web design news blog

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

G-Mail (Google Mail) is Google’s webmail service and was started as an experiment in 2004. Prior to yesterday, the only way you could get an account was by being invited by someone who already had a G-Mail account.

G-Mail’s features include a search (naturally) function so that you can search your mailbox to find a particular message and a massive amount of space so that users don’t have to keep an eye on their space allowance.

There is also a chat function, kind of like the Skype Chat, where you can set your online status to “busy” or even “angry”, and of course, this too has a search function!

You can also read your mail on your phone, and it is available in over 40 languages. Best of all, it is now free and open to the public, with or without an invite.

Further Reading
www.gmail.com

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/

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

You could be sued for not having alt tags on your site and other things that inhibit the disabled from using your site successfully.

What? Can you be sued for that?

Apparently so!

More and more countries are passing laws on web accessibility. Acts like Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and British Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) are being used to bring lawsuits against websites that are not accessible to people with disabilities.

Legal action has been brought against e-commerce website www.target.com. The complainant says that alt-text is missing from images on the site which prevents screen readers from describing them to blind users. The websites image maps are inaccessible, important navigational headings are missing, and purchases cannot be completed without the use of a mouse.

Even Google has been accused of discrimination because of it’s use of anti-spammer “captchas,” which are the squiggly letters that users must decipher and type into a box before they register for a service.

Connecticut Attorney General’s Office has had a lawsuit brought against them for inaccessible online tax filing services on its Internal Revenue Service’s official Website.

Bank of America had to install 2,500 talking Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) in Florida and California and to ensure its Websites and online banking services are accessible to people using screen-readers.

America Online has had a lawsuit brought against them because of failing to alter its inaccessible software to allow compatibility with screen readers.

Make sure your website is accessible. Read up on these

Further Reading
Introduction to Web Accessibility
Web accessibilty lawsuits
Blog dedicated to web accessibility news
Google accused of discrimination
Web Accessibilty checklist

What do Google, Yahoo & Microsoft have in common?

…They all advocate the use of sitemaps. All three companies jointly maintain the website “sitemaps.org”

So what are sitemaps?

Well theres the usual HTML sitemap, which is a section of a website, listing all the other pages. Basically, it’s an entire page or series of pages dedicated to a navigation system. The navigation system of a very large website can get overwhelming, so an HTML sitemap is primarily used to let your visitors and users know about all your pages.

The problem, search engines face is that some websites use JavaScript & DHTML menus that search engines can’t follow. That’s why most of these kinds of sites only have their home page featuring in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), leaving all the other pages by the way side. This is where XML sitemaps come into play. Google has long been advocating the use of standard robot friendly sitemap, and now with the new sitemaps.org initiative, it looks like Yahoo may be going in that direction too.

The XML sitemap has an obvious benefit of telling search engines about all the pages on your site that they may not know about. Additionally, you can specify which pages of your site are most important to you, by use of a 1 to 10 importance ratio, and you can specify how often each page is updated, thus helping search engines know how often they should crawl your site for new info.

Here’s how to use an XML sitemap

1) First make an xml sitemap, either manually or you can download a free program that does it for you (see my program recommendation under further reading)

2) sign up for a free google account, here

3) Under the google webmaster tools, you can add your URL and then follow the instructions to submit your XML sitemap

Further Reading
Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Initiative
www.sitemaps.org
GSiteCrawler – free sitemap program