Last year Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), announced that it was about time to revise the HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Version 4 came back in 1997, followed by a minor update in the end of 1999 (4.01).

Recently W3C announced that the initial draft of HTML 5 is ready. The working draft is made by W3Cs HTML Working Group, consisting of almost 400 members from companies like AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia and Opera among others.

The web has changed dramatically since HTML 4 saw the day of light. Moving from static pages to advanced web applications and extensive use of multimedia.

W3C says Ajax and related innovations have pushed the need for a new standard that allows developers to create web applications that works on all platforms, both stationary and mobile.

In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practised in the U.S. and worldwide.

33,000 responses is a lot of data. To make sense of it, An Event Apart commissioned statisticians Alan Brickman and Larry Yu to translate raw data into meaningful findings. The findings are now nicely presented in a 80+ pages PDF presentation.

The findings we present here have never been seen before, because until now, no one has ever conducted public research to learn the facts of our profession. This report is not the last word on web work; it is only the beginning of a long conversation. Read, reflect, and let us hear from you.

Read the full story or skip directly to the download.

I’ve written a few news stories about Roger Marris, an Englishman diagnosed with an aggressive form of incurable NHL that has no known cause - Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma (one of many illnesses grouped under the general term – cancer; Lymphoma is known as lymphatic cancer).

Digression: To improve the chances of people in the future finding themselves in a similar position, Rog wanted to try to raise a minimum of £10,000 while he felt able to do so. Mission is now accomplished! Rog has now completed this challenge and has surpassed his original target by raising more than £25,000 for charity. Congratulations!!

Anyway… He’s website, which I believe someone has created for him, are created using MS Word as the HTML editor. This has unfortunately resulted in a website being almost inaccessible for anyone using a browser not named IE.

Take a look at www.aroundwithrog.co.uk using IE and then try it in Opera, Firefox or anything else…

Someone should really redo his pages! A good cause deserves better.

Ever wanted to test your website in various versions of Internet Explorer?It is possible to run Internet Explorer in standalone mode without having to over-write previous versions thanks to Joe Maddalone who came up with a way of achieving that in November 2003. Basically, Internet Explorer is run by exploiting a known workaround to DLL hell - which was introduced in Windows 2000 and later versions - called DLL redirection.

Yousif over at TredoSoft has written a nice multiple IE installer which includes the following versions; IE3, IE4.01, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6. Combine that with the latest release of IE7 (now also for people without genuine Windows versions), and you can see how your pages looks through the eyes of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer from the early Internet ages until today.

Very handy but also very frustrating when you consider how far away Microsoft still are when it comes to keeping up with web standards etc.

This post is just to announce the immediate availability of an updated version of my Lightbox Media add-on.

The latest version fixes problems related to upper-case file names and also lets you specify the size of the overlay when opening iframed content.

Get the new code including examples from my download page.

Tested in IE, Opera, Safari and Firefox.