On March 31, at 16.00 PM I'll take my seminar during the SMAU event in Rome. I'll talk about the benefits of web standards for online marketing. Unfortunately, the following slides are only in Italian but I'm going to write an excerpt of my speech after the event (this time translated into English).
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Let's face it: as web developers, we are forced to support legacy browsers only because our clients want us to do so. Period. There's no reason to support them otherwise. Legacy browsers slow down the deployment of the web as a standard and accessible platform. With their bugs, anomalies, rendering inconsistencies, security issues and the like, they're actually a pain in the neck rather than something that must to be handled carefully. When I post some of my demos, many developers always ask the same question: does Internet Explorer 6 support this? This approach is harmful, because it actually makes us unaware of the many potential possibilities of web standards. For example, consider the case of advanced CSS selectors: for years many developers ignored them simply because IE6 doesn't support them at all. Result? Now they're rediscovering these selectors and wondering why they didn't use them before. Why? Because they wanted to support legacy browsers, that is, instead of coding to the standards they were inclined to code to the lowest common denominator (as Ian Hickson said). And this is harmful, because it doesn't force browser implementors to release better browsers (as in the case of IE6, whose lifespan is one of the longest period in the history of the web). So the point is: for a better web experience, please don't support legacy browsers. Thanks.
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
While developing this demo, I was struck by the fact that most of the JavaScript code we write is not meant to be full standard compliant but rather an attempt to make it work also in non-compliant browsers. In other words, we should code to the standards, not to the lowest common denominator (Internet Explorer). I think that IE's developers rely on the fact that the overwhelming majority of JavaScript scripts and libraries work on their browser just because web developers are forced to write non-standard code to make their scripts work even on a browser that is absolutely non-standard compliant.
In fact, Internet Explorer has the lowest implementation of ECMAScript and W3C DOM specifications. Most developers use an if...else approach to deal with IE inconsistencies and proprietary features. I think that this is a wrong approach, because if we continue to do so, Internet Explorer's developers won't probably build a better JavaScript engine just because they can count on the backward support used by scripts and libraries. So if we want that IE be a better browser, we should write standard JavaScript code without taking into account IE's inconsistencies and proprietary features.
When IE's developers will see that many web sites don't work on their browser anymore, they will probably start to reconsider their approach to web standards which, as many of you already know, has always been inconsistent and absolutely wrong.
If you are a web developer, then Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 is your introduction to the new features and elements of HTML5—all the leaner, cleaner, and more efficient code you’ve hoped for is available now with HTML5, along with some new tools that will allow you to create more meaningful and richer content. For everyone involved in web design, this book also introduces the new structural integrity and styling flexibility of CSS 3—which means better-looking pages and smarter content in your website projects.
For all forward-looking web professionals who want to start enjoying and deploying the new HTML5 and CSS3 features right away, this book provides you with an in-depth look the new capabilities—including audio and video—that are new to web standards. You’ll learn about the new HTML5 structural sections, plus HTML5 and CSS3 layouts. You’ll also discover why some people think HTML5 is going to be a Flash killer, when you see how to create transitions and animations with these new technologies. So get ahead in your web development through the practical, step-by-step approaches offered to you in Beginning HTML5 and CSS3.
This seems interesting and I've already added this book to my wish list. Oh, but there's also the new book of Mark Pilgrim on the subject. So, which will be? One? Both? I don't know!
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Beginning HTML5 and CSS3: Next Generation Web Standards is a new book on HTML5 and CSS3 that is up to be released (see Amazon). As always with Amazon, there's also a brief insight of book contents: