The team of developers making the Opera Web Browser can (at least for now) rest easy on the fact that their product supports modern web standards to a superior degree. Opera 9 RC has had it nailed down for some time, but this is their first public Opera release passing the Acid2. As of this writing it is 9.0 beta.

This bold claim is verifiable by anyone using said browser. All you have to do is take the Acid2 Test. If you go to this page using any browser except KHTML-based Safari 2 or Opera 9, you will most likely see a distorted mess of colors. These browsers, as much as you love or hate them, do not support what the WaSP has determined to be the most needed and useful functionality of HTML 4 and CSS 2.

If you are interested in seeing your choice browser pass the Acid2 test, I suggest notifying the development team of the browser you use

Recently people have started noticing something odd. They have to click on a flash file, java applet, or any other interactive component before using it. You may see the message “Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control” What causes this? Thanks to a patent troll by Eolas Technologies, Microsoft has chosen to make a change to their Internet Exporer interface for all content that requires an <applet>, <object>, or <embed> tag.

A Ridiculous Patent

I’m not going to go into the specifics, but Eolas filed the patent this century [edit: I take that back, issued 1998] and basically claims to have invented the process of using interactive content on the internet. The W3C has even gotten involved, claiming that documents published over a decade ago qualify as prior art against this ridiculous patent.

Eolas wants 521 million dollars from Microsoft to license the priviledge of allowing IE 6 to work the way it has worked since 2001. Oh, and they don’t care about licensing to the browsers with smaller market share (Mozilla, Opera, et al). How funny.

LevelTen is already prepared

Clients of LevelTen need not worry, as we have been using the methods required to sidestep this frivolous ordeal for years, and have noticed no changes to sites we have produced.

Read more at MSDN for an explanation of the problem and different solutions.

Or if you want a quick solution, use this code generator

If a picture is worth a thousand words, that means I talk less, and many times that’s a good thing. I ran across a simple, rather compelling way of explaining the benefits of semantic markup combined with CSS. It is titled Standards in a Nutshell. See for yourself.

Imagine the three colors as three different programming languages. In the first example, they’re all slammed together in one document. In the other, they are neatly separated and grouped in a less random fashion. If you are unfamiliar to web design and scripting, which one looks more organized and maintainable? If you are up to speed, crack open a few sites, which one resembles your website?

It may not have to be perfect like the diagram, but it is much easier to maintain a website when you separate the different languages while bulding it initially. This goes for a simple site all the way up to a wiki or CMS.

Copywriting was by far the most influential and rewarding class of my college career. I sometimes wonder what my academic experience would have looked like had I taken it as a freshman instead of as a senior. Professor Shaw was a witty, sixty-something professional who had worked in the industry for decades. She was a quality assurance Nazi. If your work stunk (and it usually did), she would look you in the eye, smile and say something like, “I said to use your words sparingly,” or, “spend more than ten minutes on the next draft.” If it was a bad final draft, she’d tell you it wasn’t the final draft. She was as sparse in speech as she was on paper. I learned much from what wasn’t said.

On the first day of the semester, Shaw greeted the class with something very close to the following address:

“You’re all horrible writers. Don’t feel bad, it’s not entirely your fault. You’ve been taught to write poorly. Your English teachers may have said, ‘It’s quality, not quantity that’s important,’ but I’ve no doubt they still pushed for ‘ten pages on this’ or ‘one thousand words on that.’ If you write one sentence, you should write it well. And if you’ve written one good sentence, a second will often be superfluous - at least in the world of advertising.”

Years later, that address still rings in my ears when writing. So get on with it already, Donovan!

The Copy Workshop,” is so much more than a book on copywriting. It should be required reading for anyone who has to write or even speak to anyone ever. This is THE textbook on making a point. It’s PACKED with entertaining example ads and fun (albeit challenging) exercises. Bruce Bendinger quips his way through his instruction in four sections: Forewords, More Words, Your Words, and Onwards. From history to how-to, from typography to television, Bendinger covers the gamut. This was my course reading for Copywriting 3401. If you talk and/or write to people on occasion, I commend this book to you. If you work in Marketing - you should have read this years ago. If you’ve already read it, you should read it again. I return to it annually.

The world rejoices as an extension, IE Tab, has been released that allows users to view content in either the Gecko or Internet Explorer engine. This functionality has been a part of Netscape 8 for some time, so it's not ground-breaking, but still, I will be forced to open Internet Explorer up much less often! Windows Update even runs properly in Firefox via this extension. How cool is that?

It adds a contextual menu item so you can right click a link to open up a new tab of IE-rendered content. It also adds a browser icon to the status bar, so the little Firefox icon in the status bar can be clicked, which reloads the page in IE mode and switches the icon to the blue E. You'll always know which engine you're viewing in. Unfortunately this only works for windows since it uses the native IE engine.

Today Apple announced “Boot Camp” - a new, free to download software that will make it easy to install Windows XP on their newest machines with Intel chips. With Boot Camp, Apple hopes to further entice customers currently interested in their newest computers with Intel chips - the Mac mini, iMac and MacBook Pro.

Boot Camp will also be added to Apple’s next operating system - Leopard.

Read More Here

I just purchased my new iMac, maybe I’ll have to give Boot Camp a try.

That’s right folks! Wednesday April 5, 2006 is the first annual CSS Naked Day. This idea was cooked up to promote some awareness of the importance of valid semantic markup.

The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and; well, a fun play on words. I mean, who doesn’t want to get naked?

When a site strips its CSS off, you see the markup and nothing else. It’s actually pretty close to how a search engine or a screen reader sees it. Although a bit boring, it should still be perfectly understandable to anyone who stumbles across your site.

We’re not participating (this year) at LevelTen, but you can see my site in the nude on April 5