You can pick up SVG and PNG versions of the icon there, as well as T-Shirts featuring the logo…and free stickers if you live in the U.S. and have some spare postage stamps laying around.

Webmonkey brings up an interesting, and troubling, point about the HTML5 Logo site. The FAQ calls the logo a “general-purpose visual identity for a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others.”

It doesn’t really matter if the New York Times thinks CSS 3 or SVG are HTML5, but we’d like to think that at least the organization in charge of describing what is, and is not, HTML5 would make some effort to distinguish between tools. Lumping everything together is as silly as a carpenter referring to every tool in their toolkit as “a hammer.”

That doesn’t sound very good to me. Is “HTML5″ becoming the new buzzword to replace “Web 2.0,” and sanctioned by its own standards body?

Update: And now it sounds like the HTML spec is no longer going to have specific version numbers…

One proposal is rev=”canonical”, but I really don’t I don’t like that option. This comment sums it up pretty well. Rev is too easily confused with rel, and is deprecated in HTML5 to boot. The “canonical” terminology also isn’t fitting, since it implies that the short URL is the preferred URL for the page (i.e. “the short link is preferred over the full one”) rather than an alternate link.

I found it interesting to learn that WordPress 3.0 is going to start automatically including something along the lines of this on permalink pages:

<link rel='shortlink' href='http://fantasyfolder.com?p=32' />

There will be hooks to override it with your own URL (so a plugin could place a single Bit.ly or YOURLS link there on publication), but the URL is irrelevant for the purpose of this discussion. The rel='shortlink' part is what interests me. I think it’s the perfect term to use for this scenario.

I think, whether you use WordPress or not, rel="shortlink" is what you should go with. (If you’re worried about controlling short links, at least.)

WordPress 2.9 also includes oEmbed functionality, allowing you to easily add YouTube videos to your posts, simply by wrapping the video page’s URL in a pair of “embed” shortcode tags.

WoorkUp shows how you can implement the feature in your own projects.

Learning oEmbed: Convert Links Into Embedded Content [WoorkUp]

If Microsoft were to switch from their proprietary “Trident” rendering engine to an open source solution such as WebKit or Mozilla’s Gecko, it would do far more than simply save designers headaches.

It would save Microsoft money and development time, net them some publicity, and vastly improve their web browser? What’s not to like?

What is WebKit? It’s an open source HTML rendering engine that powers Google Chrome, Apple Safari, the iPhone’s MobileSafari, and just about any Mac OS X application that displays web pages.

Internet Explorer could at long last become reasonably standards compliant, and Microsoft would be able to put their resources towards improving their browser’s user interface, rather than wasting time reinventing the wheel.

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but there is no reason it couldn’t be done.

Security isn’t exactly the browser’s strongpoint either, as the public is becoming increasingly aware of.

Microsoft has been losing market share in the browser area for the past few years, as people move away from IE. Slowly but surely, IE’s userbase is decreasing, and other browsers are picking up the switchers. Internet Explorer has 43.6% market share as of February, down from the 54.7% early last year, or the 91.1% from early 2005.

Firefox is up to 46.4% market share now, while Chrome, Safari, and Opera collectively have roughly 7%. (Chrome has shown very fast growth considering its age.) The general public is becoming more aware of browing alternatives, and the security benefits of switching to them. More people are buying Macs too, which include Apple’s Safari browser instead of Internet Explorer. People are learning, and moving away from IE.

Market Share

Until now, Internet Explorer has been surviving based on Microsoft’s virtual monopoly on the browser and operating system markets. They produce Windows, which continues to run on 88% of computers, and they bundle IE with it, giving computer buyers a conveniant “internet button” that the majority of users wouldn’t even think of changing. It’s just there. With their large preinstalled userbase, Microsoft hasn’t have to worry about anything really. They could ignore parts of the standard, implement it in a flawed manner, or not update the browser for six years.

Until now.

It seems people are finally learning. Adoption of alternative browsers is on the rise, and Internet Explorer is losing market share. Microsoft is going to have to either follow the standards to the letter, move to an open rendering engine like WebKit, or fail miserably.

Internet Explorer 8

I had hopes that Internet Explorer 8 would be the one to finally bring a fully standards-compliant rendering engine to the table, but events have convinced me that it won’t, despite Microsoft’s touting. This InfoWorld article has a couple worrying passages, such as:

Then there’s the issue of legacy HTML/CSS support. So much of the Web has been tweaked for IE 6.x compatibility that even Microsoft’s own attempts to implement a more standards-compliant browser engine in IE8 have met with disastrous results. For me, the situation so bad that when I do find myself using IE 8 (typically, to view a site that causes my copy of the Chrome 2.x beta release to blow up), I end up configuring IE 8’s compatibility mode as the default viewing option since the browser’s native rendering mode breaks practically every site I visit.

The author seems to be a little bit misinformed, but it is worrying nonetheless. Much of the web is tweaked to be compatible with IE 6, but those tweaks are mainly made to designs that are otherwise standards-compliant and display perfectly in Firefox or Chrome. If IE8 truly is standards-compliant, it should have no problem displaying those pages. It has been a few months since I used IE8, but I had run some informal tests that seemed to confirm my theory that IE8 isn’t as compliant as Microsoft claims.

Yes, IE8 passes the ACID2 test as Microsoft claims. I used IE8 to visit a few websites that I knew to work flawlessly in standards-compliant browsers, and to validate properly. They looked horrible in IE8, worse than they would have in IE7 or IE6. GMail’s login form was squished funny, Web Designer Wall didn’t look good at all, Freelance Switch was messed-up entirely…

It was a few months ago, and I figured “Well, it’s beta. They fix it soon.” Apparently they haven’t yet. One wonders how a browser can pass the ACID2 and display nearly every standards-compliant web page wrong. Did they cheat on the ACID 2 and put a conditional in to display a fake ACID2 result, while rendering every other page wrong unless you turn the magic “IE7 Mode” on? Sadly, I wouldn’t be surprised.

If IE8 is still rendering pages like it had been when I used it last, it’s not standards-compliant, by any stretch of the term.

Conclusion

If Internet Explorer doesn’t shape-up soon, Microsoft won’t be a major player in the browser arena anymore. People are moving to Firefox, Chrome, and Safari in flocks. You have the Mac switchers who are likely to use Safari or Firefox, the Windows users migrating to Firefox and Chrome, and the Linux users who are mainly using Firefox.

Microsoft has to deliver on their promise of a standards-compliant IE one way or another, or they will lose what market share they have left. Want to take bets on how long that will take?

Of course, one wonders about the accuracy of this study. There are certainly more than 3.5 million pages on the internet. Perhaps they were only searching a portion of the web that had less valid pages? And does a site with 100 non-compliant pages count as 100 invalid pages? How many of those sites are invalid because they try to comply to Microsoft’s bogus standard (a.k.a the “does it look alright in IE?” standard) at the same time?

I can understand the small figure, and maybe it is realistic. After all, many a website almost validates, such as Reddit.com, which has one lone (and minor) error stopping it from validating. And heck, Google and Amazon are validity-challenged. Amazon has “1445 Errors, 135 warning(s)” on it’s front page.

Many monolithic sites that you’d think would validate don’t, though they look fine in most browsers anyway. This brings up an interesting question: Does it matter whether you meet the standard to the letter, or is it okay if it looks fine in all of the standards-compliant browsers? What’s your opinion?

News article: Opera study: only 4.13% of the web is standards-compliant

Interesting Reddit Discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/77grk/

Apparently, the a lot of of web pages will load in IE7 mode instead of standards mode. The Register has the full details.

This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.

So all intranet sites will be shown in non-standards mode. Then we have all the version targetting nonsense they’ve been planning.

Oh, and guess what happens whenever a page loads in standards mode? A little icon appears showing a broken page. When clicked, it forces the page into “IE7 compatibility” mode. So the browser tricks people into not using standards mode.

The picture shows a broken page. A broken page? Why is broken page icon shown next to standards-compliant pages? The idea, apparently, is to encourage users to escape standards-mode by clicking on the broken page. There’s a dastardly logic here: showing a broken page may make users wonder if they are seeing pages correctly. Authors are probably not too thrilled by having a broken page shown next to their pages, and the only way to avoid the icon is to not trigger standards mode. The message is clear: don’t use standards!

A broken page icon! Can you believe that?

Here I was thinking Microsoft was finally putting some effort into getting their act together in the browser department. Forget that. Microsoft, what is your problem? This rubbish will only hurt you, and the entire internet to boot, in the long run.

I’m very well aware that the browser is in beta, but I can’t help but be worried about this. Some pages seem to render worse than ever, and I can’t help but think “Are these bugs, or some sort of ploy to keep things as they’ve been?” It’s not really in Microsoft’s best interests to be fully standards compliant, after all.

Here are just a few examples of the render bugs I’ve noticed:

• WSC’s footer appears halfway down the page, right at the end of the sidebar, not at the bottom of the page where it belongs.
• The contents of Facebook’s main page are squished funny.
• The search bar on Apple.com appears below it’s parent navigation bar, instead of inside it.
• Digg’s header doesn’t match-up with the top of the screen, and has a bunch of extra padding below the navigational links.
• WebDesignerWall.com doesn’t look very good. The background image (which is most of the design) does not line-up correctly, because there is at least 800px of extra space inserted above the content.
• FreelanceSwitch.com looks horrible, and we’ll leave it at that.

Few sites have escaped its horrible rendering issues. Again, I know IE8 is in beta. But I wonder, how on Earth did it pass the ACID2 test with such horrible problems? Did they just adjust things until all of the ACID2 elements lined-up, messing everything else up?

I hope things improve.

First of all, Microsoft, again, is trying to force us to build web pages for IE specifically. If the X-UA-Compatible tag is not found, then a page will not render in the standards-compliant mode. So, basically, you’re having to specifically instruct IE to follow the standard, which it’s supposed to follow anyway. Does that make any sense? No. It seems like another ploy to maintain their monopoly. After all, if most pages work in any browser, there is less reason for people to continue using IE.

Microsoft claims that the meta tag exists so manually-updated web pages won’t break when IE8 comes around. Manually updated? If you’re still doing that, you’re just asking for trouble. Take this as an opportunity to move away from a manually-updated site. While you’re making your design standards-compliant, install a CMS, or at least start using PHP includes. Also, as Bb’s RealTech said:

“The argument for this tag is actually the number one argument against this tag: those people with hand crafted pages are not going to be willing to hand edit each page to make it standards compliant–why on earth would they hand edit each of these pages to add this tag? As for being able to test a site against a version of a browser–this site looks good in IE7, but not IE8, or some such nonsense–when are we finally going to actually commit to standards? Not just as browser vendors, but as web page designers and developers? More importantly, as people who use browsers to surf the web?”

Instead, IE8 should check the DOCTYPE. If it’s XHTML Strict, then use the standards mode. If it’s HTML transitional, or absent, use the IE7 engine. I’m guessing that a lot of the people who would run into the problem Microsoft talks of wouldn’t be using XHTML. It’s much easier to manually-update HTML than strict XHTML after all. Or IE8 could validate the entire markup in-browser, and if it’s not standards-compliant, render in IE7 mode, and display an icon to show that the page isn’t compliant. At the very least, they should make the standards-mode default, and have the meta tag specify IE7 mode instead. Microsoft needs to base their trigger off of an existing feature of (X)HTML, rather than inventing proprietary tags.

Edit: I wrote this post before Microsoft changed their minds. You read my mind, didn’t you, Microsoft? But couldn’t you wait until the post went live?