Standardista and web development community leader Molly Holzschlag pointed me to the “very awesome iJustine”, who posted this hilarious rap by m0serious about standards-based web design. User interface tips, semantics, accessibility — it’s all there! Perfect for nerds and gangsters alike… Molly and iJustine’s posts are complete with transcript, so educate yourself

We built a simple web site for the New Mexico Rural Water Association (NMRWA) 5 years ago, and their tech-savvy staff has maintained the site content on their own ever since. The layout and code had started to show its age, though, so NMRWA recently hired us to revamp the site.

The new site is more responsive to the preferences of site visitors (it expands with the browser window, any modern browser can change the font sizes, etc), and is vastly improved under the hood (page semantics, accessibility, search-engine-optimization). The site integrates a phpBB-based forum, with simple theming to tie it in to the look and feel rest of the site.

NMRWA continues to maintain the site content, but now they’ve got a modern framework to build on! As always, we take it as the highest compliment that we’re able to maintain such long-term relationships with our clients.

Visit the new NMRWA site at nmrwa.org.

Web browser drama!

Microsoft is still reeling in the web browser market from its own five-year failure to update Internet Explorer before version 7 last year. After being poised to continue their arrogant imperial approach to said market with a new proposal called “version targeting“, I’m thrilled to see they’ve changed course and will now heed the wishes of the greater web development community.

Version targeting is the idea that web sites should explicitly specify which version of the browser they’d like to use, and Microsoft was going to require web sites to “opt-in” to using the latest version of Internet Explorer every time a new version of the browser was released in the future. (If they didn’t, even IE99 would still show the web site exactly like IE7 did!) This proposal is a reaction to the trouble they created by fixing many of their own bugs with the release of Internet Explorer 7, and it would be a sea-change for web development: moving away from the convergence on web standards and the idea of progressive enhancement, back to the use of specific bits of code dictated by browser vendors from the top down for their one particular browser.

The version targeting proposal and explicit opt-in requirement has created a huge upswelling of comment and debate in the web development community, and while 99% of “blue collar” web developers like me seemed opposed to the idea, I was disappointed to see so many rockstar standardistas coming out apologetically in favor. Many thanks to Jeremy Keith, who took a strong stand against the idea in a recent article on A List Apart. Jeremy wrote:

The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of "breaking the web" in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches.

Well, as of yesterday, Microsoft has changed course and said that while their new version targeting scheme will remain intact, web sites will no longer have to explicitly opt-in! IE will continue to adhere to web standards as best it can by default, and the onus to “version target” will be on developers who explicitly want to use an old version of IE. This is great news.

Workers of the web unite! And kudos to Microsoft. It’s excellent to see them listening, and working with the greater community.

We just helped Washington CeaseFire launch a new, Drupal-based web site! From the site: “Washington CeaseFire is a statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing gun violence in Washington state through education, research, and advocacy.”

The site is a relatively simple Drupal installation, with a handful of user-contributed modules. We helped WCF consolidate multiple legacy membership databases into the new site database. The new site will provide a platform for WCF to track membership, facilitate donations, and send newsletters.

On the graphic design side, there were a few challenges developing the Drupal theme from the mock-ups provided by their initial designer. In the end, we were able to stick to our coding “best practices” (semantic and mostly valid markup; reasonable Search Engine Optimization), and provide a flexible, adaptable user experience for both site visitors and site editors, while still matching the original mocks.

We had a great time working with the WCF folks and as always, we’re excited to help clients/friends get up to speed with this powerful tool. Drupal allows them almost complete control over the content of the site and their membership database, with an easy to use administrative interface.

Check out the new washingtonceasefire.org.