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ASP.NET is a leaky abstraction because it tries to hide away some of the details of HTML markup generation for you when sometimes you need to know about the underlying markup.

In doing so, it is too easy to create ASP.NET sites that violate web accessibility guidelines and contain unnecessary markup bloat. In some cases, ASP.NET makes it really difficult to create the exact output you need. But there are a some options to address this problem.

Read the full post titled, “ASP.NET Is a Leaky Abstraction”

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”

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”

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”

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”

WYSIWYG editors for HTML are fraught with problems, as discussed in a previous post. This post is a quick look at why WYSIWYG editors would be important for content producers and offers some links to tools and research that people are doing.

Read the full post titled, “WYSIWYG HTML Editors”

Explaining whitespace to clients is important. Sometimes people may want to cram everything into a small place. But the way you explain it to clients is also important.

Read the full post titled, “Explaining whitespace”

HTML, JavaScript and AJAX are not only used for normal web sites and web applications but often for general applications that happen to use these technologies as a delivery mechanism. This latter type of application is ideally meant to be a desktop app, but issues such as deployment, upgrading, and installation, especially in corporate-wide scenarios leads to use of web technologies instead. But HTML, JavaScript, etc were not built for these kinds of applications. So, what about Flash or even HTML 5? HTML 5 is still not meant for those apps, but Flash can be, if desktop apps are still not possible due to some of these constraints.

Read the full post titled, “AJAX, Flash or HTML? (or HTML 5?)”

HTML 5 is gaining increasing interest, with the potential to improve accessibility, make richer web sites more consistent and help make developing web sites that bit easier. A lot of new useful elements are proposed and some big companies are backing this. Yet, it will still likely be a long time before we see this.

Read the full post titled, “HTML 5 = Improved Web, Accessibility, Productivity?”