If your laptop and phone both got stolen – how easily could you conduct online life through the worst browser you have? If you have to file an insurance claim online – will you get sent a simple HTML form to fill in, or a DOCX which won’t render?

What vital information or services are forbidden to you due to being trapped in PDFs or horrendously complicated web sites?

[…]

Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you’ve created?

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML - Terence Eden

Nine people came together at CERN for five days and made something amazing. I still can’t quite believe it.

This is a wonderful project in celebration of the Web's 30th birthday, recreating the first ever browser, WorldWideWeb, which ran on NeXT machines.

My first job in technology, working on the computer support desk at Coventry University (back in 1995… eek!), involved looking after a number of NeXT machines. So even outside of the Web angle, this project is full of all sorts of nostalgia and memories for me. And how incredible is it that they've built the browser inside a browser!

I'm extremely pleased about how this site renders in WorldWideWeb, a testemant to the resilience of plain old semantic HTML

If you want to have a play with any of your own sites, getting started is a little different to these days:

1. Launch the WorldWideWeb browser.
2. Select "Document" from the menu on the side.
3. Select "Open from full document reference".
4. Type a URL into the "reference" field.
5. Click "Open".

And remember, you need to double click on links to activate them.

Ben Henick has a new article over on ALA: 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards. There are some great tips and hints here for those of you starting in web development, or those who are trying to break some bad habits gained over the years.

This one struck a particular chord with me, as it's something I've been trying to explain to clients for a while now:

Lesson No. 2: It’s not going to look exactly the same everywhere unless you’re willing to face some grief... and possibly not even then There are an awful lot of differences between rendering engines, and the W3C specs sanction those differences. You can adjust, tweak, hack, and waive, but if you want to preserve your social life, you will learn to let go of the small differences—and convince the stakeholders in your projects to do the same.

Amen to that!

Here's the IEBlog entry or just go straight to the download page. Ho hum, there goes the next couple of weeks while we get some empirical testing done.

Details of the CSS parser fixes can be found on the IEBlog here and here.

Update: a link to the release notes would probably help too.