A few weeks ago I read a great post by Inayaili de León called Clients Aren’t Stupid. In this post Yaili challenges the perception of the web industry in the way that we think about clients. When I first read this post I agreed with what she was saying but it didn’t really register any further. In the last week or two however the topic of “stupid users” or “stupid clients” has resurfaced in a couple of different areas and it got me thinking further about the way we as and industry think.

Firefox is a great web browser especially if you are a web developer. Through the Firefox extensions you can make your life a hell of a lot easier for a variety of web design/development tasks. I don’t normally have a ton of the extensions installed but below are my favourites and some I use everyday to make my life a little easier.

Looks like Microsoft have done a u-turn on the old IE 8 debate and have now decided to have IE8 run as IE8 by default. This marks a big change and means web developers will not have to opt-in to run it this way.

I’m just in the process of reading the IE Blog so I’m not sure of all the details just yet but this looks like a big win for web standardists.

I say look out for a post on A List Apart pretty soon. Take a look for yourself if you are in anyway interested.

blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have not been too pleased with Firefox lately.  I tried the version 3 beta for windows xp not that long ago and I still was not that impressed, but I have just downloaded the beta version for the mac and I must say it looks quite good.

Firefox, the champion of web standards, the web developers excalibur and the holy grail of browsers. The one that helped banish the broken and retarded IE6 to the dung heap. What else is there to say other than lately I have really begun to get pissed off with this browser.

As any web designer/developer knows, the browsers main strength is its plugins, which make debugging and testing websites a breeze, especially firebug and the web developer toolbar. I use Firefox exclusively at work but it regularly crashes or locks up after downloading images, or anything else for that matter. And it’s not just me, I regularly hear my work colleagues complaining that they have trouble with it crashing. 

I was just having a quick read of an article called The Craft of HTML. It mentions in this post the article created by Bruno Pedro called Top blogs fail W3C markup validation. This brings up the interesting question of signing over a website to a client. After all your hard work ensuring that you have a valid site, six months down the line you check it again only to find out that the client has buggered it up and it no longer validates.

Does it really make a difference? of course it does but the problem lies in that the client probably doesn’t know what valid code is and what is not. All they care about is adding content to their site.

It seems there is a stirring among the web designer/developer community at the moment, a little unease with those folks over at the W3C. For a good number of years now, the web standard hippies have changed the way the web is viewed, they have even managed to change the habits of those dusty old people over at Microsoft and (a bit) better standards introduced in their browsers was the result.  How have they done this? Through violent uprisings, dirty protests, chaining themselves to trees? No. Through peace not war..... Man.

It could be easy to say that the love in is coming to an end, but that would be entirely dramatic and not to mention completely wrong.  It is clear though that a few respected names have displayed their frustrations about the job that the W3C are doing and how this is affecting the motion of web standards.

As I’m sure most people are aware, Apple has released its Safari web browser on windows as a beta version.  I downloaded this a few days ago just to have a quick look at how it fares up and to see if it will knock the gains firefox has made.  Here is what I think of it so far.