Steve Workman

With the impending release of Firefox 3, a new chapter to “browser wars” is upon us. In this short series, I’ll be looking at what each browser offers to a user, and hopefully pick a champion.

The first battleground is JavaScript. In the late 1990s, JavaScript was shunned by many web developers because of browser incompatabilities,  bugs and that it wasn’t very useful for things other than fancy clock (which flash is better at anyway). Since the rise of the XmlHttpRequest, JavaScript has become a way to enhance a website and provide new ways of interacting with the users. Combine this with JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, mooTools, Prototype and DoJo, JavaScript has had a renaissance of biblical proportions. With the Web Standards Project releasing Acid 3 as a JavaScript test, the JavaScript comeback has been set high standards of compliance in the same way that Acid 2 did for CSS Read more »

I’ve been using Opera since it reached version 9.0 in 2006. I have used it every day since in one form or another. I use Opera on my PA laptop, on my Mac, on my TV, my games console and on my Phone, and since Opera’s rendering engine is now built into some Adobe products (Photoshop, Dreamweaver and GoLive) I’m using Opera even when I don’t realise it.

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Opera Dragonfly, the opera web browser’s developer tools, were released into alpha yesterday. It features tools like a DOM inspector, CSS style tracing, Javascript console with breakpoints and step-through inspection, and support for debugging other opera browsers (opera mobile and opera tv, though not opera mini). However, it’s not all roses.

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Welcome everyone to SteveWorkman.com!

After a few long weeks work I’ve finished the re-design. This re-design is far more user-friendly, accessible and standards-compliant. It’s screen-reader friendly and accessible.

The idea of this blog, to show by example, CSS techniques and CSS 3 experiments, along with technology news, web-standards and my current projects. Check out the articles in the categories above, click on the links to the left to see my other sites and get access to downloads and my photo archive.

Once again, welcome!

With the release of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 this week, MS debuted a few new features for the browser. Not only is it more standards compliant etc (read about all the features here), there are two major features which developers can utilise to make web sites and services more accessible through IE8. I’m talking about Activites and WebSlices.

Activities is a browser feature where you can right-click on the page and bring up a context-sensitive menu where you can perform actions based on the content of the page. You can also select some text, say the address of a restaurant, and a drop-down menu will appear with options for a map or wikipedia entry. You can also get a preview of the resulting page if you hover over the link.

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