w3c: May 2006 Archives

Over the past year or so most of the blog engines have defaulted to using the nofollow tag in comments. This tag basically tells search engine spiders not to follow the links. While this can be handy if you want to mention a competitor it's not so useful when you have genuine contributors to your blog's comments. While I can understand the reasoning behind the introduction of the tag's usage I still feel that blog authors should be able to choose whether or not to turn it on or off. Movable Type allows you to turn it on or off easily, but Wordpress doesn't. Up until recently I was using a plugin to turn the damned thing off, but I've now had to turn it off the hard way - by hand. If people take the time to comment on my ramblings then the least they should get is a small bit of "link love"!

From time to time I come across website that simply do not work properly in Firefox. In most cases this can cause some degree of irritation, but other times it is extremely frustrating. At present I am researching cars, so I've been working my way through as many of the Irish car sites as possible in order to gauge pricing etc., Unfortunately at least one of the sites that ranks high on Google plus runs adwords does not work properly in Firefox. It's not merely an aesthetic display issue - its core functionality simply breaks when you attempt to use it. What really amazed me, however, was that the web development company that are responsible for this atrocity have such a nice client list. Does this mean that the large corporates don't apply any standards to their web developers?

Back in December of last year I mentioned the IEDR's planned rebranding. They have finally unveiled the new site design this afternoon. Although I'm not a designer I like the new look and feel: Unfortunately not all elements of the new site will work perfectly in all browsers, but it is a definite improvement on the previous design and layout.