The recent announcement is that Outlook 2010, like Outlook 2007, will use Microsoft Word for it’s rendering engine. No…you read that right…Word’s rendering engine. A rendering engine that doesn’t support simple CSS statements like float, width or height. Here’s their stance on why they’re opting to use the Word rendering engine again:

We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages.
William Kennedy
Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team

Now I understand their desire to allow their users to create “visually stunning” emails easily. However, the side effect of their current method of enabling that is that they force anyone creating HTML emails to tailor to their poor support of current HTML and CSS standards. Unfortunately, the team behind Outlook apparently doesn’t think these standards apply to email. They claim that there is “no widely-supported consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability.” Really?

In response to their announcement, fixoutlook.org was set up and encouraged Twitter users to retweet in protest of the decision. At the time of their statement, over 20,000 people had tweeted the message. I understand that Twitter users are only a subset of the people who will be using and developing for Outlook 2010, but still….how can 20,000 people, many of whom are developers and designers who work with these technologies daily, not demonstrate some sort of consensus? Even if not, wouldn’t the logical move be to try to support as much of the HTML and CSS standards as possible?

In the meantime, this really sends an inconsistent message about Microsoft’s willingness to play nicely with others. While the IE8 team made a commitment to improving their standards support significantly, the team behind Outlook 2010 is ignoring them and is forcing everyone else to make the effort to play along with them, making it very difficult for innovation across the board.

If you’re on Twitter, head over to fixoutlook.org and be sure to add your name to the list of people who realize how bad of an idea this is. If you’re not on Twitter, how about telling the Outlook team your thoughts on their article defending their choice to use the Word rendering engine. Let’s find out how many people equal a consensus.

More Information

• The Email Standards Project original call to action
• Jeffrey Zeldman’s thoughts
• Outlook’s Response to the Protest

CSS Naked Day is a way of promoting web standards by stripping off all the CSS on a site to show that by structuring your HTML in a way that is semantic and makes sense, your content is still useful even without all the pretty design. If you want more information, you can check out the official CSS Naked Day site, and the almost 400 participants.

Don’t worry, this site will return to its regular design and layout on the 10th.

WaSP‘s InterAct Curriculum was specifically developed to help take some of the pressure off current educators in creating and maintaining a curriculum based on current industry standards. Thanks to the work of numerous educators and industry professionals, the InterAct Curriculum accomplishes that. The current, and initial, release contains 11 courses that fall into one of six general tracks:

• Foundations
• Front-end Development
• Design
• User Science
• Server-side Development
• Professional Practices

A Complete Package

There’s a lot of work that went into the development of the curriculum. For each course there are assignments, core competencies, learning modules, recommend textbooks and additional recommended reading. The content in each course is carefully selected, the books include fantastic titles like Designing with Web Standards and PPK on Javascript, and the recommended reading contains some great writing from around the web, including articles from Opera’s web curriculum.

There are two other releases scheduled, one in March of 2010 and one sometime after that. Each will contain a few more courses, as outlined in their roadmap. The best part is, this is an ongoing project and community driven. That means that the curriculum will not become stagnant, but will continue to evolve with current industry standards.

Getting Involved

Being community driven, there are plenty of ways to get involved. Educators can contribute assignments and modules that they’ve implemented in their own courses and believe to be helpful. There is also a place to discuss the curriculum and input suggestions or criticisms to help fine tune the subjects addressed.

Get the Word Out

I doubt if many educators (if any for that matter) will argue against the value of having the curriculum available to them. Considering all the work that went into its development, and the fact that industry experts were envolved, ensuring that the curriculum lines up with current practices, it’s just too valuable a resource to pass on. I think the biggest challenge then, is to make sure and get the word out about the curriculum.

We need to go out and start sharing the information with local college professors and advisory teams. If we can start communicating the value of adjusting existing curriculum to model the roadmap laid down by WaSP, that would go a very long ways in speeding up the adoption of these courses and helping to increase the level of competence for new professionals fresh out of school.

Manage Your Data

A custom data attribute is simply any attribute starting with the string “data-”. They can be used to store data that you want kept private to the page (not viewable by the user) in cases where there is no appropriate attribute available. Every element can have any number of custom data attributes.

For example, consider a form validation script. The script needs to know what form of validation is required for each field. Currently, many of these scripts will use the class attribute to signal that.

Making use of the new HTML5 custom data attributes, we might choose to store the information like this instead:

To gain access to the value of the data-validation attribute, there are two options. First, you can simply use the getAttribute() method. This method should be familiar to anyone who’s worked with the DOM in Javascript and is supported by all major browsers. The second method is to make use of the new dataset DOM attribute. Currently, no major browsers support the dataset attribute, but to be fair, here’s how you would use it:

1. var theInput = document.getElementById('myInput');
2. var validationType = theInput.dataset.validation;

What I Think

Custom data attributes have been met with varied opinions…some think it’s fantastic while others either don’t get the value or simply don’t like the idea. Personally…I think it’s a good idea.

Currently there’s two popular ways of providing hooks for scripts in HTMl where no appropriate attribute exists:

1. Use an existing attribute even though it may not necessarily be semantically correct.
2. Create a new attribute and have the page no longer valid.

Where you stand personally along those lines, of course, varies. Some people don’t mind a page that doesn’t fully validate and would rather not clog up their id’s and classes. Others don’t mind adding an extra class to an element as long as the page is valid.

With the new data-* attributes, you can have the best of both worlds; your page can validate and you don’t have to add extra classes and id’s to make your scripts work. It’s also very easy to implement, and manages to keep all the data needed for scripting together in one dataset. What’s not to like?

You can actually start making use of custom data attributes right now. The page won’t validate for HTML4 of course, but once HTML5 rolls around you’ll be set. Just remember that to access the dataset values in Javascript you will need to use the getAttribute() and setAttribute() methods as the dataset DOM attribute is not currently supported.

As a recently graduated student, I can reflect on both my training and the training of other people my age who attended other colleges for web development that I interacted with. Unfortunately, the majority of the people I’ve communicated with stated the same thing: standards based development was not presented as a priority. CSS was glossed over and there was little to no mention of the DOM and unobtrusive scripting techniques in the Javascript courses.

Why Colleges Can’t Keep Up

A large part of this is due to the fact that our industry moves so quickly. Progress is made at such an incredible pace and new technologies soon emerge while old ones fade away. In contrast, changing the curriculum at a college usually takes awhile, making it very difficult for schools to keep up.

Another issue is that some of the best candidates for taking on the role of instructor in these courses are overlooked due to a lack of degree. It would be great to have industry-tested professionals teach the courses…who better to teach a class about the techniques and tools that will be necessary in the field than those who are doing it, and have been doing it for some time.

That is not meant to be a criticism of all current instructors. As always, there are exceptions to the rule. There are industry professionals who have no place standing in front of a class and teaching technique, and likewise there are instructors who do a fantastic job of presenting their classes with quality information. And many of the other instructors simply have their hands tied by what the college allows them to do and not do.

One thing I do like seeing is that a few instructors who are pushing standards-based development forward in their courses have published their class information. Daniel Mall and William Craft are just two examples of people who are pushing forward with standards based development instruction and then sharing with others what they are doing. This opens the door for critiquing from industry professionals and provides an example of what other instructors might consider basing their coursework around.

How Do We Fix It

So what needs to be done? Universities and colleges need to adjust. Traditional methods of updating curriculum simply do not work when it comes to such a fast-paced industry. These institutions need to be making a concerted effort to keep their curriculum up to date with current industry standards, and as a result, the curriculum should be re-evaluated on a very regular basis.

In the mean time, a temporary fix may be to implement some sort of a rotating course, a generic web development study course. The course could be used to highlight emerging industry standards and could rotate on a semester basis. Again, just a temporary fix, but at least it provides a small level of attention to the techniques that the students will be needing.

I’d also like to see a few schools start taking a look at allowing existing professionals to instruct more courses, regardless of higher-education degree status. There is a lot of insight they can offer and it’s a shame that schools are not tapping into that.

Of course, that door swings both ways. I’d love to see us as professionals get more involved in helping colleges to evaluate and update their curriculum. I applaud Opera and the people behind their new Web Standards Curriculum. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look. They are putting together a series of 50 articles or so highlighting areas in web design and development. This is exactly the kind of thing that can really help colleges by providing a guideline for what to build their new curriculum around.

Let Me Hear Your Thoughts

This is a topic that interests me very much. Eventually I would love to start teaching a bit myself…I love sharing what I’ve learned with others and find the teaching experience to be very rewarding. That is why I pay attention to what the current colleges are doing to try and stay ahead of the game a bit. I would love to hear any input you might have on the topic. Trying to improve web education in colleges is not an easy task and I think getting more opinions and discussion on the matter are exactly what is needed to come up with a better way to help get colleges up to speed and keep them there.

The Acid test, for those unaware, is a test page set up by the Web Standards Project (WASP) to allow browsers to test for compliance with various standards. The test runs 100 little mini-tests, and to score 100, you need to obviously pass all 100 of the tests. The first Acid test was set up in 1998 and checked for some basic CSS 1.0 compliance. Acid 2 came around in April of 2005 and tested for support for things like HTML, CSS2.x and transparent PNG support. The new Acid 3 test checks for support for CSS3 selectors and properties, DOM2 features and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) among other things.

It should come as no surprise that Opera was one of the first to successfully pass the test. After all, they were the second browser to pass the Acid 2 test (Safari was first). What’s so impressive is the little amount of time necessary to complete the test. It took Safari about 6 months to pass the Acid 2 test, but it took Opera just under a month to pass the Acid 3 test.

Not that we can get too awfully excited about this. The two major players here (IE and Firefox) both have a ways to go. The last I saw Firefox 3 was up to a 71/100 score and IE 8 was at a frighteningly low 18/100. Let’s just hope that IE can get the gap closed quicker than the 3 years or so that it took them to reach Acid 2 compliance! It’s looking like Safari, who has their WebKit Nightly Build’s up to 98/100, will be the next to hit a perfect score.

In spite of the needed improvements in Firefox and IE, this is great news and I think that congratulations need to go out to Opera’s team of developers. They’ve done a great job of being proactive with their standards-support and it shows. I also think that WASP deserves a pat on the back for all of this….they are obviously doing a good job of pushing standards-compliance in browsers and giving vendors a goal to shoot for. We are starting to see some great improvements in compliance to standards across the web and I for one, am greatly looking forward to playing around with all the new toys!

What Is It?

Version targeting, as proposed by Microsoft, will use a X-UA-Compatible declaration, either via a META tag or as a HTTP header on the server, to determine which rendering engine the page will be displayed in. For example, the META tag below will tell IE to use the IE8 rendering engine to display the page:

If IE8 comes across a site that doesn’t have this declaration either in a META tag or as a HTTP header, than it will render the page using IE7′s rendering engine. This idea is not entirely new. DOCTYPE declarations have been switching IE browsers from ‘quirks mode’ to Web Standards mode since, I believe, IE6. There were some limitations with this. While using a DOCTYPE ensured standards mode, there is a definite difference in what standards mode is in IE6 versus in IE7.

The X-UA-Compatible declaration is meant to be more robust. Here, we can tell the browser exactly which version of IE to render the page in, thereby alleviating us from the headaches that may be caused by a different rendering engine in IE8 than in IE7 for example. We can also use the ‘edge’ keyword (which is apparently not recommended) instead of declaring a specific version. The ‘edge’ keyword is used below:

By using the ‘edge’ keyword, we are telling IE to always use the most current rendering engine available. This basically gives us the option of ignoring IE’s new feature. However, this seems like a flawed idea, because as Jeremy Keith said “…even if you want to opt out, you have to opt in.”

Some Problems

I agree with Keith in thinking that the idea was implemented wrong. The X-UA-Compatible declaration should be a tool to use, not a required feature. If I want my site rendered in the newest version of IE, I shouldn’t have to tell it that. It should assume that unless I tell it otherwise, I want my site rendered with the most current rendering engine, not the other way around. I guess I understand how from a business perspective this makes sense, this way everything works at least as well as before. However, for a community that puts so much emphasis on progressive enhancement, this doesn’t seem to fit the mold.

I am also not so sure that this is any better than using conditional comments. If I can develop for standards supporting browsers and then use conditional comments to “fix” the other ones, than what benefit do I really get from using the X-UA-Compatible declaration? Also, what happens years down the road, after IE9 and IE10 are released? If I am one of those people still using IE8 at that time, and I come across a site that declares it should render in IE10, how will IE8 handle that? I would like to assume it would just render it using the highest version it knows (IE8 can only render IE8 or lower so an IE9 declaration results in IE8). Of course that just brings us back to using hacks again to ensure the older browsers still show our site reasonably well, and then we’re back at the beginning.

I would also be interested to see if this is going to result in substantial code bloat for IE. If IE10 is potentially supporting four different rendering engines (quirks mode, standards mode in IE7, IE8, IE9) how is this going to affect the size of the browser code? I could see this potentially resulting in a pretty hefty amount of disk space being required in the future as more and more engines are being supported.

Not All Bad

The idea is not totally off base. It offers a nice feature, we don’t have to scramble to make sure our sites don’t break in the newest version of IE. I just think that it should be an optional feature…I either use the declaration and therefore ensure that my code will be rendered as always, or I don’t use it and allow progressive enhancement to work it’s magic.

I still say kudos to IE for trying a new idea out. If nothing else, this has gotten the community discussing the advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft’s proposed solution, as well as talking about other routes we could take. Even after looking at it in more detail though, I just don’t think this is going to help solve much of anything. I don’t know that there is that big of an advantage offered by it, and I just don’t think that other browser vendors will think it is worth their time. Who knows though? Maybe in five years, people will be looking at this post and remarking about how short-sighted I was. I guess time will tell.

Don’t Take My Word For It

This is a very opinionated topic that has generated some great discussion already across the web. I encourage you to check out some of the varying opinions and arguments presented in the posts below:

• Chris Wilson’s announcement
• Aaron Gustafson’s post at A List Apart
• Eric Meyer’s response
• Jeremy Keith’s take on it
• Johnathan Snook’s argument for it
• Some potential browser problems from Robert O’Callahan

For those of you who may be unaware, Acid 2 is a test page for web browser vendors set up by the Web Standards Project (WASP). The intention was for the Acid 2 test to be a tool for browser vendors to use to make sure their browsers could handle some features that we as web developers would love to use. It’s a pretty intense little test. If your curious, the WASP walks you through each of the items that Acid 2 tests for.

The timing for Microsoft couldn’t have been any better. This announcement comes right after Opera announced they were filing a complaint against Microsoft for their lack of standards compliance.

Now just because a browser actually passes the test doesn’t guarantee it will be standards compliant, but this is most definitely a step in the right direction. Add to this the rumor going around that hasLayout will be taken care of now in IE8, and I must say I am getting a little excited here. Of course, with the beta version coming out in the first half of 2008, it will still be quite some time before IE8 takes over the market share currently owned by other versions of the browser. Heck, IE7 still hasn’t passed IE6 as the dominant Microsoft browser.

Not to be outdone, BetaNews claims that Firefox 3 Beta also successfully passed the Acid 2 Test. Looks like we may have a pretty intense battle for browser supremacy starting up here in the new year.