As for me I’ll probably be CSS hacking for a couple more years. One of the main reasons I’ll be doing this is because it’s quite easy, it can fix problems easy with a well written hack. Secondly, Netscape and IE Mac have annoying CSS bugs; also because of compatibility.  When a browser updates they often fix the display bugs with the parser bugs, which makes for only a small number of updates needed instead of writing a whole new CSS file.

But, I wish I could say I’m surprised by some of the negative feedback and people still wanting to use IE hacks in their stylesheets but I’m not.
This is all relatively simple, which is also the message I took out of this post.

IE conditional comments provide a neat way of organizing ALL your IE hacks so if you need to hack IE, use conditional comments. Why do it any other way?
Lets just accept the differences between IE and the other browsers and get over it! IE 7 is a significant step forward towards a more standards compliant rendering experience and as Joel pointed out, this is not an example of an IE bug, simply a rendering issue between IE 7 and other browsers.

Some people may complain and say “what about people that don’t have JavaScript installed/enabled”? I imagine that the only browsers that are in that demographic are speech browsers, search engines or customized by paranoid techies.

I consider myself to be quite open-minded. I guess Slashdot is using an IE6 CSS bug to work around the IE rendering difference, but the CSS bug is fixed so in IE7 Slashdot’s code doesn’t know to apply the rendering adjustment.

It would be nice if IE7 (in strict mode, at least) would follow the implementation of other browsers in cases where something is unspecified and the other browsers have come to an apparent consensus. Such cases aren’t technically bugs, but that doesn’t really matter if we have to write a hack for it anyway.

IE6 and other browsers don’t reserve vertical space for other empty elements like paragraphs, so it seems like a bit of a special case to do so for legends, but I guess we have to live with it.

A CSS hack I’ve used a bit is writing _height to mean min-height in IE, but I haven’t seen anything mentioned about the underscore hack or the implementation of height and min-height.

Has the IE-Team ever considered implementing the conditional comments feature for CSS documents, too?
I understand that you can achieve the same if you just embed the aforementioned piece of code in your (X) HTML document. But the point is that this may not be an option for every project out there and having all your CSS Code in one place can be very advantageous at times or simply be convenient.

Internet Explorer 7 users have made a definite stand-out for cleaning up existing CSS hacks in their pages for IE7. It is has been their policy since IE6 that under quirks doc type, they will not make any behavioral changes so that existing pages will continue to render unmodified, but under the strict doc type, they want to change behavior to be as compliant as possible with the web standards.

For IE7, they introduced CSS functionality and cleaned up their parser bugs.

Walking severely into a CSS hack trap is quite easy. For example, just clean HTML with a full complement of CSS. You should notice the strange behavior with their search box being moved into the footer of their page. As a result, the legend tag is empty. IE6 and IE7 reserve white space for the empty legend tag. The HTML 4.01 spec does not specify what should happen in this case. The legend element is required according to the HTML valuator, so Slashdot did the right thing to put an empty element in the page.

Ideally IE 6 keeps getting the height wrong and ignoring the child selector. But IE7 understands the child selector, and properly overrides the height and applies the min-height. I suppose IE6 will ignore the style because it doesn’t understand the child selector, and it won’t affect any of the other browsers who apparently have the equivalent behavior. Actually, the best fix would be to remove the empty legend tag since it’s not serving any purpose, or put content in it.

But I don’t understand why you would want to use browser-specific code in this specific case. Since the problem is that the standard doesn’t specify a standard behavior in the case, it seems natural to explicitly request a behavior for all browsers.

Slashdot isn’t trying to work around a bug in IE; they are trying to work around a rendering difference between IE and the rest of the world. The spec doesn’t define how an empty legend should be rendered, and IE chose a different path than other browsers. Since the spec doesn’t define it, different rendering is not a bug.

I used to create a mess consisting of invalid markup, multiple levels of nested tables, and tons of spacer images. When Netscape 3 and 4 ruled the browser world there really was no other way of creating a decent looking website. And I didn’t know any better.

This does feel a little embarrassing, but I think it’s important not to hide the fact that many of the standardistas that keep talking about web standards and accessibility have once been guilty of many of the mistakes we now want to see abolished. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the ugly old-skool hacks were invented by the same people who are now trying to make people stop using them.

I’ve been looking through some documents on coding conventions and recommendations that I wrote years ago. Here are just a few of the hacks I found:

Using the border attribute only lets you control the width of a table’s borders. Most of the time I used tables for layout, and removed the border by specifying border=0. But for the times when a border was required, I didn’t want that ugly default grey and beveled border. I wanted a one pixel black border around every table cell. And to achieve that effect I used to create a table containing a single cell with a black background, put the table that I wanted to have a border in that cell, and use cellspacing to push the table cells apart and reveal the black background.

So I used a little bit of JavaScript that detected which browser the visitor was using and then used document.write to load an appropriate CSS file. No JavaScript? Sorry, you don’t get any CSS. CSS?

And that’s just scratching the surface. I’ve been guilty of many more markup-horrors through the years, as I’m sure many of you have.

So, care to share your worst crimes against HTML and best practices in web design and development? Come on, don’t be ashamed. Bring them all out!

Carriers who sell this sort of phones, have certain appealing features involved: no long term contracts aimed for the pre-teen market. Now the ideal marketplace for children, I imagine it as ALice in Wonderland with a tweek: cell phone communication, Internet TV coverage and multiplayer XBOX 360 games. Maybe it sounds a bit freaky, but services nowadays offer such flexible customized features destined for children, that you as a parent cannot say no to your children’s most inner desires.

There is also that sense of competition between you and other parents, those who chose to educate their kid by spoiling them to be the bone.

Now the problem still remains: can children handle the responsibility of owning a cell phone?
Are they too young?
But, as I’ve stated earlier that aspect remains up to the parents who must educate their children apropriately. If that means turning your child into an apprentice of high standard technology, I’ll pass.

Cell phone can add peace into the households of men and women, by making these affordable devices the perfect way for communication. But as you know, cell phone can create that sort of depedency, and children are still children, who still become fanatics for downloading the latest game or song.

However, buying kids cell phone can send the wrong message. A cell phone seems to be a symptom of a larger societal issue; parents need to learn to say no when their children beg for things they don’t need.

It’s up to every open-minded parent to look for the well-being of their child.
But we musn’t overdo it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not all to fired up for the cell phone industry. Especially if destined for younglings. Don’t get me wrong, kids should possess a cell phone for contacting their parents at all costs(emergency calls etc) but not just for the pleasure of having a cell phone. Furthermore, I’m not all too confortable when I see preteens with the latest type of Nokia for example… Really people, do kindergarden children need the latest high-tech device? I mean, they’ll be fed up with the whole business later on in life, they don’t need to become fanatics from this early stage in life.

A recent study in America showed that by 2010 more than 50% of the children ( 8 to 12 year olds) will be using cell phones.
That’s sounds pretty freaky, if you ask me. A study conducted by Jupiter Research found that nearly one-half of children age 12 or13 will have a cell phone by the end of 2007, while one-third of children age 10 or 11 will have a one in the same period. Boosted by these findings, carriers are developing new ways to reach the SpongeBob set—and to convince skeptical parents that it’s a good idea.

Being in the company of adults all the time, children have the tendency to become infatuated by other people possesions. That is the of mobile phones. I can easily portray the every day 7 year old begging of his parents, for a little bit of that mobile feel.
Now, let’s hope they don’t camp out outside Iphone carriers!

But there are certain differences involved, meaning cell phones designed for pre-teens. These type of cell phone can be programmed for having only emergency numbers and programmed numbers.
Sure safety is definetely a big part of all this charade, more parents wanting to know exacly where they are, what are next moves, but a long time commitment to a cell phone is just wrong.

Concerning how Internet culture is evolving — or, in his view, degenerating, is not a matter of perspective.

Internet pundits often gleefully say that pampered Big Media is getting what it deserves, but the long-term social consequences may not be so humorous.

Publishers and record labels provide more than just distribution and promotion.  In a sense, they’re the venture capitalists of culture, advancing money so that a writer can take years to research a great book or a band can concentrate on creating a strong body of music.  Sure, there are lots of writers and bands who keep their day jobs and still create good work — but most of them wouldn’t mind an upfront check and some uninterrupted time.  Even the most faithful bunch of MySpace friends will probably never be able to offer them that.

Can bloggers replace traditional news organizations?  But few bloggers will ever be able to afford in-depth investigative reporting — the kind of long-term work with which the Washington Post recently uncovered the Veterans Administration scandal.

Top investigative reporters are usually remarkably focused and even obsessive individuals who want someone to pay them a salary, give them a desk and then let them loose.  And if they’re taking on big business, they also need a backer with some legal resources.  Finally, the public is still more comfortable with news that comes from trusted brand names.

The loss of quality — is really about the devaluation of the expert.  Keen argues that Wikipedia, which considers enthusiastic amateurs the equal of trained experts, is a step backward in the quality of knowledge.  It’s a point worth discussing: Wikipedia is brand new and its means of creation shouldn’t go unquestioned simply because it has climbed to the top of Google. That’s particularly true if it hastens the demise of traditional encyclopedias that have existed for hundreds of years.

The future of the Internet is also a hostage of shout culture: on one side the specter of a dumb-and-dumber dystopia devoid of quality, on the other a utopian vision in which amateurs fill the Web with free and meaningful content. Neither, of course, is really the future: we’ll end up in the middle, where certain good parts of the past may be lost but valuable new elements are gained.

While young people embrace the Web with real or virtual friends and their mobile phone is never far away, relatively few like technology and those that do tend to be in Brazil, India and China, according to a survey.

Only a handful think of technology as a concept, and just 16 percent use terms like “social networking,” said two combined surveys covering 8- to 24-year-olds published on Tuesday by Microsoft and Viacom units MTV Networks and Nickelodeon.

Talking to them about the role of technology in their lifestyle would be like talking to kids in the 1980s about the role the park swing or the telephone played in their social lives — it’s invisible.

The way each technology is adopted and adapted throughout the world depends as much on local cultural and social factors as on the technology itself.

The changes in how the youth market engages with technology is keenly followed by advertisers and content firms.

Traditional youth marketing considered opinion formers and influencer’s to be a small elite, but these days the elite has become much larger.

For parents worried about what their children are getting up to amid the wave of gadgets, little has changed in a generation.

I’ve decided to talk about the lang attribute. Considering the fact that many individuals use it, no one had anything really throughout provoking to say about the lang attribute. So I guess it’s up to me, to do all the dirty work?!

Marking up languages and using those attributes don’t only apply to the root element and specifying the base language of a document. Marking up languages specifically and thoroughly is very important for speech-enabled UAs to pronounce the text correctly.

Ideally speaking, you should mark up absolutely every single piece of text as the language it’s written in accurately. This sounds pretty straight-forward, and usually it is, but sometimes it can also become quite tricky.

Some languages, like Dutch for example, have certain words that are taken from English and then adjusted somewhat to become Dutch. For example, the word “downloaden” Semantically, this is sort-of adjusted and adopted from English to Dutch, thereby making it Dutch. In other words, if the rest of the document is in Dutch you shouldn’t really have to bother marking this up as another language.

When this word is pronounced by a computer, it will probably be pronounced incorrectly, because I strongly doubt that the “w” would be pronounced by it as it is normally pronounced in Dutch. Some people will therefore be tempted to mark it up as English. However, this is still incorrect from a semantic point of view. Downloaden shouldn’t be pronounced in an English voice, but rather in a typical Dutch voice, otherwise it would sound completely unnatural in a Dutch piece of text.

Before creating your personalized website, or trying to build up a site for professional reasons, I must attract your attention to some issues. I’m not trying to be arrogant or something like that, but I’d like to go over some basic issues when you make a contract with a firm or an individual that is going to create your web page.
From organizations plans, to building a website step by step, or just re-designing your current one, there is still much to learn to achieve professional and quality web services.

Firstly you must plan out your ideal website, figure out what you want exactly. Secondly, review what the costs are and what they are going to be; talk freely with the developer, and specify clearly what you expect. Expect at all time, to put in balance the cons and pros of the projects. If you’re going to get the job done, try to avoid bit delay, regarding web site maintenance. The whole process should be handled with professionalism, on both parts, if you really want stable web services.

The majority of Web workers out there should either update their skills to what is required in the 21st century or find something else to do. If you get something cheap, there is always a catch. The lowest bidder is the lowest bidder for a reason. Remember that.

Being a web professional you may have clients who really would have benefited from understanding these very important points. Like I said, that is understandable and excusable to some degree. Much worse is that I have also worked in organisations where most project managers would have needed the tips mentioned here. They simply did not understand the Web. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I suspect that clueless project managers are still a common problem in the Web industry.

Many irritating things I encountered last year, regarding World Wide Web technology. I’m going to try to specify some of the issues involved.

When working with Ajax, one of the most aggravating issues I want to point out is the Flash perspective. Generally speaking, people don’t have the slightest idea what to do when Ajax programming is concerned. Sure, it does score definite pluses on accessibility, but that doesn’t change the matter at hand.

Secondly, I’ve got a problem with over-wide, fixed with layouts. Now, if you don’t know how to do an interactive layout, go for it. But do go over the top with over-wide. As for horizontal scrolling, let’s be serious!

Moving on, most people learn Javascript libraries instead of writing efficiently in JavaScript. Not that pretty wrong. It’s like learning to make a PowerPoint instead of writing a C# code.  Sure, libraries can be an advantage, but not in this manner.

Headings are definetely not for me. Sure, they look pretty good when performed correctly , and they provide any desired font. But when trying to print, paste or increase text size, now there are some big issues at hand.

By acting like fundamentalists unwilling to compromise, these people are contributing to making the Web less accessible and less usable. Accessibility extremists tend to do it by insulting proponents of universality and equal access, design zealots by disregarding usability, accessibility, and common sense in the name of “creativity”. Grow up, both of you.

High tech contrast and the growing light on dark designs are just awful. Let’s hope I don’t have to wear glasses pretty soon.

Creating a CSS Toolshed submission can be achieved step by step. Making each developer to submit their designs to the working class environment can be a real stimulation for real world simulation websites. Now, I’m really sure many fanatic developers can’t wait to lay their hands on creating on the perfect design and submitting it to the CSS Toolshed.

Well, people find time to produce 12341 wallpapers for deviant art, or create yet another CSS layout that repeats mistakes others have made before instead of goggling a bit before plunging into it.

People also have time to ask questions that have been answered countless times on a mailing list, added to the Wiki and coming up as the first 20 results in Google.

Right now I consider the biggest problem of CSS that everybody wants to start something on their own rather than contributing to a centralized repository.

The “happy cock” layout took me one hour while riding the train home, and by re-using the skeleton CSS selectors it should now be pretty easy to come up with something in a short period of time.

Basically, for creating a CSS Toolshed submission, you’ll need to include all the necessary images, even more templates containing almost all elements of the building block gallery and pre-fined CSS selectors with all the content elements.

However, it seems a bit more idealistic in terms of time and resources that’s required to attack something at this scale. Let’s face it; (perhaps speaking for myself) developers are enthusiastic about projects only if they can foresee a visible outcome within a ‘realistic’ time-frame. Perhaps this is the sole reason why products like zen garden managed to break through.

A common reason for sites being inaccessible is the general ignorance among CMS developers. Very few seem to actually understand what accessibility (or web standards, for that matter) is. Because of that ignorance, which seems to be particularly widespread among enterprise-level CMS vendors, most CMSs have an inaccessible admin interface that is used to publish inaccessible websites.

I always make sure that whatever CMS I use, I will at least allow the published content to be accessible and standards compliant. But the admin interface used to publish content is a different matter.

We rarely even touch that, for several reasons:Understanding the mish-mash of nested tables, 20th century HTML, and JavaScript dependencies that most CMS admin interfaces consist of is near impossible.

Messing around with the admin interface is asking for trouble when it’s time to upgrade the CMS.It isn’t really our job, unless a CMS vendor pays us to do what they should have done from the beginning.

So, are there any options if you want a CMS that has an accessible admin interface? Perhaps.

When it comes to commercial alternatives, I am not aware of any CMS whose admin interface even comes close to being accessible. But obviously I haven’t used them all (which I doubt any single person has).

If you happen to know of any accessible commercial options, please speak up.