All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Modern Browsers

ajt on 2003-10-15T20:28:58

Today I tried the latest browsers from the Mozilla.org (Mozilla and Firebird), and yesterday I installed the latest Opera browser*. I'm amazed at the quality of these modern browsers, they are so fast and feature complete, with excellent standards support that I can't see why anyone in their right mind would use an insecure, slow and sub-standard product such as IE. I've not used a khtml based browser yet, but I gather that they are rather good as well.

I borrowed Zeldman's book on standards based web design, to read this weekend, so I can do my part in push in the web sites I can influence towards a more standard based design, with less browser sniffing, complex, bandwidth wasting non-standard code and markup.

* Interestingly Adobe use Opera as the built in browser for the latest version of their In-Design product, and Macromedia are using Opera for the next Mac version of Dreamweaver.

Other new Mozilla goodies

drhyde on 2003-10-16T07:33:19

There's also new Firebird and Thunderbird. The new Thunderbird seems to just be cosmetic changes, none of the bugs I've griped about in their forums seem to have been fixed. The new Firebird - haven't tried it yet, cos the damned firewall at work won't let me download it. I'm currently wgetting it at home and will then scp it.

DWWS

davorg on 2003-10-17T13:18:15

Thanks for pointing out the Zeldman book. I'd never heard of it before, but I've been reading it on Safari and it looks great. I've now got a copy on order.

Essential reading for web designers.

Re:DWWS

ajt on 2003-10-18T16:08:13

I've followed "A List Apart" for some time - the site is undergoing a redesign at the moment but the archives are still available. Zeldman is the editor, and has written several good articles himself for ALA.

We are planning some revisions at work to our site, and I thought it would be useful to try and wean the graphic artist of his beloved Dreamweaver, and back to real HTML. Dreamweaver has two basic problems:

  • It produces very old-fashioned, usually invalid and extremely verbose mark-up.
  • If you want to do anything other than the fairly basic stuff it comes built in with, then you have to think for yourself, and then it's no better than notepad or emacs.

I want to shrink the markup, our pages are far too big, and the graphics guy want's to be creative, and so I thought this book would help him relearn HTML, which Dreamweaver has allowed him to forget.

Actually it's a lot smaller than the monster ORA tomb "Dynamic HTML", and is very bright and orange, so I thought it may appeal to him more, while he is relearning HTML, and getting to grips with XHTML, CSS, DOM and ECMA-262.

As it has turned out I have had the joy of an unwelcome stay in hospital, so to alleviate the boredom, I've almost totally read the book.

In it's favour the book is quick to read, has quite a few nice ideas, some very useful tips and hacks, and lots of arguments in favour of clean modern design. He is also living in the real world where the most popular browser is also the least compliant of the current browsers. Against the book, I'd say it's a bit trivial and frivolous in places, makes some errors (PERL not Perl and claims that Safari is K-Meleon based). Overall I'm glad that work bought a copy, now I just have to convert the graphic guy!!!