the 200ok weblog

The second batch of articles has been released at the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. This update really gets the curriculum up to a full head of steam - students can now learn everything they need to know to create a valid, accessible, fully styled website. The next update will see the Javascript articles added.

I contributed two articles to this round... styling lists and links; and styling tables. They were chunkier topics than we originally imagined, as it turns out... :)

Anyway, if you haven't checked out the Opera Web Standards Curriculum already, head on over and take a look.

One of the great things about our industry is being around people who are passionate and motivated. People who take ideas and make them real.

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be part of the first Local Government Web Network conference - We Believe in Community - run by Diana Mounter and Reem Abdelaty.

Webjam 8 is announced. Awesome!

Need to register with OpenID. OK, well I signed up for one of the OpenID services a couple of years ago, but it was the least memorable URL in history and well, I can't even remember which service it was.

I do have a Blogger account though, which I can remember and should work for OpenID now: Blogger in Draft: New feature: Blogger as OpenID provider.

Awesome! My blog already has OpenID meta tags, so I bang in the URL.

Your blog is not supported for use as an OpenID URL. Please check the following: Is your blog externally hosted? OpenID is only supported for blogs hosted on Blogger...

Not awesome. I host my blog on my own domain. But wait! I can delegate to any blogspot-hosted blog: Blogger in Draft: Using Blogger’s OpenID with any URL

OK, so I need to make an extra blog on blogspot just for open ID. Not awesome, but hey it's their infrastructure. Hopefully they'll sort out the problem later anyway and I can delete it.

Add delegation meta tag to my real blog. Republish. Now my real blog is my OpenID URL.

Awesome.

It's not every day a whole new browser comes out. It's even less common for that new browser to make lead story status in mainstream media outlets*. But today both happened as Google released their browser, Chrome.

A while back, Microsoft stunned the standards world by responding to developer objections and agreeing to have IE8 render like IE8 by default (and yes there are many things in that sentence that should be wrong, but aren't).

Nobody could quite believe that Microsoft would really do something that genuinely supported web standards, especially when they were reluctant to do it.

Sadly the disbelief was justified - Microsoft have now done a backflip on their backflip. IE8 won't always default to rendering in standards mode after all, interoperability principles notwithstanding.

For those of you who don't obsessively read my sidebar (and my goodness I've no idea how you can be so lax ;)) I have some speaking gigs coming up (including one this coming week!):

• Open Publish 08, Sydney, 30-31 July - I'm speaking on day two (Thursday). Fellow speakers include Russ Weakley, John Allsopp and Rod Peno.
• Local Government Web Network Conference 08, Sydney, 21-22 August - I'm really excited to be doing the opening keynote on day two. The speaker list is awesome for this grassroots event - it's going to rock! (technical term ;))
• Edge of the Web, Perth, 6-7 November. Really looking forward to this one; and hoping we can get a good Sydney posse together. After all the Perth crew have crossed the nation many times to come to Sydney - it's about time we returned the favour :)

Opera has some great features buried in its menus, so I make a couple of buttons to add them to the standard toolbars.