OK. Let’s talk frames…. No, wait! Where are you going? Come back! Perhaps I should’ve been a little more subtle. Chatted about the weather, or maybe the Green Bay Packers.

Instead, I came right out and used the “f” word. I understand your reluctance. Everybody, it seems, is sick of frames — including the W3C and other advocates of web standards. But frames still have a place in this world. So you just sit back and let me finish.

“So,” I say, “I’ve got these killer frames….”

“Sure, whatever,” you reply.

I look at you coyly. “But these frames, man … these frames, they float.”

Intrigued, you turn around and smile. “They float, huh? Tell me more.”
Continue Reading “Floating Content in I-Frames” »

If you’re anything like us, you’re always jumping on your cross-platform soapbox at the office. On mailing lists, over lunch, at parties, and on the bus home from the party (just in case the bus driver has been duped into supporting proprietary tags in his home page) you insist that everyone should follow W3C standards for HTML, CSS, and HTTP.

“Standards, standards, standards!”, you insist, as you pound on your podium. But do you actually test your own Web site for rigid W3C compliance? Be honest: Of course you don’t. You look at it with a couple of browsers, maybe a second computer, and just fix anything that looks wrong to your naked eye.

But if you really want to create cross-platform HTML and remove proprietary browser tricks from your site, you should be validating your HTML with the W3C’s HTML validator at validator.w3.org. The W3C validator is free to use and always up to date. And a more official source for standards specifications doesn’t exist.

Even better, you can augment the W3C specifications to include your own rules, such as forbidding nested tables. A “house rules” validator is an easy way to keep a team of developers from messing up each others’ work.