Summer wrap up
Just a few things to let you know about. First off, I know its been a bit light on information as to what these new web committees are up to. I will be updating everyone in September with presentations on the Committee’s and what we have been up to.
Tools for web folks
The final version of Contribute 3 will be available soon. I have been working a lot with Macromedia on the testing of the software and it really is a nice a piece of software. Take a look at the preview release, you will be impressed. There will be a presentation on Contribute 3 in September.
Another useful tool is Mozilla’s Firefox – which has grabbed a lot of headlines recently in tech news circles. You can download the latest here:
But what makes it more than a browser are the extensions:
http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/
One in particular I highly recommend for web folks is the Web Developer 0.8:
http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/
Read up on the site for more info – basically it allows you to view CSS, remove, highlight, validate, and a few other things to web pages right in the browser.
Communication and information
If you haven’t noticed or been there in a while, I have updated http://web.uwaterloo.ca into a slightly different format. It now includes the RSS feed from my little developers blog:
I post information on what I have been up to, bugs, links, and ramblings. Another space within the UW web that has some information for everyone is WatITb, from Yvan Rodrigues:
“I would like to invite all web developers and designers to join WatITb, the collaborative web board for UW IT/IS staff.
As the board grows, there will be more discussion on XHTML, CSS, ECMAscript etc.
The address is http://watitb.uwaterloo.ca “
If Yvan can get a RSS feed out of that, I will include it on web.uwaterloo well 
At end off this link rich email (in web page form), I would like to say have a great rest of the summer. I am off to jolly ole England next week until Labour Day. If you have any web questions, you can email me, I might respond but I can’t promise anything…
When publishing URL’s on paper
Just a note: when you publish URL’s in your publications try not to publish the entire file name down to the extension. Why? If you decide or are forced to change the extension to make a dynamic page or take advantage of PHP, the page is no good.
Example:
http://web.uwaterloo.ca/index.html (bad)
http://web.uwaterloo.ca/ (good)
Another problem could arise from Dreamweaver itself. A lot of people have not fixed their install to create .html pages and are instead creating pages with the .htm on the end.
This is a friendly reminder to be careful when you publish web related things. Of course there is a way to fix it if you already have published a URL that you have changed by accident, just ask
IE 7 – is there hope for CSS?
It has hit slashdot that there might be an IE 7 soon-ish. What does this mean? Not sure. One would expect that little 1% drop woke up MS engineers to the fact that a significant number of web users do upgrade browsers, and do like new features. CSS support may just happen by default… we will see.
Here is to hoping that they take the list of features users want and build a better IE – or just tell everyone to download Firefox where they will find all the features IE users yearn for
Update (Jan 11/05): If you search Google for IE 7 this post ends up 5th on the list so I thought I should update this. The number one result is this /IE7/ which looks pretty cool. It is basically a hack so you don’t have to hack your CSS. Not a bad idea.. but other than that, IE 7 isn’t real… yet.
Update (Feb 15/05): Looks like IE 7 is real and Google still has this post ranked high. I will make sure today’s post has lots of links
Strictly speaking…
I have never been all that sure about using XHTML Strict for anything as long as DW did not support it. Why? Because you start of strict but as soon as you hand over the page to someone else there is no way to ensure it stays that way. Transitional languages are better suited for that scenerio. When my co-op student from term needed a way to learn CSS I told him to make a pure CSS UW home page .. and he did.
Today (until around 12pm) the current UW home page was XHTML strict and standard CSS. There are, however, some limitations:
- The left nav is not ‘clickable’ in text mode
- The search form is not accessible
- IE 5.1 on OS X has some issues
We were trying it out until we got complaints, which I was certain it would happen by noon and it did. But it is an attempt to make the UW home page accessible without changing the design – which I am not entirely sure is possible.
The page can be found:
http://www.uwaterloo.ca/indexstrict.html
The first problem that was noticeable was the drop down navigation, it failed in IE 6. But what else is there? Other than the drop downs, was there anything else wrong with it? I am wondering if anyone can duplicate the IE 5.1 on OS X issues?
