Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Slows Down Web Development

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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. Continue reading →

Book Review: Head First Design Patterns

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  • Book: Head First Design Patterns
  • Authors: Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Freeman, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates
  • Publisher: O’Reily (November 2004)
  • Purchase the book:

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. Continue reading →

The Email Standards Project

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The Email Standards Project 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. Continue reading →

Hiding Content on Web Pages for Accessibility

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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? Continue reading →