The open web is the web built on open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and more. The open web is a beautiful soup of barely compatible clients and servers. It comprises billions of pages, millions of users, and thousands of browser-based applications. You can access the open web with open source and proprietary browsers, on open source and proprietary operating systems, on open source and proprietary hardware.

Google has built its business here, on the open web, and we want to help you build here too. To that end, we are happy to announce the formation of an encyclopedia for web developers, by web developers: Google Doctype.

Google Code Blog: Introducing Google Doctype

Personally, I'm excited by this development (both practically and philosophically) and will likely contribute wherever it makes sense for me to lend a hand. Looking at it quickly some of the HOWTO information is already very useful (the web security information especially) and it will only improve with time as more and more dedicated people get involved with the project.

With a class="more" attached the DL, all we need to run the above is this


dl.more dd{
display:none;
}
dl.more:hover dd{
display:block;
}


There are two things I like about that:

1. It's as simple as it gets. The only thing simpler than coding that would be not coding anything.
2. It makes sense. A lot of times those "more" links are the spitting image of a dt dd pair, except it's unrelated tags in an arbitrary structure (something like DIV > P + DIV) so using ready-made structure just feels right.

Yeah, there are potential issues. The one that sticks out to me is it's not accessible, since with no mouse there's no :hover. That said, with any solution involving a mouse, accessibility becomes an issue, so it's not better or worse than any other solution that doesn't address the mouse-less users.

The other obvious issue is that IE6 doesn't support :hover on anything but links, so there would need to be a script based solution to get this to work in what is still one of the biggest browsers out there.* But I can dream, can't I?

*For this site, Firefox is actually the number one browser, followed by IE6 and then IE7. The combination of IE versions are still the dominant browser platform.

One common design element that I've been bothered by recently* but haven't sat down and figured out looks like this:

Today I took a step back** and came up with this to represent it:

<dl>
<dt>Sessions focus on:</dt>
<dd>
<ul>
<li>Configuring, tuning and understanding hardware servers and software applications</li>
<li>Client side issues related to Mac OS X computing and management</li>
<li>Integration with PSx, UNIX, Telephony and other environments </li>
<li>Managing Macs in an enterprise environment</li>
<li>A Jump start for admin newbies</li>
<li>Best Practices for 3rd Party Tools IntegrationM</li>
</ul>
</dd>
</dl>

Which feels just about right to me- it captures the relationship between the lead-in (the lead in being the term defined) and the list (the list being the definition of the lead-in), and would allow me to style the whole thing with no additional markup.

I'll just go ahead and file that one away.

*I've seen it on four or five different sites I've built in the past year and not so often before that. So up until recently it was never enough of a recurring pattern for me to even worry about.

**amazingly, since this markup will end up on a Drupal site. It's a wonder I even bothered since Drupal is pretty much on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from my minimalist coding style.

This Is Cable – Cable Services And Providers

Someone else put the thing into production so blame him for any errors (*looks over shoulder to see if anyone catches me throwing people under the bus Peyton Manning style*)