Do you validate your markup? How about your CSS? What about accessibility guidelines? Validating your code against the W3C validators can save time in creating cross-browser applications.

The W3C offers a QA matrix of popular specifications that the standards body recommends.

The list includes both recommendations and those specs that are in working draft.

The W3C (aka World Wide Web Consortium) is the standards organization for web development on the Internet. Some of the many features of the W3.org site include automatic validators and references for designers and browser developers.

Validating code can save time by immediately seeing all potential errors on a page that could be causing visual display problems when writing markup and CSS. It is important to validate both CSS and X/HTML markup in an effort to create a cross-browser, cross-platform web application.

There are other validators of importance that I use on a regular basis — including the Section 508 Accessibility guidelines recommended by the W3C. Some countries and states have passed laws for government sites and contractors working with governments forcing them to comply with at least one of the three levels of Accessibility.

Satisfying these guidelines and recommendations can ensure your web site works on all browsers, screen readers for the blind, and mobile phones.

It has been reported on the PayPal developer forum that since the recent UI redesign was released, paypal subscriptions have stopped working. That explains why I didn’t see any this week as usual.

Thanks for those few folks who initially posted about it and brought it to the level of attention it deserves. PayPal is one of the premier online payment gateways, that allow buyers and sellers to coordinate payment without divulging sensitive information to each other.

There are only a handful of players in this arena, and I personally have tried 2CO with a mostly disappointing user experience. I sought a secondary payment gateway to PayPal because some of my clients were not served by PayPal because of geographical location. 2CO has a lot of potential — the homepage looks great, but after logging in I was ultimately disappointed in how ugly and un-intuitive the UI is. On the bright side 2CO is one of the few that offer a recurring subscription billing service aside from PayPal.

PayPal has had its share of broken releases, the earliest I recall was October of 2004. There also has been press lately about PayPal’s new logo and user interface re-design.

It is great to see a major online player take on standards web design after many years of encouragement by the developer and web design community.

As I check my account I noticed that PayPal has removed the beta testing of the new user interface completely and reverted back to the original design that has been in place for years. This raises the question of how long the subscription bug has been live…perhaps more than one push?

One of the many limitations I had on projects when using Linux (especially when contracting) was that the clients wanted their web application tested on the latest versions of IE — that’s “Internet Explorer” for those outside the webdev circle.

I’ve always been fond of Linux, especially Gentoo and more recently I have developed a love of Debian-based systems like Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

As a web developer, it is not very common to find someone in the workplace that uses anything other than PC or Mac, with the Mac users being few and far between….at least before my current job.

It has been the main reason I keep an active Windows XP partition running on my development box (in addition to Quicken).

Enter ies4linux…a sweet little bash script that installs the latest (and oldest) versions of Internet Explorer….from 5.0 to 7.0 (w/beta install).

If you want IE7 you’ll have to install the beta version, which is somewhat buried in a downloads directory.

You can watch the development, although it seems somewhat stale lately, at ies4linux developer’s blog.

I had a few broken package downloads the first time I ran the 2.5-beta install for ies4linux, but re-running it seem to fix the problem. Also, afaik Flash 9 still does not work on 64-bit hardware.

I was able to install it on mac osx, but it is rather ugly. I opted for WinXP on parallels with “multipleIEs” for Windows– google it ;)