The Circle of Standards A blog about standards, style guidelines, & best practices for the Web.

With a flurry of new browsers hitting users’ computers and mobile devices this year, everyone involved with the Web has had to scramble to ensure that their sites are compatible with the latest and greatest. This has left many Web professionals and business teams wondering, “What browsers should my site support?” Kimberly Blessing helps you answer that question.

Read my article at Peachpit and let me know what you think! And stay tuned for my next article on optimization…

On Saturday, July 18, I gave a talk as part of the CSS Summit on CSS & Troubleshooting IE6. Many designers and developers are passionately anti-IE6, while I’m one of those folks who has a soft spot for the browser. So I laid out the case for continuing support for the browser and gave some tips on how best to do that. Most importantly, I tried to reinforce the idea of planning for and managing browser support, especially the phasing out of specific browsers. After all, if you don’t have a plan, you don’t know where you’re going.

You can download the presentation slides as well as read and comment on the use of IE6 hacks over at my personal site.

Maybe it’s the co-worker who sits next to you, or perhaps it’s your boss. It could be a new client. And, invariably, someone in your family qualifies. That’s right, they’re the not-so-tech-savvy you have to deal with. How do you get them to understand you so that you can communicate and work together effectively?

Web Worker Daily provides 10 tips for working with the computer-illiterate, ranging from the obvious (avoid jargon and be patient) to smart strategies you may not have figured out yet (introduce new technologies gradually, talk results instead of process).

Two things that aren’t mentioned in the article but deserve emphasis:

1. Don’t talk down to the person or treat them like an idiot. First of all, no one deserves being talked down to. Doing so is going to make you look bad and it will make future communications even more difficult. The person you’re talking to could have a Ph.D. in some other field and simply may not have the background or experience to understand you without more explanation or context.
2. Take the time to educate. I had a boss who was very results-oriented. When I was able to demonstrate the ROI of Web Standards in an effective way, he wanted to understand more. Over the course of a few months, I helped him learn some HTML and CSS, introduced him to our publishing tools, and gave him a copy of Zeldman‘s Designing with Web Standards, which we discussed at length. Didn’t my boss turn around and become my biggest supporter and advocate to more senior management? And all it took was my investing in his education. Think of what educating a co-worker or client could do for you — relieve you of that constant headache from one-off questions? Stop you from rolling your eyes after every interaction? Maybe the payoff seems small, but the mutual growth is worth it.

Coding HTML emails is rarely regarded as a fun task, but these articles may help take some of the guesswork out of the task.

Sitepoint author Tim Slavin offers four steps (each with many details) to coding a better solution in How to Code HTML Email Newsletters.

Campaign Monitor provides an updated Guide to CSS Support in Email Clients for 2008. Their matrices thoroughly detail CSS support in both desktop and web clients, 21 in total.

Standards Suck is a podcast show/blog by Anne van Kesteren, Marcos Caceres, and Lachlan Hunt.

So far, the topics covered include WCAG 2.0, the Selectors API, and ARIA in HTML5. However, they haven’t explained why they think that standards suck. I guess we’re supposed to gather that from the complexities of what’s discussed.