As announced today by its creator Dave Shea, the CSS Zen Garden has reached the venerable age of 10 years. When I first saw it back in 2003, I was blown away by the possibilities of CSS. Together with the book Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman, it really opened my eyes.
I started this site almost 20 years ago and learned about web standards a decade later. The web was a completely different beast back then, and organizations such as the Web Standards Project (WaSP) were needed to bring order to chaos.
There has been a lot of discussions lately in regard to vendor prefixes. It all began when some non-webkit browser representatives were considering support of the webkit prefix during a CSS Working Group meeting earlier this week.
Apart from the HTML5 bandwagon, Responsive Design was arguably the most discussed topic of 2011. The term was coined by Ethan Marcotte in the article Responsive Web Design, May 2010.
Bruce Lawson is one of my favorite technical speakers, and it was great to see him at @media conference in London. A few days ago he wrote HTML5 Semantics which gives a nice round-up of the state of semantics in November 2011. A great read even if you’re already fluent with semantics.
Mobile development and responsive design are all the rage these days and media queries are mentioned everywhere. It’s a CSS3 extension of the media types frequently used in HTML4 and CSS2. The following (very simplified) example hides a sidebar if the browser device has a max width of 500 pixels.
Do you remember a thing called Dreamweaver? A decade ago it was a popular tool for building web sites, or rather creating something that remotely resembled web sites since the produced markup was worse than a pile of garbage.
Recently W3C revealed a new HTML5 logo which managed to stir the old cauldron a bit. It is already appearing on tshirts where the orange badge on a blue background seems quite Superman-ish.
The web is constantly changing and 2010 will be no different. Recently the Web Standards Project announced a change of direction, which really isn’t all that surprising. The “war for web standards” as Aaron Gustafson call it is far from over, but a lot of people in the industry has transferred to the Good Side and develop solutions which have an ever increasing level of standards compliancy.
XHTML was the new black a decade ago and a lot of loud people said it was the best thing since sliced bread. Even though it wasn’t half bad, it had one important culprit: it was allowed to be served as text/html instead of only application/xml. There are many reasons for that design, the main one being that Internet Explorer doesn’t support application/xml which would break the web for most people.
