Farlops Industries

Perhaps some of you have noticed that when I link to stories on the big media sites like Ziff-Davis, the BBC or the New York Times I tend to link to the printer-friendly, single-page low-bandwidth versions. I do this for several reasons:

• It reduces the number of ads that have to be viewed. Sometimes it eliminates the ads entirely–hurrah!
• It often gathers the story onto a single page. I disagree with the experts who say vertical scrolling is bad. I think most people don’t mind scrolling several screens of text, especially if it gives them a sense of continuity in the subject they are reading. I think what people really object to is loading time. If you use three-zillion layout tables and then attempt to jam 7 seven screens of text into it, the page will take a long time to load. If you just had the text, the loading goes much faster. Yet another reason why layout tables are evil and CSS is good.
• The format is more accessible to screen-readers and non-visual browsers.

So now there is a repository for Greymatter tweaks. For example, now there is a way to fix the unescaped ampersands Greymatter generates. Since I know perl, I fixed the ampersand thing on my own but it is good to know that other functionality is there should I want to try it.

I just posted my first bug to Bugzilla!

A growing number of software companies are making web tools that use something very similar to Microsoft’s recently removed smart tag technology.

All these things, since the now defunct Flyswat and Third Voice onwards, seem to use JavaScript or JScript to do this. Yet another reason to keep scripting turned off until you need it.

For over 3 years the Web Standards Project harped, cajoled and harangued browser makers to build stuff that supported W3C recommendations of HTML, DOM and CSS. Finally, nearly 5 years after the CSS1 recommendation, browsers that support standards are coming out, even Microsoft is finally playing by the rules.

The use of @import gives us web designers and developers a chance to break cleanly with the broken browsers of the past. It divides browsers into three groups:

1. Those that don’t understand @import–Lynx, Arachne, Internet Explorer 3, Internet Explorer 4.5 for the Mac, Netscape Navigator 4.
2. Those that do understand @import and have good, if not totally complete, implementations of CSS.
3. And Internet Explorer 4 for Windows, which understands @import but doesn’t have a good implementation of CSS.

Most page designers and web developers worth their salt know that this allows us to break cleanly with legacy browsers. Just hide all the presentational stuff behind @import and deliver straight, presentation-free markup to the browsers that don’t get that method of linking stylesheets. The content is still delivered, the links still work and the site is still usable–hurrah! No more broken browsers!

This still leaves us two problems though:

1. How to convince the bosses of big commercial sites that this is beneficial and won’t alienate customers.
2. How to protect amateur page builders from their own ignorance and ensure they generate valid markup and CSS.

The first problem is deeply political, economic and philosophical and we as web technicians need to frame our arguments right to assuage the fears of our bosses.

The second problem is somewhat easier. Just start bugging the makers of WYSIWYG web page editors to make certain their programs generate W3C valid markup. This is the new focus of the Web Standards Project.