ADC promotes best practices in web development

The Apple Developer Connection has published a technical article on how to follow the W3C recommendations when coding web pages.

The Safari development team at Apple has made a dedicated effort to implement Web standards. This means that the easiest way to ensure optimal rendering of your pages in Safari is by following the standards. Doing so will also guarantee optimal rendering in Mozilla, Opera and Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Of course, each of these browsers has its own minor quirks or legitimate differences of interpretation, so testing your site in all of them is still mandatory.

The article covers DOCTYPE, page layout, XHTML, CSS and Javascript. A number of external links are provided for all these topics.

http://developer.apple.com/internet/bestwebdev.html

Toggle HTML parsing in Mail.app

This is a cool tip found on MacOSXHint that enables HTML viewing of trusted mail. It turn on HTML download for 2 seconds, and turns it off again.

  tell application "Mail"
    set download html attachments to true
    delay 2
    set download html attachments to false      
  end tell

Just add the above script to your script menu.

Javascript in Mac Browsers

How well do Mac browser handle Javascript? A recent ADC article examines this question in details.

The article presents seven scripts that test crucial bits of Javascript functionality, ranging from form field manipulation to advanced W3C DOM scripting. The main Mac browsers are tested, Safari included.

Tests include manipulation of form field values, opening and communicate with pop-up windows, register event handlers to links, moving DHTML layers, change the display style of an element, generating form fields using the W3C DOM, and importing XML documents and showing their contents.

Mozilla executed every script with a minor bug in the DHTML test. Its unique in its ability to import XML files. Safari didn't support XML import, but succeeded in all the other tests, and appears as a strong contender.

This should be of interest to any web designer.

Editable Share {i}Calendar

How about a shared calendar that iCal can subscribe to, and all users whatever their operating system can add items to from a Web interface ?

Sounds groovy, no ? Okay, iCal can only view it, but it can come in handy.

The actual calendar is stored in a MySQL database, and the actual iCal is dynamically generated on the fly. This solution requires access to a web server, PHP and MySQL.

Check out Joel Rennich's article on afp548 for full instruction details. I'll let you know later how I got on..