the 200ok weblog

Something I've observed is frontenders and designers often sound like they're talking about the same thing, while actually talking about different things.

For the past few years I've used Microsoft Virtual PC (with the free test images) for testing browsers that won't coexist on a single machine (IE in particular). It's effective, although the image expiry makes things a bit tedious at times.

For the past few months I've been using a Wacom Bamboo Pen + Touch tablet, replacing the original Bamboo I reviewed a while ago. I've given a pretty good workout on both Windows XP and Windows 7, so it's about time to review this one too.

I've felt torn watching the current spat between Apple and Adobe. On the one hand, it might move a few people away from building Flash sites. On the other hand, it bothers me to have people act like it's suddenly a game-changer - it means they just aren't paying attention.

A perennial question on discussion lists, and in fact at work, is how to handle heading hierarchies in pages and title structure across sites.

While there's a fair bit of opinion to be had, when people focus on creating a valid document structure the same rules consistently appear. These rules not only match up to the high-minded ideals of specification, but also serve the prosaic requirements of the daily development grind.

Event: November Sydney Web Standards Group meeting 2009

On Friday Canberra welcomed an influx of web geeks, inviting them to mash up government-supplied data in interesting and useful ways. I'm not sure anyone really knew what to expect, least of all the hosts!