web design news blog

A few years back there was a prevalent internet banner advert by Mozilla Firefox claiming that by switching to Firefox, you could surf the web faster. I remember having a good laugh about the blatant lie and even proved it was a lie to a colleague using a stop watch. Whether it was through that campaign’s lies or something else, Firefox grew from a little known browser to a serious power player.

It seems that Microsoft are so insecure that they are trying their hand at some outlandish claims themselves. Have a read through their marketing campaign below…

Source

So it seems that Microsoft would have us believe that not only will your 386k modem be miraculously transformed into a 1 meg line, but videos will automatically have better quality and ugly websites will miraculously redesign themselves.

And what’s with the line about unlocking the other 90% of your computer’s power? Are they trying to insinuate that your Pentium 1 will be transformed into an i7 chip, or are they admitting it’s going to be bloatware.

‘Why Upgrade?’ … Better security and HTML 5 support … Fair enough, but why add all the other lies? Just because most computer users aren’t tech-savvy, does that give them the right to make stupid claims?

Microsoft have just launched Internet Explorer 8 Beta and it has some very interesting features. While other leading browsers like FireFox, Opera and Safari have tried to build their sites with the World Wide Web Consortium’s standards in mind, Internet Explorer, Pre IE7, didn’t actively encourage standards compliance. As a result Web designers have long battled to have their sites cross browser friendly. It looks as though that’s set to change though. It appears now though, that Microsoft are turning over a new leaf.

IE8 beta displays webpages using its latest “Standards mode”. They have stated that although one of main goals for IE8 is CSS 2.1 compliance, it is also forward-looking towards CSS3, which is the next step in the evolution of Cascading Style Sheets and hopes to implement some of the most requested CSS3 features by web developers and designers.

For those designers that aren’t up to date with the latest W3C standards themselves, they have also enabled a way for a site to emulate IE7 behaviour while viewed in IE8. There are two ways to go about doing this:

1. On a per-site basis, the designer can add this HTTP header:
X-UA-Compatible:IE=EmulateIE7

2. On a per-page basis, the designer can add this meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">

Besides standards compliance, it also features a nifty colour coded tab view, whereby pages opened in a new tab from an existing page become colour coded, creating groups.

You can read more or download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/

Today the W3C released an editors draft of HTML 5. (X)HTML 5.0, also referred to as Web Applications 1.0, is now in it’s early stages of development, which means that you can even take part in some of the discussion and give suggestions here
At this stage it looks as though the first browsers to support (X)HTML 5 would be Mozilla, Opera & Safari, which is a reasonable assumption given that they were responsible for starting the HTML update initiative, of which the W3C is now a part of. It is said that it is being developed with IE compatibility in mind, so it should degrade gracefully in older browsers. It has also been said that we don’t need to wait for browsers to integrate this new technology before we start using the codes, but personally, we think it might be a bad idea to jump in prematurely because of the chance of growing attached to or comfortable with certain elements only to find that they have not been included in the final specification.
It is estimated that HTML 5 will reach a W3C recommendation in the year 2022 or later. This will be approximately 18-20 years of development, since beginning in mid-2004, however given the nature of the web design business, we think it’s fairly safe to assume that designers will be using these new elements LONG before it becomes a specification.
Although subject to possible change, it seems as though HTML 5 is not a whole lot different to HTML 4. There are some interesting additions to the semantic elements such as <footer> & <nav> which will in theory help machines (screen readers, search engines and the like) understand the structure of a page a little easier.

FURTHER READING…
Why HTML 5 Specification Matters
HTML 5.0 vs XHTML 2.0
HTML 5 differences from HTML 4

Those of you who own a blog or forum in some form will really know what spam is. Websites like this suffer from daily deluges of comment spam…comments that are placed for one reason only, and that is ‘link dropping’. Individuals & robots will post completely unrelated comments with links to their own websites. What these morons don’t know is that links from unrelated pages don’t hold much weight in search engine algorithms anymore. It’s about quality not quantity.
But the real problem is that some of these comments tend to be criminal in nature. The adult industry is one thing, but when you start to get comments with links pointing to websites containing rape videos, etc, that’s when you need to take action. If enough of us report these sites, we will make life that much more difficult for them, and that makes me happy!
The first thing you need to do is start logging IP addresses, many blogs such as wordpress will have this feature built in for you, but if your blog or forum doesn’t, chances are that there will be a plugin that you can download to do it for you.
The next thing you need to know, is where to report these links.
Thanks to wenwilder at webproworld, I now have a comprehensive list of places you can go to report these crimes…

Reporting Agencies & Law Enforcement:

International Law Enforcement
National Fraud Information Center
Internet Crime Complaint Center
Internet Fraud Center
FBI Tips and Public Leads
FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection
Anti-Phishing Working Group
the Federal Trade Commission
the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center

Other Security:

Security Tracker
Security Focus
DSL Reports
CERT
I-Cop
OCBA
Spyware Info
Anti Phishing
Geek Girls
Cyber Top Cops

Additional Resources…

IP Address Logging Script
Anti Formmail Hacker Script