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No sooner had I written about how Internet Explorer currently slows down web development, the IE team have announced that IE8, under development, is now rendering the Acid2 test correctly.

This is a great step forward.

Read the full post titled, “Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 to Speed Up Web Development?”

This has been said so many times on the web by web developers frustrated at IE’s rendering bugs, lack of progress in support for web technologies, and so on, that at first I didn’t want to bother writing this post. However, a number of other posts on this site make reference to this point and I end up repeating myself, side tracking from the point at hand. For that reason, and for the benefit of some readers not familiar with this issue, this post serves as a summary of those concerns.

Read the full post titled, “Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Slows Down Web Development”

For a book with about 650 pages, I got through this really quickly (for me, that is — about 8 hours)!

That should hopefully help summarize my view that I really liked this book.

Read on to find out why.

Read the full post titled, “Book Review: Head First Design Patterns”

HTML-based email seems to be a mess, with different email clients supporting a different set (and sub-set) of web technologies such as HTML and CSS.

Microsoft’s Outlook has a commanding share of desktop email clients. However, Microsoft announced that Outlook 2007 would use Word’s HTML rendering engine, rather than Internet Explorer’s which seems like a big step backward.

While some may prefer text-only email, others prefer to — or must — create HTML-based email.

The Email Standards Project is attempting to follow the example of the Web Standards Project, but for email clients, web- and desktop-based to try and make HTML-email creation less hit and miss.

Read the full post titled, “The Email Standards Project”

Accessibility on the web not only benefits people who are considered disabled, but a much wider, often aging, population.

Some people still claim that people with such needs don’t use the web (see further below). Watching people use the web using assitive technology may however, change perceptions.

Read the full post titled, “Web Accessibility: not just for disabled people”

My impression of day 2 at @media ajax, the ajax/javascript conference with some of the leading figures in this area.

Read the full post titled, “Day 2: @media ajax November 2007”

My impression of day 1 at @media ajax, the ajax/javascript conference with some of the leading figures in this area.

Read the full post titled, “Day 1: @media ajax November 2007”

Web pages often benefit from some text that may not be necessary from a visual design perspective, but offer additional context to say blind users using a screen reader. Some CSS techniques to achieve this include moving text off the screen in such a way that screen readers will still read them out. However, there is a concern that search engines may not like this technique as it could be abused for keyword stuffing and other such practices. What are the implications?

Read the full post titled, “Hiding Content on Web Pages for Accessibility”

Microsoft is making IE 7 more widely available. IE 7 still has to catch up with the other modern browsers but this seems to be a good thing from a web developer’s perspective as IE 6 is so much more buggy. Or is it…?

Read the full post titled, “Microsoft to make Internet Explorer 7 more widely available”

Many SEO people simply go through the motions and almost forget about creating good content; the technical on-page factors such as a good title, link text, etc are there because these are naturally important for good content, not solely for search engine optimisation.

Read the full post titled, “SEO for sake of SEO misses the point”