Future Media Standards & Guidelines from the BBC. I particularly appreciated this point:

1.1.2. If a user does not have the correct plug-in to access the enhanced content, or cannot easily access the content because they are using assistive technologies (such as screen readers) or Betsie to view the site, this should not detract […]

Due to last week’s blizzard the CWSA’s first purely social event had to be postponed and is rescheduled for today. A note to all you foodies, Bier Markt/Bar Cento chef Jonathan Sawyer will be appearing on Iron Chef America tomorrow night on Michael Symon’s team. If you’d like to have the best burger in town, […]

This Saturday, March 7th the CWSA would like to present:
The First Semi-Annual Convocation of the Benevolent & Protective Order of Markup
Are you interested in CSS? Want to geek out? This is an opportunity to meet and socialize with the Cleveland Web Standards Association, as well as drink beer and eat some of the best food […]

Last night’s CWSA planning meeting was a great success. We’ve had a lot of new faces, some of them traveled pretty far to attend. Some topics discussed last night:

Trying to advance standards in the local web and business communities without being the CSS gestapo.
Involving other industries in our group. (Maybe we can find a lawyer […]

I’ve seen a lot of debate going on around the web as to the direction of HTML5 and XHTML2. I wasn’t really too worried about it, I use XHTML because it’s what I’m comfortable with, it forces me to write well-formed markup, and so far has always seemed like the appropriate solution. Recently my employer […]

I finally had a chance to make it to one of these meetups, in spite of inclement weather and parking in the wrong lot. I’ve been wanting to go for quite some time, but illness/client work/weather has always prevented me from doing so. Not to mention, once I get home and settled on Tuesdays it’s […]

In the past few months the web community in Cleveland has really begun to flourish. Tonight the Cleveland Web Standards Meetup Group gets together. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to make it yet, and I’m ill today so I still won’t be in attendance. On the agenda tonight is non-profit work as well as the […]

Microsoft has always had two big strikes against them:

1. Microsoft builds everything in their own crippled formats.
2. It’s appearing that Microsoft will never really embrace web standards, which means approximately 90% of web users must suffer as a result.

At my first job I worked in-house in an enterprise level environment where we were forced to rely on Microsoft’s mostly unreliable junk. IIS would always inexplicably serve users the wrong image. As a designer, trying to build a website in the Visual Studio IDE is like trying to decipher hieroglyphics. We were slowed down by the constant MSDN and licensing issues.

At my previous job we had a partnership with a web hosting company using Windows servers. It was a huge, crippling burden. We were constantly developing solutions that were already available in the open source community. Essentially we were passing this cost on to our clients in more expensive hosting, and longer development times with more bugs in a language that simply didn’t offer as much documentation. And let me tell you, .Net is practically inapproachable if you don’t come from a development background, it’s like building in the dark.

If you haven’t heard, today is reboot day. I was a little disappointed, I’d expected to see a lot more sites. I also expected to see more original sites. A few of the rebooters might have taken emulation to the next step, blatant rip off. I even saw one snag Mint’s […]