Posts tagged “web standards”

A web standards cover of "Hands to Heaven" called "Hands to Boag" is a delightful piece of web history, made even better by the fact that one of the podcast hosts was actually in the original band. I rescued it from bit-rot so you can still enjoy it.

I propose Cascading Semantic Descriptions (CSD), a new approach to microformats that keeps semantic metadata separate from content, like CSS does for presentation. Current microformats are unweblike, unscalable, and hard to index. CSD aims to fix that while building on microformats' existing work.

I was wrong to dismiss semantic markup along with microformats. Microformats have real problems: poor tooling, awkward HTML class name hijacking, and limited extensibility. But adding meaning to web data is genuinely valuable. In my next post, I'll propose fixes.

CSS can't apply multiple background images to a single element, forcing designers to litter their HTML with empty, semantically meaningless divs just to achieve visual effects. The CSS Zen Garden proves the point: nearly every layout there is fixed-width as a direct result of this limitation.

Reluctant blogging today yields a link dump: Monopoly Tycoon, a 20-minute HIV test, magnetic pole flipping, web standards research for my ambitious Web2 project, KaZaA popup fixes, UI shame, Mozilla vs IE, and a possible Edinburgh master's. Also: antibiotics. Yuck.

Curl is a new web language co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee that replaces the HTML/JavaScript mess with one clean, powerful solution. It needs a plugin now, but so did Flash once. If IE bundles it, this could be huge.