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Posts Tagged ‘LinkedIn’

Standards-compliant Flash and YouTube Embedding

July 16th, 2009 admin No comments

If you’ve ever wondered why the markup provided by Flash or YouTube to embed their content don’t validate in the W3C Validating Service then you aren’t alone. Luckily for us there are developers out there who have put a lot of time and energy into creating and testing standards-compliant markup for embedding this content in your web pages. You can read more about how they came about their solutions here: Validating Flash XHTML and  Validating YouTube XHTML.

Without going into the wrong way to do it, I will just post the “correct” markup below.

Validated Flash XHTML

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”movie.swf” width=”575″ height=”350″>
<param name=”wmode” value=”opaque” />
<param name=”movie” value=”movie.swf” />
</object>

Validated YouTube XHTML

<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”575″ height=”350″ data=”http://www.youtube.com/v/oC4FAyg64OI&hl=en&fs=1&”>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/oC4FAyg64OI&hl=en&fs=1&” />
</object>

Save The Developers – Retire IE6

July 13th, 2009 admin No comments

IMG_0277

I was amused to come across this post which talked about the Save The Developers campaign. The campaign notified users of IE6 who visited the site that by upgrading their browser to IE7 they could save web developers all over the world a lot of headaches and frustration. Any web developers out there will know how much time and effort it usually takes to ensure that your design is compatible with Internet Explorer 6. It’s usually not a fun experience and it does limit what can be done on your site if you want to ensure 100% backwards compatibility.

I was hoping to take a look at the Save The Developers website but the domain (http://savethedevelopers.org/) seems to have expired and is now being parked. Darn.

Searching the web, I was able to find some information on current browser statistics from the popular web developer site W3Schools. More detailed browser statistics look to be available from other websites which require a paid subscription but I’ll stick with what I can find for free for now.  Please be aware that these statistics only include visitors to the W3Schools website.

2009 IE7 IE6 IE8 Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
June 18.7% 14.9% 7.1% 47.3% 6.0% 3.1% 2.1%

Glad to see that IE6 keeps losing market share, but it looks like it’s web developers will need to continue supporting it for some time to come.

Another ray of hope from Asa Dotzler at Mozilla. He wrote here that usage of IE6 has been surpassed by IE8, making IE6 the least popular IE still in widespread use. Good news. He then goes on in another post here about his browser predictions where states that he expects IE6 to be virtually non-existent by the end of 2010. I can only hope that he’s right!

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Automatic Lossless Image Shrinking

July 12th, 2009 admin No comments

I just ran into this post which talked about a wonderful WordPress plugin to help increase the performance of your site or blog. The plugin automatically runs any images that you upload through the Smush.it service which generates a lossless image that can be considerably smaller than the original. There is no loss of image quality so you have nothing to lose! I’d recommend to install this plugin as soon as possible so your visitors can quickly enjoy a more responsive website.

Download: Smush.it For WordPress Plugin

More Info: Smush.it Homepage

Install Wordpress In A Subdirectory

July 12th, 2009 admin No comments

Have you ever wanted to install WordPress in the root directory of your website without having to keep the source files there? Well it’s possible and quite simple. With just a few changes you will be able to store the WordPress files in a subdirectory while keeping the blog accessible from the root directory. Here’s an easy to follow guide taken from the WordPress website:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory