For the last few years, web designers and developers around the world have been challenged to build Standards Compliant websites, their task has been to create websites that are accessible, aesthetic, quick to load, cross-browser compatible, etc.

Firefox emerged as an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which after 6 years, has been overhauled to get closer to be a Standards Compliant web browser… but you already knew that.

Among all the struggle, I think that one of the biggest challenges is to make a website look the same regardless the browser you use: Firefox, Safari, Camino, Opera, IE… We strive to cater anyone on the internet with a web browser… but, again, you alreay knew that.

For the last few of years I have been learning how to tame a web page with CSS to make sure that all my layout and content look the same on every single browser out there. You probably have been doing the same.

Also, a couple of years ago I bought an Apple iBook because after I tested a site for a client in IE, Firefox, Opera, and Netscape, it was brought to my attention that such website didn’t display correctly in Safari. Then I was able to test my sites with different browsers and different platforms. I figured that if I coded the CSS for Firefox, Safari would normally accept the code the same way, as well as Opera and Netscape, then I had to tweak the CSS (or hack it) for it to work with IE… all the time… I bet you knew this too.

Not long ago, I upgraded my iBook to a more powerful and robust MacBook Pro. Having a Core Duo Intel processor really appealed to me. But I didn’t know that I was going to stumble upon such a problem… No, I am not talking about running PowerPC apps on the Core Duo…

I realized that Firefox, Safari, Camino, and Opera behave differently on a PowerPC Mac and on a Intel Mac. [sigh]

Now, not only we have to deal with IE, but also with crossplatform Macs… I don’t know who’s the one to blame, I know that not always happens, but I know that it sometimes happens and makes me sad to think that Firefox for Windows behaves almost exactly the same way as Firefox on a PowerPC Mac… But here the ones behaving badly are the Core Duo Macs.

If anyone knows about this, it would be great if they let us know what the heck to do with this issue. I have left a post in the Mozilla Support Forums, and another one in the Safari Support Forum, with no answers or replies whatsoever.

So, drop me a line, or post a comment, I am sure people will definitely appreciate it.

I am pleased to announce that my business website, webmediamx.com, is up and running.

Check it out, and let me know what you think!

As usual, it is xHTML compliant, using CSS for laying out it’s Table-less design.

Yay!

I found this Berea St. article that talks about HTML levels… It is quite interesting.

The article provides a good representation of HTML skill levels, gives a bit of awareness, and it kinda made my day because I know I am on the right track… me thinks. =)

I would say that I am at level 5, with a bit of level 4: I can’t think of building a website without CSS, I am always pushing for a clean and structured markup, I always make sure that pages display correctly in all browsers (because even when you gotta dig Firefox, there’s A LOT of IE out there). I am trying not to over use Class and I tend to use Div tags quite a bit (when necessary). And, I don’t use tables for layout, because you are supposed to use tables for ‘Tabular Data’ only, right? Right!

While debugging some apps today, hence, waiting for about 30 minutes to let one of my workstations execute such apps, I decided to check Microsoft’s homepage, and then I jumped into the code… I noticed that they had the following line of code:

The lack of this infamous line, made the homepage fail the W3C.org validation tool for the longest time… I don’t remember that they had ever achieved this tiny milestone!

The line was there, I knew it was a longshot… then I tried to validate the URL…

To my surprise, it worked!!!

I don’t know for how long has this been like that, and after them releasing a IE 7 Beta available only to MSDN members, I had lost a lot of trust on these guys. A lot of web developers/designers feel the same way, I believe.

However, knowing how hard it is to achieve the W3C validation, I must admit that they had to work very hard to get rid of their so-many proprietary HTML tags.

Hats off… err… wait… nevermind… If you dig into any other page within their website, you can tell that the layout changes, ergo, flunks the validation. =)

ay ay ay…

I have just released the new version of my personal site.

Lots of changes ‘under the hood’, it is now running Coldfusion on the back end, and instead of Flash, I used all xHTML and CSS, with a little bit of Javascript.

The benefits? Well, it loads faster, it is w3C xHTML compliant, and I think I won’t neglect it as much as the old version. =)

Please let me know what you think!