Ian Hickson has announced on his web site that he is running a contest to come up with some great JavaScript (EMCAScript 3) tests for ACID3. Ian has set aside some criteria for the test that need to be followed but once you think you meet the requirements and feel the test is effective he has requested you email it you him. Currently there are about 84 sub tests and Ian is shooting for an even 100 subtests, so there is a lot of room for some good browser tests.

1. The test must consist of the body of a JavaScript function which returns 5 when the test passes, and which throws an exception otherwise. It doesn’t matter what kind of exception.
2. The test must compile with no syntax errors in Firefox 2, IE 7, Opera 9.25, and Safari 3. (You can use eval() to test things that are related to syntax errors, though.)
3. The test must not crash any of Firefox 2, IE 7, Opera 9.25, and Safari 3.
4. The test must fail (throw an exception) in either a Firefox trunk build from January 2008 or a Webkit trunk build from January 2008 (or, ideally, both). (Opera and IE are failing plenty of tests already, I don’t want to add more tests that only fail in one of those. Of course if you find something that fails in Firefox or Webkit and Opera or IE, so much the better.)
5. The behaviour expected by the test must be justifiable using only standards that were in the Candidate Recommendation stage or better in 2004. This includes JavaScript (ECMAScript 3), many W3C specs, RFCs, etc.
6. You must be willing to put your test into the public domain. (I don’t want us to end up with any copyright problems later!)

Popularity: 53%

There have been some great posts over this past week from all over. It really can take quite a bit of effort to sort through the articles you read and receive through email to pick out the best to share. There are always a dozen more articles that I think should be included in my weekly list but these are the ones for the week I found most interesting and applicable other web designers and web professionals.

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Popularity: 65%

With the announcement that both Firefox 3 and IE8 have passed the acid2 test, Ian Hickson has been working hard on the acid3 test. The new test will focus mostly on ECMAScript and Dom through Selectors Level3, Media queries and data URIs. The new acid3 test isn’t quite ready yet but it should become ready within the coming months.

This new test will put more pressure on the browsers to attempt to adhere to further standards with JavaScript. Hopefully they will all pass it soon with their push towards adopting web standards as they are written.

Hopefully we will be seeing IE8 and Firefox 3 released very soon. There are of course already versions of Firefox 3 available for download. However, not many of the extensions work on the beta browser yet. Until they do I don’t plan to fully switch over to Firefox 3. I would like to say that Firefox 3 renders pages incredibly fast and loads and runs very fast within Windows also. I’m awed by the new version.

Popularity: 75%

There is a lot of talk amongst designers about why web standards are important, sometimes it is a bragging point to say that you know a lot about CSS and HTML and can make a good site within standards. Some of it is just a line to make whatever you are doing sound better. I hear a lot of local Oklahoma web design companies talk about web standards but for the most part I see some of them still designing in tables or not even getting the bare minimums in when it comes to web standards.

This article is going to be directed at web design firms, web design clients and web designers everywhere. The importance of web standards is more then just something to say, it is the way the web should be designed. There is more then just passing an HTML or CSS validator when it comes to standards. Even so there is more to making a site pass coding standards, accessibility being the primary objective. Accessibility is usability, it isn’t just about disabled it is about ensuring that your site will work from the time it is published until the end of time if it needs to. I’ll go over different web standards and accessibility guidelines and how they can be implemented, used and maintained better then just exporting a document out of Adobe Photoshop or throwing together an insane unaccessible image map.
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There are a lot of reasons that you would want to replace simple text with an image. One of the biggest reasons is the benefit of getting the text that is within the image for search engines. This method is used mostly for site headings. Say you were making a site about “Freelance Oklahoma Web Design” you would want to be sure to include that in your first H1 but you don’t want to use plain text to do it. So you would be creative and ensure that you are getting the same information that is within your fancy image into your heading tag. This way you can ensure that your site topic is best read by search engines without losing any of your design benefits of creating custom imagery for your design comp.

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Popularity: 75%

There are a lot of social networks available for every niche you can think of, some of them aren’t as good as others and the good ones always need a little attention. I’m sure a lot of you have been to a few of these but should be members of all of them. Interaction is important when it comes to social networks. Ensuring that you do your part as a member and contribute to them by voting on content or contributing to a conversation.

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Popularity: 100%

There are a lot of tools out there for web developers and marketers that do all kinds of different things. It is hard to know what is important and what isn’t important when you are using some of the tools available. When it comes down to it, the best way to get search traffic is to get more links to your site. But once you have those links coming in, you have to make sure that you have relevant content to ensure that the search robots (and your visitors!) know what your site is about and where the content is located. But don’t over do it, keep it simple stupid applies to search marketing also.
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Popularity: 56%

There are a lot of different ways to display text using CSS, some of them are rather straight forward. Like assigning a color or setting the font size of your text. However, there are several text effects that you may not know about that can manipulate more then just the color or font size of the text. You can literally transform the text using various CSS rules. I’m going to show you a few that I think are kind of cool, some are handy and others are nearly useless in design. But they are all there and available to use, and I’m going to show you how.

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Popularity: 46%

It is important to use lists in navigation for semantics, accessibility, aesthetics and flexibility. Not using lists for navigation can lead to confusion, inaccessibility and unclear markup. There has been an article published from a popular CSS tutorial web site that is slightly misleading and generally not the best advice for developers and designers. It appears as though most of the people in the comments noticed right away some of the holes in the attempted “listless navigation” theory. I thought I would address the importance of using lists for navigation here. For some this may be an obvious practice in design but it is important enough to be addressed. I would like to be clear that I mean no disrespect to David Walsh or Chris Coyier, I’m sure they both only had good intentions of showing off what can be done with CSS.

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Popularity: 44%

The year is getting close to an end and it seems that in these last couple of weeks of the year only the most dedicated bloggers are taking time to write posts. Which is great for those that are looking for content, but difficult for those of us that want to be sure to get all of the great stories we have read throughout the week out to those looking for great design content. At any rate, I have compiled a pretty good list of content. Thanks for everyone’s submissions for this week also. Be sure to submit your submissions by the end of day Friday this next week, and only submissions for posts that happened between Monday-Friday will count. I got a lot this time dating before last weekend.

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Popularity: 16%