I’m attending CollabTech’08 - a conference being held at CASE about collaborative technologies on campus. It promises to have talks about things such as; OpenID, 2D Codes, Wikis & blogs.
All this in our own backyard.
So if you’re going, be sure to say “Hi”. If you can’t make it I’ll be twittering (#collabtech08) and perhaps sharing stuff on Evernote, WiFi permitting.
Tags: CASE, technology, conference, collaboration, cleveland
So this week Apple rolled out the 3.1 version of their Safari browser, with it a lot of nice HTML5 and CSS3 support.
Peter Gasston has a great post with examples over at CSS3.info.
If you use iTunes you may have already downloaded it but if not you can get Safari 3.1 here. Make sure to visit some of the examples on Peter’s post as well as checking the CSS3.info layout too - CSS drop-shadows and rounded corners abound.
Tags: HTML5, CSS3, Safari3.1, browsers, standards
As my previous post about Cleveland web design companies and validation seemed to ruffle a few feathers I thought I would take this opportunity to look at one of the points that was brought up in the comments - That the company I work for (Optiem*) has a Web site that didn’t pass validation either.
Well that’s true. Optiem.com had a home page that pulled in 20 errors at the time of writing that post. I am happy to say that now, it validates.
I thought I would share the process and changes we went through to get validation on this .NET, CMS powered Web site.
Firstly, I always take a look at the DOCTYPE and encoding used as this can be a simple fix for some issues. We had chosen XHTML1.0 Strict when originally putting together the HTML PoC. This stayed through the implementation of the CMS. Going back to this we saw that we could just as well be using XHTML1.0 Transitional, so I forced the validator to override the existing type and use Transitional. When run again a couple of errors did disappear. So we made that change on the page templates.
Next was the encoding errors. In the .config file the encoding was being set to UTF-8, though in the <head> of the pages we had specified ISO-8859-1. Simply overriding the validator again showed a drop in errors so that was then fixed in the templates.
The remaining validation errors we had left seemed like simple HTML changes:
<span> outside a block-level elements causing problems<label for="f00"> where there was no input named f00border="0" inside an <input>The label issue was an easy edit in the code. The span issue was a little more difficult. It was causing a lot of the errors as the CMS defaults to wrapping items (block-level or inline) in a span which, it turned out, was easily suppressed by using SuppressWrapperTags="true". This fixed it and cleared a lot of the errors up.
The last one seemed a simple fix. Remove the border="0" from the input. As this was an asp:ImageButton we couldn’t just go in and remove it from the HTML, but the mystery came when we looked at the generated code (when you “view source” in your browser) and couldn’t find it. We found the input but it was showing an inline style (generated on-the-fly) which should not be throwing the validation.
After some head-scratching Ben discovered this post about the exact same problem. It seems that user-agent string returned by the W3C validator is not recognized by ASP.NET so it servers up HTML4 - Hence the validation error.
A quick change to the web.config file and “Presto Chango”, it was fixed.
These changes have obviously had a positive impact on the rest of the pages within the site, but there are still a couple changes here and there that need to be addressed:
<link> to a global.css (for the CMS editing mode) which gets placed within the <body>border="0" error and must suffer from a similar problem as the W3C validator at the hands of ASP.NETThe work performed took about 3-4 hours which is all that Mike & Ben could spare at the moment.
I hope that this walk-through helps other developers with problems they might be having with bringing their site through validation as well as going a little way to slay the myth that a database-driven or CMS powered Web site cannot be standards compliant.
* Optiem has no affiliation with this site. Just sayin’.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: validation, fix, optiem, .net, standards, cms
Brian Suda has a great article on Sitepoint about Portable Social Networks.
By combining things such as microformats and OpenID we can start to own our online identity a little more and forgo the usual rigmarole of entering all of our contacts to every new social network that we join.
When you look at it the pieces aren’t that new. I’ve been using microformats in my day job for a little while now and I’ve personally had an OpenID for well over a year as part of my ClaimID. but the exciting part comes, as with everything web related, when you combine them.
Managing your online identity is becoming much more important and articles such as Brian’s is a great step forward towards achieving that. There are some great links in this article and, if you’re interested, you should also check out another Brian’s portable social networks posts.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: portablesocialnetworks, opendid, microformats, briansuda
Looks like the last guy in city government with a clue about technology just left the building. Listen to Tech Czar Michael DeAloia when he met the bloggers last week, as he gives you an inside view it’s like trying to get tech companies into Cleveland.
It’s about time someone said (and confirmed) what many of us have been thinking.
[found via Eric G. Wiley's blog]
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