Simon Willison’s Weblog

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36 items tagged “webstandards”

2024

“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Anil Dash points out that podcasts are one of the few cases where the dream really did work out:

“[...] what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.” # 9th February 2024, 5:18 am

2023

How we’re building a browser when it’s supposed to be impossible (via) Andreas Kling: “The ECMAScript, HTML, and CSS specifications today are (for the most part) stellar technical documents whose algorithms can be implemented with considerably less effort and guesswork than in the past.” The Ladybird project is such an inspiration, and really demonstrates the enormous value of the work put in by web standards spec authors over the last twenty years. # 11th April 2023, 10:18 am

Simple Push Demo (via) Safari 16.4 is out (upgrade to iOS 16.4 to get it) and the biggest feature for me is mobile support for Web Push notifications. This little demo tool was the first I found that successfully sent a notification to my phone: frustratingly you have to add it to your home page first in order to enable the feature. The site also provides a curl command for sending push notifications through the Apple push server once a token has been registered, which is the crucial step to figuring out how to build applications that can send out notifications to users who have registered to receive them. # 27th March 2023, 8:48 pm

Igalia: the Open Source Powerhouse You’ve Never Heard of (via) An in-depth article about Igalia from July 2022. I had no idea how much stuff they had worked on: arrow functions, generators, async/await, MathML, CSS Grid and a whole bunch more. # 16th January 2023, 8:28 pm

2022

Supporting logical properties. A frustrating reminder from Jeremy Keith that Safari is not an evergreen browser: older iOS devices (1st gen iPad Air for example) get stuck on the last iOS version that supports them, which also sticks them with an old version of Safari, which means they will never get support for newer CSS properties such as inline-start and block-end. Jeremy shows how to use the @supports rule to hide this new syntax from those older browsers. # 1st October 2022, 1:03 am

Shoelace (via) Saw this for the first time today: it’s a relatively new library of framework-agnostic Web Components, built on lit-html and covering a huge array of common functionality: buttons and sliders and dialogs and drawer interfaces and dropdown menus and so on. The design is very clean, the documentation is superb—and it looks like you can cherry pick just the components you are using for a pretty lean addition to your page weight. So refreshing to see libraries like this that really take advantage of modern web standards. # 20th August 2022, 8:57 pm

2018

Somebody should write up how the early-2000s push for open standards and the Web Standards Project’s advocacy are a major factor in why Apple was able to create its enormously valuable comeback. Put another way, one of the killer moments of the first iPhone demo was Jobs saying it had the “real” web, not the “baby” web, by demonstrating the NYT homepage. That would’ve been IE-only & Windows-only if not for effective advocacy from the web standards community.

Anil Dash # 7th May 2018, 1:28 pm

2010

Are there any web design conferences in Southeast Asia?

Our site, Lanyrd, lists a few:

[... 39 words]

2009

Dive Into HTML 5. Mark Pilgrim’s free online book on HTML 5—currently just one chapter on canvas (which neatly illustrates the coordinate system using a diagram rendered using canvas itself) but certain to become an invaluable resource for anyone looking to take advantage of HTML 5. # 20th August 2009, 2:40 pm

Microsoft was slowing development of new versions of Internet Explorer in the hope that Web-based applications would not be able to compete with Windows applications, and Windows applications would keep people locked in to the Windows operating system. Thus XHTML2 was developed with no expectation that the leading Web browser would ever implement it.

David Baron # 8th July 2009, 8:30 pm

Insofar as it encouraged workaday web professionals to recognize that there are such things as best practices independent of particular browser implementations, I think XHTML can be termed successful. Insofar as it got people thinking about the possibility of a better Web ahead of us, I think XHTML can be termed successful. Insofar as it changed the popular conception of professional web design and thrust standards into the forefront, I think XHTML can be termed successful.

James Bennett # 8th July 2009, 7:36 pm

In defense of web developers. Zeldman: “The social benefit of rethinking markup sealed the deal. XHTML’s introduction in 2000, and its emphasis on rules of construction, gave web standards evangelists like me a platform on which to hook a program of semantic markup replacing the bloated and unsustainable tag soup of the day.” # 7th July 2009, 3:52 pm

Turns out, a lot of people are saddened by the loss of a spec they don’t understand, and if they did, would not bother using.

Assaf Arkin # 6th July 2009, 9:02 pm

Yes, it’d be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don’t. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel’s Law. Now all of a sudden they’re told XHTML is dead. Some wailing and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What’s needed is less “boy aren’t I smarter than them” snideness, and more Hey, here’s what’s up.

Alan Storm # 4th July 2009, 12:51 pm

Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML WTF. Reading the comments, it’s scary how many people are totally ill-informed about HTML5 and XHTML5. # 4th July 2009, 1:22 am

FAQs about the future of XHTML. The XHTML 2 Working Group charter will not be renewed after 2009—as far as the W3C are concerned, XHTML5 is the future of XHTML. # 3rd July 2009, 1:37 am

2008

Opera Web Standards Curriculum. Opera commissioned an impressive sequence of articles from a bunch of very talented people to help address the monstrous learning curve for modern client-side development. # 8th July 2008, 2:22 pm

James Bennett: Why HTML. Finally, somewhere to point people when they ask why I avoid XHTML that’s a bit more up to date than Hixie’s rant from 2002. # 18th June 2008, 12:27 pm

Elliotte Rusty Harold: Why XHTML. “XHTML makes life harder for document authors in exchange for making life easier for document consumers.”—since there are a lot more document authors than there are tools for consuming, this seems like an argument AGAINST XHTML to me. # 5th June 2008, 9:25 pm

Why the webstandards world appears to be choosing Django. I’m not convinced that this is a definite trend, but it certainly makes for an interesting discussion. # 4th April 2008, 8:33 am

Ian’s Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It’s quite explicitly about making browser developers jump—Ian specifically sought out tests that were broken in WebKit, Opera, and Gecko, perhaps out of a twisted attempt at fairness. But the Acid tests shouldn’t be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.

Mike Shaver # 27th March 2008, 1:35 pm

Opera and the Acid3 Test. Screenshot shows 100/100 (live code or it didn’t happen!)—Opera’s codebase must be in extremely good shape to fix so many issues so quickly. # 26th March 2008, 10:47 pm

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

IEBlog # 4th March 2008, 3 am

Legacy. James Bennett has what I think is the most interesting analysis of the X-UA-Compatible header to date. # 23rd January 2008, 2:14 pm

If Web authors actually use this feature, and if IE doesn’t keep losing market share, then eventually this will cause serious problems for IE’s competitors — instead of just having to contend with reverse-engineering IE’s quirks mode and making the specs compatible with IE’s standards mode, the other browser vendors are going to have to reverse engineer every major IE browser version, and end up implementing these same bug modes themselves.

Ian Hickson # 23rd January 2008, 10:07 am

HTML 5 published as W3C First Public Working Draft! A significant step, almost completely overlooked in the hubbub over IE8. # 23rd January 2008, 2:15 am

Broken. Jeremy highlights the fly in the ointment: if you want IE 8 to behave like IE 8 (and not pretend to be IE 7), you HAVE to include the X-UA-Compatible header. # 22nd January 2008, 6:42 pm

The versioning switch is not a browser detect. PPK: “In other words, the versioning switch does not have any of the negative effects of a browser detect.” # 22nd January 2008, 4:34 pm

Like DOCTYPE switching did in 2000, version targeting negates the vendor argument that existing behaviors can’t be changed for fear of breaking web sites. If IE8 botches its implementation of some CSS property or DOM method, the mistake can be fixed in IE9 without breaking sites developed in the IE8 era. This actually makes browser vendors more susceptible to pressure to fix their bugs, and less fearful of doing so.

Eric Meyer # 22nd January 2008, 2:24 pm