13 June 2001
[6 pm]
Jezebel turns five and Joshua turns 30. Happy birthday, ya punks.

Sex, Lies, and Webhosting: Discussed here previously, the unbelieveable saga of Gisol, Nosepilot, and Great-Jones-Street is explained in some detail at Streamingmedia.com. :::
 
[10 am]
B R O W S E   T H I S.
In the face of abyssmal market share plus last week's announcement that AOL/Time Warner's Netscape division was abandoning its "browser company" business model, most people won't give a damn—but a forthcoming Netscape 6.1 beta based on Mozilla 0.9.1 might provide the speed and stability that have been missing from the first "Netscape 6" releases.

Meanwhile, the specs on Opera 5 show great support for web standards, along with a few unfortunate bugs and omissions. For instance, Opera 5 supports the display of IFRAMES but does not allow you to reference and thus manipulate them via JavaScript, as you can in IE, and should be able to according to JavaScript 1.3 spec.

There is also a still-unfixed type size problem in the Mac version of Opera 5, and despite sophisticated theories to the contrary, it is simply a bug—not a feature. 11px=11px, not 8px. The Windows version of Opera 5 gets it right.

400 million web users don't know or care about any of this (nor should they), and a surprising number of web designers and developers feel the same way. But it is important, because no matter how good IE6/Win and IE5/Mac may be, no single company should hold the keys to the web's future.

This is precisely why web standards are as important in a Microsoft-dominated market as they were in 1998, when Netscape and Microsoft enjoyed roughly equal shares of the market. It's also why the W3C needs to do more than offer timid, toothless assessments of broken standards support in browsers.

Dale Doughtery makes this point more eloquently than we could hope to, so read his column and think about the kind of web you want to use, design, and build. (Hat tips: Michael Schmidt, Alan Herrell, Joe Clark, J.D., and George Olsen.) :::
 
12 June 2001
[4 pm]
Sheer genius: Writer's Block. (Requires Flash. Hat tip: Joe.) :::
 
12 June 2001
[11 am]
"Gold, gold, gold. This is the best web design book I've read." Since1968.com reviews Taking Your Talent to the Web. [More in Book News.]

Delorie's Lynx Viewer emulates a text-only web browser. Type in your URL and you'll see approximately what your site looks like in browsers that can't display images, stylesheets, JavaScript, etc. Here's the Daily Report in Lynx emulation. (Hat tip: Inflatable Sheep.) :::
 
[midnight]
iStockphoto, indie purveyor of free stock photos, relaunches with a smooth new design.

Can Commercial Be Cool?—Julie Moran Alterio on what the no-longer-cool Cool Site of the Day says about the changing web.

Greatly exaggerated? Peter-Paul Koch begs to differ with announcements that the Netscape browser is dead.

50s nudie collage redux: Surfstation redesigns! Their sleek new issue features an interview with Miika Saksi. Not content with those efforts, Surfstation also presents Issue 112 of K10k, a Friars Club-like roast of designer Token Nygaard.

Rachel Andrew unveils additional standards-based Dreamweaver extensions. Dreamweaver fans, you too can support web standards. :::