Scott Hanselman

à http://www.alistapart.com/stories/tohell/helltest.html

It’s an slightly older article, but it touches on things that we may take for granted (or forget all together) as we create our sites:

• There’s more to the web than just HTML
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is one of the most powerful, widely supported and totally underused technologies on the net
• Pretty Printing of Web Pages is possible, and included in CSS.  (Check out the link above and do a Print Preview to see the menu disappear!)
• Writing browser-specific javascript or server side sniffing code is adding complexity to an already complicated project

Some good quotes:

• “This is not about graphic design. It's about the separation of style from content, which will allow us to do amazing things. Like redesign an entire site in hours instead of months. Stop authoring and debugging stupid, browser-specific markup. And support non-traditional browsers, from Palm Pilots™ to Braille readers, without building multiple versions of every page. All pretty good stuff.”
• “But My company has ‘standardized’ on a 4.0 browser. - We realize that many of you are stuck in that predicament. Consider this an opportunity to alert your boss or your IT department to the fact that 1997 browsers are holding back the web. Make them think upgrading was their own idea. That often helps.”

And for those who insist on 4.0 browsers, there’s a movement to start redirecting people to this page if they are running a non-compliant (<=1997) browser:

http://webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/ (also worth your time)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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