In the first episode of the Refresh Cleveland Podcast, hosts David Mead and Chris Miller meet in an unlikely place and discuss the reasoning for adhering to web standards, give a brief history of the standards, and set out a challenge for the next episode.

Links from this episode:

• The W3C
• W3C Markup Validator
• The Cleveland Web Standards Meetup
• Dave’s presentation on CSS

 

 Intro to Web Standards [18:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (104)

In 2007 I met some great people right here thanks to the Cleveland Web Standards Association, met some of my favorite internet personalities at SXSW and more and more at work I’m seeing our clients reap the benefits of using web standards.

So imagine my glee when I got an email from Mike DeAloia (ex Tech Czar) asking people to rally around a really cool Cleveland tech company and vote for them on Ideablob.  Especially since the company, Bizooki, is a web services company.

Call me a sad geek, but the first instinct I have is to delve into the source code and validate.  I restrained myself this time, but the restraint didn’t last long.

I wasn’t blown away by the design, but beauty is in the eye etc., so I decided to check out the portfolio section.  As the first example I clicked on loaded I noticed that “tell-tale  images loading in a table” look.  Oh yeah, they’re all here:

• tables for layout
• incomplete doctype
• 75 errors on validation
• no headings <h1>
• no alt text on images (all 83 of them)

Giving the benefit (site was copyrighted 2005) of the doubt I went back and looked at Bizooki’s home page:

• 186 errors on validation
• drop-down navigation doesn’t work without JavaScript
• a mixture of external and internal CSS, divitis, classitis, tables
• no alt text for main navigation images

Now I’ve never met Andy Tabar and I wish him and his company all the best but seeing as he’s based out of Nashville (according to Ideablob) and one of his goals, if he wins the $10,000, is to Hire my established team in India to dedicate 4 months to executing these tasks I can’t say he’s getting my vote.

C’mon guys.  Building with web standards is easy, really!  It doesn’t matter if your in Westlake or Bangalore.  Let’s really get behind this in 2008 and promote great, standards-based web development, putting Cleveland developers up there with the best of them.

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Tags: cleveland, web-standards, bizooki, 2008

See that?

Look closer - that’s light at the end of the tunnel.  I was just pointed (thx Brad) to the IEBlog where news of IE8 passing the Acid 2 was announced.

Let the celebrating begin - bye bye IE6 (hopefully).

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Tags: IE8, acidtest, browsers

Andy Clarke has a great post about the future of CSS. You should read it, think about it, comment on it and then see where we all end up in 2008. As I’ve said before, it’s going to be an interesting year.

UPDATE:

So not two hours after I read Mr. Clarke’s post and wrote about it above, I saw (thank you Snitter) that Mr. Meyer has crafted a post in response. I left my own comment on Andy’s blog and as I said, as an industry we can and should have more of a say in these things. I also agree that the Opera lawsuit against Microsoft is a year too late.

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Tags: css, andyclarke, workinggroup,

You can now see the presentation on CSS I gave at the Cleveland Web Standards Association.

David Mead presents CSS Tips & Tricks from Cleveland Web Standards on Vimeo.

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Tags: css, presentation, cwsa, davidmead