Comcast recently updated their customer portal. Apparently with some standards in mind.
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Category: Web Development
My passion
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Coding with Timezones
I’ve got a bit of a complex question here for all you professional web developers:
Environment
Website targeting international users in all 24 timezones. Website based in US.
Problem Summary
How do you handle timezones correctly? What is the best strategy?
Problem Expanded
The particular problem I see is Daylight savings. I’ve seen several sites ask it based on GMT (-5 for New York for example). Now what that misses is Daylight Savings. Not everyone in all timezones participates, and each has a different time when they implement it. Keeping it in GMT isn’t exactly desirable either, since users need to know the time (in their timezone).
Anyone take on the issue? I’ve searched high and low, and yet to see a good solution. Most just leave it as GMT, or hide times (put it in very low contrasting color compared to it’s background for example).
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silverorange rocks!
As if you didn’t already know silverorange totally kicks butt.
I found this little gem tonight. I’m already working off of it, for a new site I’m working on. Exactly what I was looking for.
Thanks to silverorange for making the web excellent.
I decided to take some time today, and start workng on Project Aquarius, a secretive project I’ve been workng on for a few months (though not often within those months). Lots of progress! So I’m thrilled.
- Cleaned tons of old templates out
- Tons of optimization
- Quite a few bug fixes
- Front-end work
- Lots of stylesheeting and HTML
There’s still more to do, lots of it, but it feels great to be back in the code!
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Holy poo, Yahoo’s Strict
Yea, take a look at that source.
Interesting eh?
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Why Does CSS have to suck
[rant]
I’m going out on an edge here to say this, knowing a few people will bite my head off for even suggesting this. But I must ask: Why does CSS have to suck? At what point did the CSS WG come up with that decision? Ok, now let me explain where this is coming from:
I’m a strong believer in web standards. They are a great idea, and using CSS is right, and I do support that. What I don’t support is what CSS actually is like.
CSS has been around for some time, but why wasn’t there CSS Columns for example since the beginning? A very basic part of most page designs. CSS is extremely awkward when it comes to layout. Text manipulation is easy. It’s layout that’s painful. Then of course add in browser support.
I think this may be a tiny little reason why web standards aren’t prevalent on the net as of yet. Because CSS has a steep learning curve.
I’m going to really take a chance when I say this: But perhaps CSS3 should rework it from the ground up? Focus on layout and actually make things easier?
Look how easy I can design a site with tables. I can position fairly well, align stuff, etc. etc. Now try with CSS.
I’m working on a project right now that I’m trying to adhere to web standards. But what’s my problem? I’m spending way to much time on layout, and not enough time on the backend. That’s really not good. If anything, designing should become easier.
Most corporate websites are designed by designers, not web developers. Web Developers get handed a page, and integrate it into the CMS. Now how many designers do you think are ever going to sit down and do CSS? Their mind is in design, not code.
Again, I agree CSS is a great theory, keep design and content separate. But the CSS implementation just plain sucks. And until it improves, I can’t see penetration being very high.
Especially after languages like HTML being so easy, you’d think they’d have the perfect complement with CSS.
CSS layout is just wrong. It’s awkward, tough, and not friendly.
[/rant]
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Moving towards standards
I’ve been a web developer for some time now. Since I entered High School, way back in late 1998. Since then times have changed, saw the bubble of free ISP’s who thought ads would pay for everything, to becoming a free ISP myself. One movement that’s really been large in my mind has been the move towards standards. Allow me to explain.
It used to be a webmaster was one of either two ways. You either used an editor like Go LIve, Dreamweaver, or Claris Homepage (remember that beauty with it’s amazing table builder). Or you were a toolsmith who made a script to help build your site. Either way, your website was a proprietary mess of HTML, perhaps a javascript, and a backend of ugliness. I couldn’t stand it. I’m a little bit compulsive. That’s why I like Apple products. Clean, great UI, integrated, functional. Everything the web wasn’t.
Fast forward to now:
Now I’m a web developer working on a few projects, including a new venture (won’t discuss much details at this time). What’s life like now:
PHP for serverside development. Using Smarty as a templating engine, and PEAR::Package::DB. All my output in new Apps is moving closer and closer to XHTML 1.0 Strict.
What’s my advantage in all this? Is it as complex as days of old, just new products? Absolutely not.
- I use PHP because it works on many platforms. I prefer UNIX (Linux or Mac OS X), but it also works fine on Solaris, or Windows. Making sure my bases are covered.
- Smarty makes it easy to update my interface without touching my app. That makes life much easier.
- PEAR::Package::DB allows me to have a layer of abstraction between my app and the database. This makes transitioning in the future to a new platform much easier. Also saves me trouble.
- My output is as close to strict as possible these days because it’s quicker to template. Templating tag soup is a giant mess. Anyone whose done it knows. Strict is much easier to do. Not to mention the more I control with CSS, the faster I can make changes in the future.
- Another advantage of all this is performance. PHP is fast, Smarty Caches to keep performance. PEAR DB is pretty zippy as well. By going XHTML strict and using CSS as much as possible, I’m cutting bandwidth, and making pages download faster.
I’m personally of the belief the golden age of the internet hasn’t quite dawned. That will happen when my PDA is as useful as my computer, Email is without problems (spam/viruses), and platform is irrelevant. When the web can feel like an application. Were moving in that direction, but not there yet. Less and less websites are “PC only”, or “IE 5 only”. Much more neutrality thanks to things like Mozilla’s Evangelism work. Not perfect, but better. The web can feel more like an application with XUL, though adoption levels aren’t quite there yet. Email is still a disaster though. Hopefully SpamAssassin 3.0 will be out soon.
The web has improved IMHO. But I’m convinced the next few years will continue to be just as interesting as years gone by. Lets get coding and enjoy the show…
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XHTML FAQ
A grreat FAQ on XHTML is available, and I encourage all fellow web developers to read up. I found a few interesting things:
First read this:
strong>Why is it allowed to send XHTML 1.0 documents as text/html?
XHTML is an XML format; this means that strictly speaking it should be sent with an XML-related media type (application/xhtml+XML, application/xml, or text/xml). However XHTML 1.0 was carefully designed so that with care it would also work on legacy HTML user agents as well. If you follow some simple guidelines, you can get many XHTML 1.0 documents to work in legacy browsers. However, legacy browsers only understand the media type text/html, so you have to use that media type if you send XHTML 1.0 documents to them. But be well aware, sending XHTML documents to browsers as text/html means that those browsers see the documents as HTML documents, not XHTML documents.
Then read this:
Why is it disallowed to send XHTML 1.1 documents as text/html?
XHTML 1.1 is pure XML, and only intended to be XML. It cannot reliably be sent to legacy browsers. Therefore XHTML 1.1 documents must be sent with an XML-related media type, such as application/xhtml+XML.
Now in the source of that webpage, I see:
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<HTML xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
</html>
but Mozilla says:
Type: text/html
Does anyone taste dogfood? Will the net ever move to towards XML? Not even the W3C feels it’s safe to move.
I don’t think we will ever see websites that say:
Type: application/xhtml+XML
On a sidenote: Does anyone know what versions of Internet Explorer support this trick? Is it 5.0+? Or just 6.0?
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PHP 5.0 is Released!
The PHP development team is proud to announce the official release of PHP 5.
Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:
- The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features.
- XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
- A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.
- A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.
- A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later. This new extension includes an object-oriented interface in addition to a traditional interface; as well as support for many of MySQL’s new features, such as prepared statements.
- SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website (http://www.sqlite.org/).
- Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams.
- And lots more…
Enjoy!
PHP Development Team
Sweet, I’ll have to update Bender this weekend so I can toy around with it.
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Favorite XHTML/CSS Book
So a question to all… what’s your favorite XHTML/CSS reference book/website?