CSS is one of the most powerful tools that is available to web designers (if not the most powerful). With it we can completely transform the look of a website in just a couple of minutes, and without even having to touch the markup. But despite the fact that we are all well aware of its usefulness, CSS selectors are still not used to their full potential and we sometimes have the tendency to litter our HTML with excessive and unnecessary classes and ids, divs and spans.

The best way to avoid these plagues spreading in your markup and keep it clean and semantic, is by using more complex CSS selectors, ones that can target specific elements without the need of a class or an id, and by doing that keep our code and our stylesheets flexible.

Inayaili has written another article for Smashing Magazine, this time on “Taming Advanced CSS Selectors”. It’s technical and in-depth — we would recommend it for serious web designers everywhere. Her last article for Smashing Magazine called “Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3” got to number 1 on Digg and Delicious, so go take a look.

Yet another opening has occurred in the long running war of the browsers… admittedly a war not many people are that interested in anymore – instead ‘web standards’ won.  But back to the war.

The most interesting news is that Google have announced a new web browser called Chrome. My favourite feature is that it has been launched via a gorgeous and quirky comic by Scott McCloud (creator of the fantastic Understanding Comics). As for persuading a significant number of regular people to actually use it,  I feel it will be a hard sell. There are features that developers and geeks will appreciate (we do!), but it has been hard enough to persuade people they should move from Internet Explorer 6, which is dangerous, let alone to think about moving to yet another browser after they may have made the effort to move to Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. It is also (arguably) quite ugly, which won’t help. That said, many of the ideas behind it are very interesting from a developers point-of-view and it may well become a very interesting browser in the future.

The other news, less interesting or fun, but news that will probably have more impact on the world in a practical way, is that Internet Explorer 8 has reached the next stage of development. When it actually comes out is anyone’s guess, but it will probably be much more important to web developers in an everyday sense than Chrome will be – at least for the foreseeable future.

In many ways we support this move. IE6 came out in August 2001: that’s almost 7 years ago. While it was a real step forward at the time it has since seriously lagged behind other web browsers. It now is responsible for creating an inordinate amount of design and development problems for people who work with the web, as well as having a wide variety of security issues. It will be a great day when the web development world can finally move on. Unfortunately we believe it could easily be another 5 years before this might be possible — there are simply too many people using it.

The percentage of people using IE6 varies widely depending on the type of website and their audience, but looking at the statistics of websites we manage, it is approximately between 15% and 35%.  Clearly a very significant proportion still use IE6, and one that can not be ignored. While websites do not need to look exactly the same in each and every browser, but they should not break or fail to work.

The move by 37signals has created various issues for us:

We do not want to overly concern our clients about what web browser they use. Most people neither know nor care about what browser they are using – and why should they? We would always encourage clients to upgrade their browsers to the most recent because of the security risks, but for medium to large organisations universally upgrading their browsers can be a very complex task.

The situation could also impact on our credibility: we have recommended Basecamp as a tool, and if suddenly some of our clients have problems using it, it would reflect poorly on us. Having the situation ‘taken out of our hands’ by 37signals puts us in an uncomfortable position.

Information for clients

We recommend that clients upgrade to the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. If this is difficult due to the restrictions of IT departments, then glitches or problems with Basecamp will probably occur. Hopefully these should not cause significant or ‘fatal’ problems. Please contact us if you have any questions or experience any errors.