i am a camera

Today, my local library called to tell me that the book I recommended had arrived and could be checked out. One small way that I'm promoting Web Standards is by recommending web standards-based books to my local librarian.

If you were to peruse the shelves of the Westbank Library in Austin Texas you would see books written by Budd, Haine (shown below), Meyer, Zeldman, and others who have advocated modern web standards via their writings.

MMmmmmm. Crow for breakfast today.

Despite my proclamation last year that the Atom syndication standard was redundant and irrelevant, Vine Type v1.2 will support three distinct Atom feeds.

If you didn't visit on CSS Naked Day, I've saved a screenshot of what this site looked like without styling.

Today, several hundred sites are removing "styling" from their web sites as a way of promoting quality internet design and in support of web standards.

So we're taking our styles off -- going naked for a day, so to speak. Why would we do this? It's to demonstrate some principles of professional website design that most internet visitors never see or realize exist:

My site is serving application/xhtml+xml once again thanks to the fine detective work by Microsoft IIS Tech Support Specialist WenJun.

After over twenty, yes twenty, emails, message board posts, and responses, the problem was determined to be ... my code. I was not handling correctly Request objects that did not contain an AcceptTypes object.

I can understand Molly's frustration seeing a high profile standards-compliant website regress after a redesign. Disney Store UK, as we all know, is not unique in this sense. What probably happened was this:

1. Some VP calls for a redesign
2. Requirements concerning look-and-feel + features were created
3. Competitive bidding process
4. Selection of a design that meets requirements

Note: Code Updated and docmented in the article application/xhtml+xml Part Deux

Iamacamera.org is now serving its valid XHTML 1.1 via the W3C recommended MIME type to those browsers that support it. And it looks like we will all be doing something like this for the next few years at least.

Updated 2 Nov 2005: XML namespace attribute added [see note 1]

Amid seas churning with DOCTYPE indecision and littered with the flotsom of MIME-type argument wreckage, I've decided to harbor in the relative safety of XHTML 1.1 and text/html. That is, until I see a clear de facto standard trend -- or someone (perhaps you) convinces me otherwise, I'm staying put.

Last week when I commented on Joe Clark's PDF accessibility article, I didn't realize he might be listening. (Small world, huh? I commented on a blog in Sweden and Joe in Toronto asked for a comment from me in Austin.) It appears, however, that he was listening.

Joe Clark's article at A List Apart defends the accessibility of Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. You may know them as Acrobat documents because they are most likey read by your Acrobat Reader application from Adobe. (Mr. Clark takes great pains to disassociate PDF from Acrobat.)

Accessibility

One big argument against PDF has been that screen readers, those specialized readers for sight impaired individuals, could not understand PDF documents well. Mr. Clark argues that screen reader improvements combined with markup changes within the PDF document itself can provide an acceptable level of accessibility.

One of the most widely followed web design blogizines out there, Jeffrey Zeldmans's A List Apart sports a new design today and everyoneistalkingaboutit.