 3.5.
First FuelWatch, now GroceryWatch Canned
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the Australian Federal Government’s fabled GroceryWatch website has been scrapped. We wrote critically about the dire accessibility of the site when it first launched. In the meantime, consumer advocacy magazine Choice had taken over the project from the government.
What happened? … Read more »
Fix Outlook
Personally, like other old web curmudgeons (OK so Dave Shea isn’t really old), I’m not a big fan of either sending or receiving HTML email. But, it’s a reality of life, and more importantly if something supports HTML, it should to the extent possible support modern web development … Read more »
Vale Michael Jackson
For all his myriad faults, he was a genius, and a strange broken symbol of our time.
Via Kottke
Australia’s Government 2.0 taskforce
Via Slattery’s Watch, news of the just launched Australian Federal Government’s “Government 2.0 Taskforce”, which (a wordpress blog no less!). From the site:
Its work falls into two streams. The first relates to increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to … Read more »
The incomparable PPK on the current state of Internet Explorer
Peter-Paul Koch, curator of “Quirksmode”, has contributed just about as much as anyone to our understanding of browsers, and their quirks, bugs, strengths and weaknesses.
He’s just published his “State of the Browsers - IE Edition”, where he takes a look not at technology, but current market share, and … Read more »
InfoWorld on HTML5
Usually when you see the adjective “killer” in a tech related story (except about robots I guess), you know you are in for a good dose of hype. Countless stories on Google-killers, iPhone killers and so on have seen to that.
InfoWorld has a quite detailed story on HTML5, which … Read more »
The peer to peer web with Opera Unite
For a few days now Opera software have been promising to reinvent teh interwebs.
Well, the day has arrived, in for the form of Opera Unite. Unite puts a web server inside every (opera) browser - challenging the traditional “client server” model of the web. As Chris Mills … Read more »
Modal web interfaces
Damien Buckley, from Propellor Global, winners of last year’s McFarlane Prize, has some thoughts about the increasingly discussed issue of modality in web design (think lightboxes, registration forms and the like). Damien McCormack, from Vision Australia, one of the speakers at Web Directions South … Read more »
The leading edge of Web Design
In the leadup to the release of Firefox 3.5, hacks.mozilla.org are publishing dozens of articles show[ing] what’s possible at the edges of web technology.
Firefox 3.5 implements all kinds of HTML5 and CSS3 features, many also implemented in Opera and Safari, so much of what they’ll cover is far … Read more »
The state of open video on the web
Ars Technica has a great roundup of where open video, the HTML5 video element, and open codecs like Ogg are at today, in browsers, and in use on the web. An excellent primer.
Happy Anniversary Mozilla (1.0)
Via Wired, today (US time) is the 7th anniversary of the release of Mozilla 1.0.
While Firefox was still a couple of years off, the release of version 1.0 of the Mozilla browser was a big milestone for open source software, and the web.
The future of development? Palm’s web technology grounded Pre launches next week
We’ve mentioned Palm’s Pre a couple of times here since it was announced in January this year.
Our interest is simple - the way you develop for the Pre and its new webOS is to use CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Now, this was the way Apple … Read more »
Adobe BrowserLab - in the footsteps of BrowserCam and BrowserShots
For years, developers who needed to ensure their sites worked in a broad range of browsers had a couple of choices.
First was to run numerous browsers (and likely operating systems) for testing. Far from fun.
Some year ago, BrowserCam started making life much more pleasant, by offering this service over … Read more »
Opera 10 beta released
Opera Software has today released beta 1 of Opera 10. Opera’s support of CSS 3 in alphas of 10 has been excellent (most selectors, text-shadow, opacity and more), and this beta now sports a new interface by Jon Hicks.
Shaping up as a huge year for browsers - with … Read more »
Announcing Style Master 5 for the Mac, from the folks at Web Directions
The reason for the existence of Web Directions is more or less CSS. But the story starts a long long time before Web Directions was ever dreamt of. And a big part of that story is Style Master, the Mac and Windows CSS development software Maxine and I have … Read more »
Exploring CSS 3
In our other lives, Maxine and I run westciv - and have done for 15 years or more.
Westciv develops tools like Style Master, training courses, and a heap of other things to help web designers and developers.
We’ve just released a number of free web based tools … Read more »
BarCamp Sydney #5 coming late June
For fans of BarCamp (and indeed folks who’ve never even heard of them), Sydney’s 5th BarCamp is coming up on June 27th at the Australian Technology Park (a great venue!)
So, mark it in your diaries and get ready to participate.
New Jobs at Web Directions Jobs
In an encouraging sign given the largely poor economic news we’ve been hearing of late, this week has seen several high profile new jobs posted to our jobs site.
News Digital Media/TrueLocal and looking for a Senior Front-end Developer
Gruden are looking for an Online Project Manager / Producer
Different … Read more »
Google Wave - the next big Aussie success story at Google?
As far too few people know, Google Maps started life here in Australia, and Google continue to have a large Australian engineering presence. Now, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, two of the founders of what became Google Maps have announced Google Wave - built here in Australia by all indications.
What … Read more »
The dawning of real fonts on the web?
Regular readers will know of my near fixation with embeddable/downloadable fonts on the web, as now supported in Safari, Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10, and long supported (in a somewhat incompatible way with these other browsers) in Internet Explorer.
But the technology has never taken off. Foundries and many type … Read more »
Mark Pesce kicks of the first ever “What’s the Big Idea”
Anyone who’s been to one of the Web Directions South conferences will have seen Mark Pesce, inventor of VRML, judge on the ABC’s New Inventors, big thinker, and all round guru, speak.
While he gracefully retired from our final keynote role after (in fact during) last year’s keynote (like John Farnham … Read more »
Happy anniversary DailyKos
I’m not sure how many Australians will be familiar with DailyKos, an enormously influential and highly trafficked politically liberal online community in the US.
DailyKos, frequently singled out by right wing commentators in the mainstream media for vitriolic abuse (which seems to only benefit DK), is an example of an … Read more »
JavaScript and Website performance
Techworld has a detailed summary of Google’s high performance guru Steve Souder’s recent Tech Ed presentation on web site performance, where he singles out JavaScript as a particular culprit in slowing down sites.
With Amazon reporting that a 10th of a second slow down in overall page loading reduced sales … Read more »
Great moments in User Experience?
News from Autoweek, that BMW will now offer full internet access in the dashboard, well. provided your car is travelling at less than 5 kph.
One wonders whether the kind of folks with a BMW budget won’t already have a web enabled phone, and whether dedicated in car web access … Read more »
Data.gov
Announced a few weeks ago, via Stephen Collins we learn that America’s service to
increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.
has been launched.
To me, a hugely important step in the transformation of the concept of government to greater … Read more »
How do you solve a problem like IE6?
(As astute, more likely female readers might guess, Sound of Music is now the new favourite movie at chez Allsopp for the 3 year old)
We might forget it, but once IE6 represented a great leap forward for the web. At the time, its support for CSS was really as good … Read more »
We ❤ Adrian Holovaty
As regular readers and Web Directions attendees will know, we are big big fans of Adrian Holovaty here at WD!
Adrian’s latest short post summarizes I think much of why we are such big fans. Highly relevant to the current widespread debate about the future of news and journalism, … Read more »
Microsoft REMIX coming in June
Each year in March, Microsoft hold MIX, their web focussed conference. For the last three years, Microsoft Australia has been holding REMIX, a one day event bringing focussing on the web, from Microsoft’s perspective. This year’s event is a few weeks off, in Sydney June 11.
Clearly Microsoft, and their … Read more »
WDS09 - off to a great start
Thanks to all those who have already registered - WDS09 is off to a great start!
We’re also very happy to announce our first exhibitors for 2009 - long time supporters of Web Directions, Campaign Monitor, and XERO, providers of a very popular web based accountancy system. XERO … Read more »
WTF is “the cloud” anyways?
One can barely move in IT and web circles these days without hearing reference to “the cloud” (in downtown San Francisco late last year I saw billboard and bus ads all over talking about the clouds!). But just what the dickens is it?
There’s a nicely title article at Google’s … Read more »
Opera turns 15
A big congratulations to long time Web Directions supporters, browser developers Opera. 15 years old today. (if you youngsters want a taste of the web in early 1994, or we old timers want to relive the glory days of animated gifs and more (sadly no evidence of the blink tag)) … Read more »
Web Directions speaker Dmitry Baranovskiy hits the big time
Many in the Australian Web industry (and beyond), particularly Web Directions attendees will know of Dmitry Baranovskiy, and in particular his fantastic Raphaël JavaScript Graphics Library. Via the excellent Ajaxian site, it’s exciting to learn that Blackberry is using Raphaël for a new, highly interactive and … Read more »
Offline web apps and client side storage with HTML5
Many web folks are probably keeping one eye on HTML5, but it can be difficult, with a great many parallel developments. We are all likely aware of some of the new elements and semantics like , , and so on, but maybe less so of some more low … Read more »
Fonts on the Web
Regular readers will know the issue of embeddable/linkable fonts for the web is more than a passing interest here at Web Directions.
Today, font designer Tal Leming talks about the issues from the perspective of folks who design typefaces, while Jeffrey Zeldman interviews Type designer David Berlow from … Read more »
Christian Heilmann at Yahoo! in Sydney
Christian Heilmann, JavaScript and web dev guru who we are bringing out for the roadshow next week in Melbourne and Sydney, is also speaking at Yahoo’s offices in Sydney next Wednesday. So if you are keen to hear him, simply RSVP.
On the road part II
For those of our readers in Japan, Web Directions Express, along with HTML5 and CSS3 workshops by me, John Allsopp, will be on in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, in mid May. The workshops and evening events are in English, translated into Japanese. Details can be found at our Web … Read more »
On the Road again
This year’s Web Directions Roadshow, featuring fantastic full day workshops from local and international experts
- Andy Clarke (Web Design)
- Brian Fling (Mobile web design and development)
- Grant Young (Social Media Strategy)
- Indi Young (Information Architecture)
- Christian Heilmann (JavaScript and Ajax)
- Lisa Herrod (User Testing)
in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. If you’ve not yet booked, we’ve … Read more »
WaSP’s amazing new education project and curriculum
With far less fanfare than it merits, the Web Standards Project recently launched their truly amazing “Interact” web education project, and first stage of their detailed curriculum for educating web professionals.
Frankly, it’s impossible to convey the amount and quality of work that the team has put into it. … Read more »
Ask the browser makers - PEte LePage from the Internet Explorer team
In the first of what we hope will be a new, occasional series at Web Directions, we speak with PEte LePage Product Manager, Internet Explorer, Developer Division about their goals with IE8, compatibility mode, with IE7 emulation in IE8 is identical to IE7 and more about the browser. Thanks … Read more »
Sub Cutaneous Human Interaction Technology at WDS09
Web Directions continues to push the envelop of technology use at our conferences. From our own social networking applications like web connections, to unique visualizations of twitter and flickr traffic, bluetooth video messages from speakers and attendees and much more, we are at the forefront of innovation.
So, Web Directions South … Read more »
Object Oriented CSS - the video
At Web Directions North, the highly talented Nicole Sullivan debuted her “OOCSS” concept, to much interest. Yahoo Developer Network video recorded a number of the sessions, including Nicole’s.
Well have the podcast, and transcript courtesy of Opera Software, up and running soon, but for now, take a look at … Read more »
Ignite web in Melbourne April 1st
For folks in Melbourne, remember the upcoming Ignite Web, April 1st, from 5.30pm at
The Apartment, 401 Lt Bourke Street, Melbourne
It’s free, with some drinks on us, Web Directions, and a baker’s dozen of presentations on CSS, HTTP, WCAG2, Agile, and much more, from folks like Kevin … Read more »
IE8 compatibility mode != IE7?
With the release of IE8 seemingly imminent, and with many developers still not testing their sites with IE8, the IE team have just posted details of how IE8’s compatibility mode is not necessarily identical to IE7
We strive to make Compatibility View behave as much like IE7 as possible, but … Read more »
“i like code/design/words” Ts now available from Molt:n
If you came to Web Directions South last year, or followed online, you would have trouble missing the fantastic t shirts our fine friends and great supporters over at Molt:n put together as give aways.
[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”300” caption=”I like code t shirt as modelled by geek hunk … Read more »
Inside Web Directions North - YDN Theater
The excellent folks at Yahoo Developer Network were out in force at Web Directions North, and among other things, Christian Heilmann (who’ll be running Ajax and JavaScript workshops for us in Sydney and Melbourne in April) interviewed various people in attendance, asking them about how the current economic climate will … Read more »
Announcing Ignite Web in Melbourne April 1st - brought to you by Web Directions
After the success of the first two Ignite events in Sydney, the first, highly focussed Ignite event is coming to Melbourne in April.
Ignite events are now held round the world, and have a very distinctive feature - each presentation comprises 20, 15 second auto advanced slides for exactly … Read more »
Australian “web censorship” scheme “effectively scuttled”
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the widely criticised plan of the Australian Federal Government to have mandatory ISP level filtering of a secret black list of sites has been effectively scuttled
following an independent senator’s decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any legislation required to … Read more »
Web Developer Jobs - they are out there
Amid the current economic uncertainty, one little positive point is that good quality jobs are continuing to be posted at our jobs site, currently at almost one a day. So, if you are looking to employ, or pick up a full time, part time of freelance gig, head over to … Read more »
CSS doesn’t suck
During Web Directions North last week, the tired old issue of tables for layout raised its head again, by way of a blog post at Ajaxian.org, referring to a recent rant about this very subject. Nicole Sullivan, who spoke at the conference last week, has posted her own rant … Read more »
webOS - a high level overview
O’Rielly and Palm have just published the the first chapter of the upcoming “Developing Applications in JavaScript Using the Palm Mojo Framework”, with a high level overview of webOS and Mojo - the new framework for developing Palm based applications we talked a bit about here, predominantly because … Read more »
Bespin, from Mozilla Labs
Last week in Denver, at Web Directions North, we had the great privilege not only of having a keynote by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, founders of the Ajaxian blog, and now heading up a developer tools team at Mozilla, but they also demonstrated a brand new, … Read more »
Burning ships - Palm abandons PalmOS, stakes all on webOS
In 1519, Hernan Cortés (quite possibly one of the most murderous people in human history), arrived in the New World seeking fame, and more importantly fortune. Legend has it that after landing, but before setting off for the interior, he burnt all his ships - as proof to his men, … Read more »
SitePoint’s great book offer in aid of Bushfire victims
Our good friends and long time media partners over at SitePoint have recently announced a very special offer of 5 of their PDF books for just $29.95 all up, with all proceeds going to the Red Cross Bushfire appeal.
Great work SitePoint.
Valentine’s day and Victoria
The devastating fires, and the continuing, unfolding tragedy in Victoria have surely left no one who has heard of these recent events untouched. At moments like these, our instincts are inevitably to do something, anything to help those suffering.
There are many options, for donating blood, money, clothes, toys and more, … Read more »
The State of the Web - ask the experts
A few weeks back, we published the results of our first State of the Web survey, and over 1200 web designers, developers, and others in the web industry responded, giving some valuable, and unique insights into the technologies, philosophies and practices of today’s web professionals.
Following on from this, next … Read more »
A case for optimism?
It’s clear from developments over the last few months, and even the last couple of days, that the current economic climate is one few of us, even those old enough to experienced the dot com bust of a few years ago have any great experience of.
There’s certainly plenty of cause … Read more »
The state of Web education
The venerable “A List Apart” today publishes two articles on the state of education for web professionals, the first by Leslie Jensen-Inman, whose recently finished a Master’s thesis, where she
interviewed thirty-two web design and development leaders. Each of them expressed interest in the formal education of the next … Read more »
Web Directions North discount period ends Friday
Just a quick reminder that the discount period for Web Directions North 2009 ends this Friday, the 17th. Sign up before then for just $895 (including all taxes for):
- 24 practical, inspiring sessions by world leading experts
- fully catered breaks and lunches
- opening night reception and legendary closing night Media Temple … Read more »
Palm Pre and webOS
Palm has just announced their very interesting looking webOS, and Mojo web application framework. Unlike Apple, Palm are essentially making the way you develop for their devices the way you develop for the web.
According to Palm, Mojo is:
a new application framework based on the HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript standards … Read more »
John’s HTML5 article in A List Apart
There’s an article by me (John) in today’s A List Apart, on the direction that HTML5 is taking in regards to semantics. I have long thought the approach HTML5 takes to extended the semantics of HTML was problematic in several ways, being not backwards compatible with at the very … Read more »
The State of the Web survey results
We’ve just published the report from our first (hopefully) annual “State of the Web” survey.
Some surprising results from the survey include
- Nearly half the respondents use Mac OS X Leopard, and over half use a non Windows Operating system. Windows XP still outweighs Windows Vista among these users by … Read more »
Google deprecating support for IE6?
TGDaily has an unattributed report asserting that
Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome that, according to the company, run the popular web-based email service “twice as fast.” Google also labels IE6 as an unsupported browser, meaning it … Read more »
Google’s “Browser Security Handbook” published
Michal Zalewski at Google has published a “Browser Security Handbook” the goal of which is
to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a … Read more »
Shiny CSS buttons
Drew McLellan and Brian Suda, curators of the now traditional “24 Ways” web developers advent calendar kindly asked me to write something for the 2008 edition.
So, having been playing around a lot with CSS3 and experimental CSS currently supported in various browsers, I put together a proof of … Read more »
State of the web survey closes today
Today’s your last chance to do the first “State of the web” survey for web designers and developers. If you can find a few minutes to take the anonymous survey about web design and development practices, it will definitely help gain a better understanding about current best practice in … Read more »
Adrian Holovaty featured in the Chicago Tribune
While these days Chicago might have an even bigger “local boy makes good” story than Adrian Holovaty, I’m happy to say that I consider Adrian one of the most incentive, and nicest people doing stuff on the web. We’ve had the great privilege to have him speak at both … Read more »
Cartoon characters and pornography
Last week, I drafted an article on a NSW Supreme Court decision, finding a man guilty of possessing child pornography, in the form of a cartoon depicting various members of the Simpsons family in sexual acts. But I didn’t publish it. I censored myself, because frankly in the current climate, … Read more »
Job - Online Director at GetUp
A job that will appeal to quite a few of our readers, Online Director at GetUp, just popped up at our jobs board.
We are looking for a dynamic, self-motivated individual to direct the overall growth and strategic direction of GetUp’s online presence.
As the leader of our online … Read more »
Dan Saffer on touchscreen desktops
Via the ever excellent core77, a great place to keep up with design trends and events beyond the web, Dan Saffer who’ll be doing both a presentation and workshop at Web Directions North talks about whether “pure” touchscreen systems really are a great interface for desktop … Read more »
State of the Web Survey - a few days to go
There’s still a few days to go to complete our State of the Web Survey - along with the well over 1,000 people who’ve done so so far.
If you’ve not done so, please think about finding the time - it should only take a few minutes.
And remember, we’ll be … Read more »
Google Chrome exits beta
In what might be some sort of record for Google, Chrome, their webkit based browser, has gone 1.0 today.
In our survey of web developers and designers, we asked what browsers people use, and what they test for, and we’ll be interested to see whether early adopter web types are … Read more »
Donate to the W3C’s Validator project
OK folks,
you’ve used them many many times, so now’s your chance to contribute to the W3C’s validator project to help keep these vitally important tools for us web people going strong.
Print and Web Designer/Develop Job at IMMEDIA!
With our Jobs site up and running, we don’t post too many job ads here on the blog, but from time to time we want to draw attention to ones that turn up.
IMMEDIA!, legendary in the Australian music scene, is looking for someone to replace their long standing, and … Read more »
Australian Bureau of Statistics new creative commons license
In what is excellent news (via the Open Knowledge Foundation), and hopefully a model for other government agencies in Australia, the ABS has just announced that their soon to be released site update will be licensed under the liberal Create Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence.
Here’s hoping that we’ll … Read more »
Ignite Sydney coming January 22nd
After the great success of the recent GeoSpatial Ignite, bringing together folks from the world of Geo Sciences and the Web, Stephen Lead is putting together Ignite Sydney, to be held Thursday January 22nd, at the Shelbourne Hotel (scene of the last two closing night parties for Web Directions … Read more »
Shoot your inspiration photo competition
Core77, one of our daily reads for keeping up with the wider design world, along with Braun, have just announced the “Shoot your inspiration” photographic competition.
Photos can be of objects, people, or environments; they can be artistic gestures or graphic messages. Use your camera as a lens or … Read more »
Introducing Soap Jr.
We’ll let you in on a little secret - well, it might come as little surprise, I’m actually wearing my fabulous Moltn: I Like Code t-shirt as I type this, but here at Web Directions we are geeks. We love code, coding, and all manner of technical stuff. So, … Read more »
Scroll Magazine - the Design Process
The super talented Veerle Pieters, responsible for the design of both the Scroll Magazine logotype, and Scroll Magazine, has a detailed article on the design process for Scroll today.
Australian Government net censorship plans in trouble
In what appears to be a triumph of common sense, the much maligned plans by the Australian government to create a mandatory, secret black list or sites that all ISPs must filter looks to be in considerable trouble. With little support from any quarter, even many child welfare groups … Read more »
Chumby - now available in Australia!
You may not know, but we here at Web Directions are big fans of Chumby - but it’s not been available in Australia, until now.
That’s right, Chumby is now available thorough ISP Internode.
And they have even got a competition to create Australian flavoured Chumby widgets.
So, if … Read more »
Advice for freelance web designers/developers
Over at Slashdot, a discussion of best practices for freelance web designers and developers. There’s a lot of you folks out there (and doubtless many thinking about making the move), so head over and participate, or soak in the wisdom (and otherwise) of the slashdot crowd.
Bert Bos summarizes the issues around Webfonts
Bert Bos, co-inventor of CSS, has a detailed summary of the issues around font embedding and standardization from a couple of months back.
Why so much on this of late here? We feel at web directions that this is a development ultimately as significant as the rise of CSS for … Read more »
Webfonts - an excellent article by Jon Tan
If you want to get up to speed with the who, what, where how and when of Web fonts, this recent article by Jon Tan is the place to start.
Web fonts - great news with Opera 10 Alpha
Opera had just announced an Alpha of Opera 10, with some excellent support for new and emerging standards, including one of my favorites, font linking.
Currently, Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox 3.1, and now Opera 10 support font linking via the @font-face mechanism. Internet Explorer has in fact supported this feature … Read more »
Surface article in Desktop Magazine
Matt Magain, from our media partners SitePoint, has an article in this month’s Desktop Magazine (another Media Partner) about Microsoft Surface, along with an interview with Web Directions keynote speaker and chief Surface guy August de los Reyes (and a lovely person to boot).
The full article … Read more »
Screen resolutions
Ben Buchanan, Web Directions speaker and long time friend has a very detailed discussion of the issues around screen resolution. Long gone are the days where you could reasonably safely rely on a small number of possible screen resolutions. Now, we might be designing for screen sizes from 240x320 … Read more »
The State of the Web 2008 - a Survey of Web Designers and Developers
Update
The results of the survey have now been published.
At Web Directions and Westciv, we’ve been strongly focussed on the standards based web, and best practices in web design and development for well over ten years. Over that period, we’ve seen the rise of CSS, along with the … Read more »
Web Directions North - “cyber-monday” super special
For those on the edge of registering for the conference, here’s something that might just help you make up your mind.
For today (Monday December 1st) only, register for the conference, and we’ll give you either
- a half day workshop of your choice or
- a day’s skiing or boarding at Breckenridge (return … Read more »
Help stop the draconian and ignorant federal government proposed internet censorship regime
We’ve not said anything as yet about the Australian Federal Government’s draconian and ignorant mandatory internet censorship regime, in part due to a combination of incredulity and anger. But, luckily someone is on the case. Action group Getup has an online petition that you should sign, and get anyone … Read more »
Now officially very angry with Facebook
After yesterday’s saga with Facebook, I had hoped the rude message I’d received was the extent of the problems I’d face. Wrong.
Today, responding to a birthday greeting for tomorrow on my wall, from a friend, I received the following
Focus on education at Web Directions North
A significant focus for us at Web Directions North will be educating the next generation of web professionals. It’s clear from many conversations we’ve had with those in the industry, recent graduates, employers, and others, that on the whole, the education systems world wide simply aren’t preparing people for the … Read more »
- Nearly half the respondents use Mac OS X Leopard, and over half use a non Windows Operating system. Windows XP still outweighs Windows Vista among these users by … Read more »