I read an interesting tweet just now by Sergey ilinsky, saying that his bug report to Chromium was being ignored. A bug that let's you include css only for chrome WebKit browsers, like apple's safari and google's chrome. Look here for the example page., the text is red in chromium WebKit and black in other browsers. The HTML is valid in case you're wondering, so you won't catch it that way.

All you have to do is to write a phony include that only chromium WebKit browser ( today ) will detect and act upon. Like this:

<link type="custom/mime+type"
rel="stylesheet" 
href="css/chromehack.css" />

The type="custom/mime+type" is what does the magic. Chromium WebKit browsers will request the file from the server and add it to the document. What should happen is that browser shouldn't fetch the file or process it for that matter. The chrome team responded with a status: WontFix, which is wrong in my opinion. People will use this to write css to over come chromium WebKit bugs instead of learning what it is they are doing wrong.

The reasoning of the chromium team is:

Darin, given the number of web sites this would likely break I don't think we want to be this strict. If you disagree then I will re-open this.

I think that there is something to be said about this reasoning, but I am one of those people that wants browsers to be very, very strict... I understand that browsers don't want to "break the web", after all, who remembers the outrage that ensued when microsoft released version 7 of IE. A lot of people blamed IE for their own sloppy coding, breaking bad websites.

Why should this be fixed?

A lot of people write css to work around browser bugs, when they should go out and read the specifications. Very often I see people complain about bugs, they have done something wrong in their HTML. So when I see a reaction like the wontfix by chromium I think that a lot of people still will take the easy way out and choose the hack, instead of learning to do it the right way. Not knowing that they are walking a fine line, utilizing a "feature" in a browser which may be fixed at any moment, thus rendering their fixes obsolete.

So I hope that they will fix this soon, after all building browsers to allow sloppy coding is encouraging that very thing in my opinion. And yes, I know that the "we render anything you code, even our own front page garbage" is what made IE6 the greatest browser in it's time. But in the end it slowed down the web, as people were not encouraged to write proper code, but got away with building crap.

Update

Kyle made an excellent point in his comment. This is a WebKit bug or feature. The browser does not do anything wrong, as this is not being specified. So browsers can do what they want with it. He even makes some good points on how we could be using this. Still I am not conviced and urge people not to use this, as it will come back and bite you somewhere...

Due to some problem with a faulty table that habari set in my mysql database and/or the inability of my host (who has some problems) to create backups from it, all of my content from last october untill now was lost. I am now slowly returning everything, but for the comments as google doesn't cache them as it does my page.

So it will be bumpy and I will be making more frequent backups from now on, I promise, I really will. As for the comments, I will do my best and if anyone has a suggestion, please do...

In my work I use textmate, the mac only editor from macromates. It comes with the abilities for macro's and plugins, some of them are in my opinion very usefull for a web developer.

CSS

For CSS I absolutely love this one Format CSS single-line. With this you can format your CSS in the way you prefer, simply by pressing ctrl-q.

You choose either 1 or 2, where the latter is the single-line option you should go with when you publish stuff.

JavaScript

Another one is for writing javascript, the one thing that makes it usefull to me is that it runs jslint on my js as I save. That sort of thing keeps me sharp and makes me put ; in all of the right places. It warns you, nice and unobtrusively, of any warning or errors as you save. And you can call it before that to get a nice window, where you can click right through to the line where the error is.

It also compresses your JavaScript files in two ways, minifying or obfuscating it. You can get it here: Javascript tools.

This is one to see.

A great interview with jeffrey zeldman about web standards. He talks about his view on them and how the adoption came around. A nice piece is around the 6th minute, where he explains why he started doing standards. Turns out he had the same reason I did, he just didn't want to build 4 versions of each page but wanted to focus on the content and the design.

So In other words, if you use web standards you get to go to the pub earlier :.

As we did in 2007, A List Apart and you teamed up to shed light on precisely who creates websites. Where do we live? What kind of work do we do? What are our job titles? How well or how poorly are we paid? How satisfied are we, and where do we see ourselves going?

Great survey, with the results marked up in an extra ordinary manner by Eric Meyer. The data is presented in a series of tables as plain data and than styled masterfully with css.

<tr>
	<th scope="row">Definitely not</th>
	<td>
		<div>
			<p style="width: 27%;">
				<span>27.0%</span>
			</p>
		</div>
	</td>
</tr>

This very simple table looks like this, after some css.

So if you want to see who makes websites and learn a thing or two about proper markup and styling, go and see for your self.