The problems with the new solution are many. The ones that concern me:

• After just a few versions, the browser will be hopelessly bloated and bogged down trying to maintain several versions with all of their features and bugs
• The point of the solution is to make browser bugs immortal. But will there be bugs in the bugs? Will the peekaboo bug or hasPosition act differently on the embedded IE6 from the original IE6? My head hurts just thinking about it.
• Like it or not, web design is a craft. The building industry doesn’t give special exceptions to architects who want to build a skyscraper out of wood just because they’ve always built birdhouses and wrap-around decks. Instead, they tell the architects to learn about steel and concrete and glass or find a new industry.

Those issues aside, maybe version targeting is not all bad (God help me, but I trust that Eric Meyer). But I agree with Ethan Marcotte that the solution is elsewhere; and by elsewhere i mean right here.

It’s not complicated. The flaming will die down. The Web will be saved. Our job – our craft will get a little easier and a little better.

The Solution

Microsoft should release stand-alone downloadable versions of Internet Explorer.

It should also give IE7-8-9-10 the ability to “nest” browsers in the parent browser window, just like Firefox already has. Sure, the <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" /> tag could still be used to automatically specify the IE version, and the user could be asked if they want to view the file in the pre-selected X-UA-Compatible version or in the current (IE8-9-10) version they have now. Then, if the version is not installed, they could choose to install it or go ahead and view it in some other installed version.

IE7 has a plugin architecture; IE8 should too. The only thing missing is the standalone IE releases (MultiIE already does it for XP, but it fails horribly in Vista).

I think this gives all of us the best of all worlds: Corporations who need a certain version of IE for their intranet will have it. Users who want cutting-edge compatibility and speed will have it. Developers who need a solution for future-broken sites under IE11 will have it. Standardistas who need those versions to browser-test for backward compatibility will have them.

Freezing all future versions is not the answer; we will be sorry. Let us pick-and-choose the fossilized browsers as we need them and we will all have what we want.

Smashing Magazine has a great comprehensive article on Microformats and their future.

Microformats are a cool technology: they allow metadata (such as vCard info: Name, Address, Postal Code, etc.) to be inserted directly into traditional markup using existing hooks like classes.

Don’t discount this kind of stuff, people. Its going to be native in Firefox 3, and if adoption rates are high, they could be everywhere.

Google’s massive databases come from its tiny minions “crawling” the web, traversing links and storing page views. They are called “spiders,” and for your site to get a good search rank from Google (and MSN, and Yahoo, etc… each of which has their own spiders), you need to know a little bit about what they are and how they work.

This is by no means a comprehensive explanation of spiders or seo methods. Volumes are being written about those topics. This is just a basic introduction to spiders and accessability on the web.

References

• Google’s official Googlebot FAQ


• Googlebot in Wikipedia


• How Google Works from GoogleGuide

Spiders

First of all, spiders are not people. They are programs run from Google’s servers that view your websites in a stripped-down, text-only virtual browser. Second, unlike your house, having your website crawling with spiders can be a very good thing.

Black Dog’s home page might look a little like this when viewed by a spider:

This is a screenshot of a text-only view of blackdogdev.com’s homepage. As you can see, the big photo of an adorable dog is gone; so is our nice-looking logo. All that remains is the most important part: the content. The text is the only thing the spiders care about.

Accessability

A spider can’t tell the difference between a photo of your dog and a photo of a fire engine, unless there is text available to give it meaning. Typically, this is achieved using an image’s alt attribute.

On blackdogdev.com, the alt text on the big dog photo is not very specific: “Loading Image…” doesn’t really mean anything. The logo, however, is better. Its alt text is “Black Dog Studios”. Much more relevant!

These alt attributes aren’t just for search engines. They are also used by screen-readers for the blind, who cannot see the screen at all but still take advantage of the wealth of knowledge on the net. For the images on your site to be meaningful to the blind or to spiders, they must have descriptive alt tags: “Portrait of Henry Flagler, January 2, 1830 – May 20, 1913” rather than “H_Flagler”. alt tags should never be left blank.

Remember: if you can’t navigate your site without graphics or flash, then spiders and the disabled can’t either. If you don’t like what you see when your site is stripped down to just text, a structural redesign may be in order.

Tools

See this blog entry in a text-only browser.

To see your site like Google does, you can use any of the available text-based browsers out there. A short list includes:

• Lynx, for UNIX and Linux, propably the most popular console-based borwser around
• Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Firefox extension. This is what I used for the screenshot. Very handy.
• delorie.com’s online Lynx converter will turn any url into a Lynx-like text page.

For those of us who care about the semantic web, standards, or the W3C, The Web Standards Project needs to be in your feed reader. I’ll admit, it wasn’t in mine; until now that is.

The design of the site is awesome, and they eat their own cooking. (Plus, they use WordPress!) They employ css tricks I have seldom seen used before, and consistently use semantic tags (<abbr>, <q>).

The best trick of all: the sibling selector. Why? Because it allows for truly semantic output with the leanest markup possible. Before, I might have marked up a simple content block like this:

[html]

[/html]

This way, all of the elements have class hooks. CSS is applied using the classes and simple hierarchies:

[css]
div.content { }
div.content h1 { font-size: 1.8em; }
div.content div.block { border: 1px solid black; }
div.block p.intro { font-weight: bold; }
div.block img { float: right; }
div.block div.mainbody { clear: both; }
div.mainbody p { color: #006; }
p.footer { font-size: 0.7em; color: #888; }
[/css]

Class hooks are helpful, but not really needed if you use sibling selectors! You, too, can write super-styled code without the additional markup headache!

[html]

[/html]

See, that code is cleaner and easier to maintain. The CSS required to

[css]
div.content { }
div.content h1 { font-size: 1.8em; }
div.content p { color: #006; }
div.content h1+p { color: #000; font-weight: bold; clear: both;}
div.content h1+img { float: right; }
div.content img { float: left } /* Just for fun */
div.content p.footer { font-size: 0.7em; color: #888; }
[/css]

That’s all there is to it. Now, the line between content and design is darkened.

One thing: the class hook remains on the footer element. This is because adjacent-sibling selectors do not work in reverse. The selector applies only to the element after the +, and there is no selector that applies to a previous adjacent-sibling element.

Sources

Eric Myer wrote about them.
The W3C recommends them.
John Gallant and Holly Bergevin say IE7 supports them.

Sometimes clients have very specific requirements. Sometimes they want autometic controls on simple things they have total control over anyway. I digress.

In this case, blog titles needed to be of any length, but have their lengths truncated under certain circumstances. Furthermore, excerpts need to be able to be the default length (50 words), but shorter (10 words) under those same certain circumstances.

Fortunately for me, the excerpt was easily fixed using a plugin called the excerpt reloaded.

http://guff.szub.net/2005/02/26/the-excerpt-reloaded/

Next, for the title length requirements, you will need to modifiy a core file: wp-includes/post-template.php.

[php]
function the_title($before = ‘’, $after = ‘’, $echo = true, $length = false) { $title = get_the_title(); if ( $length && is_numeric($length) ) { $title = substr( $title, 0, $length ); } if ( strlen($title) > 0 ) { $title = apply_filters(‘the_title’, $before . $title . $after, $before, $after); if ( $echo ) echo $title; else return $title; }
}
[/php]

Finally, when in The Loop, call the_title() like this:

[php]< ?php the_title('', '', true, '40') ?>[/php]

Now, the title will be a mere 40 characters long, and the excerpt (using the_excerpt_reloaded()) can be any desired length.

For those of us who care about the semantic web, standards, or the W3C, The Web Standards Project needs to be in your feed reader. I’ll admt, it wasn’t in mine; until now that is.

The design of the site is awesome, and they eat their own cooking. (Plus, they use WordPress!) They employ css tricks I have seldom seen used before, and consistently use semantic tags (<abbr>, <q>).

The best trick of all: the sibling selector. Why? Because it allows for truly semantic output with the leanest markup possible. Before, I might have marked up a simple content block like this:

<div class="content"><br />

   <h1>Title</h1><br />

   <img src="url" alt="pic related to story">

   <div class="block"><br />

      <p class="intro">This is an introduction sentance or paragraph.  It is supposed to represent a blurb about the article below.</p><br />

      <div class="mainbody"><br />

         <p>content</p><br />

         <p>content</p><br />

         <p>content</p><br />

         <p>content</p><br />

      </div><br />

      <p class="footer">Footer.  Date or links, or whatever.</p><br />

   </div><br />

</div>

This way, all of the elements have class hooks. CSS is applied using the classes and simple hierarchies:

div.content { }

div.content h1 { font-size:1.8em; }

div.content div.block { border:1px solid black; }

div.block p.intro { font-weight: bold; }

div.block img { float:right; }

div.block div.mainbody { clear: both; }

div.mainbody p { color: #006; }

p.footer { font-size: 0.7em; color: #888; }

Class hooks are helpful, but not really needed if you use sibling selectors! You, too, can write super-styled code without the additional markup headache!

<div class="content" ><br />

   <h1>Title</h1><br />

   <img src="url" alt="That image again"/><br />

   <p>This is an introduction sentance or paragraph.  It is supposed to represent a blurb about the article below.</p><br />

   <p>content</p><br />

   <p>content</p><br />

   <p>content</p><br />

   <p>content</p><br />

   <p class="footer">Footer.  Date or links, or whatever.</p><br />

</div>

See, that code is cleaner and easier to maintain. The CSS required to

div.content { }

div.content h1 { font-size:1.8em; }

div.content p { color: #006; }

div.content h1+p { color: #000; font-weight: bold; clear:both;}

div.content h1+img { float:right; }

div.content img { float:left } /* Just for fun */

div.content p.footer { font-size: 0.7em; color: #888; }


	
That’s all there is to it.  Now, the line between content and design is darkened.
	
One thing: the class hook remains on the footer element.  This is because adjacent-sibling selectors do not work in reverse.  The selector applies only to the element after the +, and there is no selector that applies to a previous adjacent-sibling element.
	
Sources


Eric Myer wrote about them.

The W3C recommends them.

John Gallant and Holly Bergevin say IE7 supports them.

Dotted Tables are tables with an empty dotted td in the middle,
like so:

Someting ….................. $100
Something More …......... $10,000

Each line is a complete table, all held inside a div#dotted_tables

that determines their length.
Nowrap is also enforced on all table children, so be aware of this
if you are using a dotted table within a body of text.

#dotted_tables { width: 70%; } #dotted_tables table { width: 100%; } #dotted_tables table * { white-space: nowrap; font-size: 12px; } #dotted_tables p { margin-left: 0; } #dotted_tables .dotted { width: 100%; border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaaaaa; }