Tantek Çelik tells the story of CSS hacks past, present and future.

First in a series….

If you feel like it, we have enough in the account for you to get a couple.

It is not very often that you ask for anything, but I have looked at these wrist watch es, and I see why you want one. So get it.

This is a good online-site to purchase your wacth from too. I see why you have been looking at it — because it has the ability to track shipment delivery.

During these times, we can’t always get what we would truly like.

I know honestly, how much you love one of these wonderful swiss look-alikes.

You get a reward today. Please go and pick out the watch you like best.

http://some-url/

With my most sincere love,

Ester

John Allsopp has taken some amazing first-steps to define and catalog patterns for the web. Keep your eyes open for PatternQuiz, modeled after Dan Cederholm’s SimpleQuiz and a brand new WebPattern Wiki should be up at webpatterns.org soon.

Joe D’Andrea, who along with Vincent Murphy and Rebecca Taylor led the Web standards revolution on AT&T’s corporate site looks back on one full year with Web standards.

The story at AT&T is in a lot of ways similar to that of McAfee and in other ways, different. Similar in the sense that it was a ground up effort by a small team who were willing to do the hard work necessary to get there. Different in that there weren’t too many people trying to tell us that we were making a mistake. It was a very simple sell.

“We will cut page weight by an average of 50%.”

And that was overly conservative. In most cases it was 70%. But man, no matter what kind of deal you get on bandwidth, it’s hard to say no to that. We talked about the built-in benefits of accessibility and search-engine optimization. We talked about maintainability. We talked about extensibility. And how a lot of common localization headaches would go bye-bye. We talked about the suddenly much easier customizablility of partner sites which was and is the biggest part of the consumer business. With all of those benefits, it was easy to give the extra effort the big green light.

Sure, there were grumbles. But they all came from UI designers who weren’t ready to give up the ghost. It was early on in the overall scheme of Web standards adoption. Especially by larger companies. There were just a few examples to draw upon when we embarked upon this journey in the summer of 2004. And it was tough for a lot of people to swallow the fact that they had to learn how to properly author a Web page for the first time all over again. What was once the easiest part of their job now became the most challenging. And now, well over a year later, everyone would agree that it was absolutely, without a doubt the right thing to do. Everyone involved can truly call themselves a Web professional because of it.

Like Joe, I too am very proud to have played a principle role in bringing Web standards to a major corporation. But I am absolutely beaming because while I have personally moved on to new challenges, the talented team of individuals at McAfee will carry the Web standards torch proudly and to new heights. To leave behind a legacy that was in hind-sight just the spark for a flame that grows stronger and stronger is a tremendous source of pride. The coming redesign to the McAfee corporate site will be launching in March ’06 fully integrated with Interwoven’s TeamSite. It’s sure to make for a great case-study.

I guess the point I am trying to make, is that while there are reports of once great works coming undone overnight, it certainly isn’t common-place. In more than one case we have strong evidence that forward progress continues to be made in the global adoption of Web standards.

Keep up the good fight, people!

Disclaimer: While I am an eBay employee, these opinions are my own.

Mike Davidson (almost) takes the covers off his eagerly awaited new venture. Newsvine promises to be a community driven news site with articles culled from everywhere….from major news outlets to the individual blogger and everything in between. Can’t wait to see how this grows!

Mike Stenhouse articulates very well the kind of CSS management strategy that I have been using intuitively over the past couple of years and will continue to use in the future as the teams I am working with become larger and larger. I have learned along the way that sandboxing CSS rules is a good way to paint yourself into a corner if you’re not careful. I am increasingly trying to avoid being overly specific while maintaining the benefits of specificity. It’s a fine line.

My plan was simply to work on the primary navigation tab set. I also needed to do some prep for the weekly Web standards workshop today. But you know me…once I get started, it’s hard to stop. I just couldn’t help myself. I took a break on Saturday to help my brother move some furniture around for Mom. Other than that, I was immersed in code.

Check out the before and after.

Not a bad start. Using WebSiteOptimization.com to compare the two versions side-by-side, you can see that the total size of the optimized version (44 KB) is around 30% of the original (120 KB). The mark-up alone has been cut from 37 KB down to 9 KB. The CSS from 63 KB to 9 KB.

Ahhh….that feels good. Just put one foot in front of the other. With a little luck and a lotta faith, this thing (either in part or in whole) may see the light of day sometime before the end of the year. Until then, there is much to do. I want the layout to be flexible of course, so a strategy will need to be developed that allows for that, and at the same time ensures visual consistency with the legacy content. And I still think we can squeeze some more bytes out of this thing. Oh yeah….it looks great on the phone.

Update:

Just fixed some positioning issues with the tab set in Safari 1.3, Netscape 6.2 and Firefox 1.5b. We’re good to go except for Mac IE 5.2 and again, just some positioning issues with the tab set.

Disclaimer: While I am an eBay employee, these opinions are my own.

Molly has come up with a set of Web Design and Development Personality Indicators.

I’d say I’m a SASS/SACE hybrid with one foot in the real world and the idealistic belief that comprimises never have to come at the expense of the user. Anyone who has worked with me would probably agree.

Markus Mielke issues a Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages.

Time to get busy. Start moving all those IE specific hacks into conditional comments.

Update

There certainly isn’t any reason to panic right now. While conditional comments are a great way to segregate IE specific CSS, it’s not an emergency situation. Eric Meyer laughs it off and offers sage advice.

Derek Featherstone has created a great resource called Simply Accesible which is based on his recent presentation at Web Essentials 05, in Sydney, Australia.

Derek has some great new thoughts on the design and authoring of accessible forms. I’m particularly excited about the idea of grouping all required form fields in their own “required” fieldset, while creating an “optional” fieldset for the rest of the fields. This is a fresh idea that warrants further exlporation. Thanks, Derek!