web standards

Steve Jobs announced the availability of Safari 3.0 Public Beta during yesterday's WWDC Keynote. For audience at large the biggest news about the release was that it is now available on Windows, as well. However, apparently there is a "hidden" (well, unpublicized) new feature that is just as exciting for Mac geeks like moi - Web Inpsector.

Web Inspector is a context menu-activated DOM analyzer a-la FireBug for Firefox. This thing is sweet (!) and will make Safari troubleshooting much nicer, from now on.

Thanks, Apple! Well done.

Adobe (ex-Macromedia) Flash is a core technology of today's Web. Unfortunately, it got a wrong start back in the days. Many designers sold their souls to the unprecedented opportunities offered by graphical web and forgot that Flash is a complement to HTML, not - a replacement. This confussion ended us in the initial flood of all-Flash websites - a complete nightmare, by any reasonable standards.

You might remember that even some big media companies made the mistake. I will spare their good names, considering that they [relatively] quickly corrected the mistake, but to make a point - the confusion did not infect only amateur designers. Unfortunately, the cure was not any less damaging - many websites and designers refused to use Flash, at all. It also helped that right at the time, Ajax emerged, giving buzzers new "hot" thing to buzz about.

You can do it very easily using IcoMaker. Just compose the ico as a GIF in any editor of your choice, save it. Start IcoMaker, go to "New Document", import your existing image with File->Include Image, then save.

That's it.

Irresponsible and short-sighted behaviour like this of Wal-Mart is why people have to put up with evil garbage like Internet Explorer:

P.S. Before you start frowning or chuckling, I encourage you to follow the links objectively demonstrating an example of why Internet Explorer is indeed evil and equally garbage