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Henry Swan discusses Web Standards in China on the Web Standards Project. With 95% of users working with IE6 and most ecommerce sites reliant on Active X, along with a lack of quality translated resources, this is a challenge for the Web Standards community. How do we push ideas from our cultural safety zone out into the internationalised world?

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) are asking if you’d like to set up a Web Standards Cafe? If you’re interested, check out their Web Standards Cafe Kit - available in English and Spanish.

The Onderhond series on floatitis included Part 1: an introduction, and a rundown of some alternatives such as Part 2: using css text-align, Part 3: the margin/float combo, Part 4: the pos:abs method, Part 5: the fut

The W3C Validator is now offering experimental HTML5 Support either by selecting it from the DOCTYPE menu or by placing the correct DOCTYPE into your document so the validator can detect the version.

Everything you Know about CSS is Wrong by Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank is the must read web design book this Christmas. Kevin has an inspiring YouTube presentation for the book that explains why we should be learning these CSS table techniques sooner rather than later. It’s on my Christmas wish list.

Robert Nyman points out the benefits of avoiding inline CSS and JS in your HTML files. If there’s one thing that shits me no end it’s getting messy templates because team members don’t get the whole concept or value of maintaining seperation of content from presentation and behaviour.

Blue Beanie Day is back and if you want to support web standards you should don a blue beanie, take a photo and post it to the relevant social network. Unfortunately, even though I use a Flickr account rarely, I’m never going to know what that Facebook link points to Jeffrey. Is this an assumption that if you’re not on Facebook you’re a nobody?

Sitepoint have made The Art & Science of CSS by Cameron Adams, Gina Bolton, David Johnson, Steve Smith and Jonathon Snook available as a free download for the next two weeks. Sitepoint books are extremely high quality and a must grab when they have promotions like this one.

Web Directions South Government 08 have their podcasts and presentation slides online. It would be nice to see improvement in the Tasmanian e-Government, maybe I’ll flick this link around.

The new Sitepoint Podcast may be worth bookmarking, or subscribe to the feed.

Smashing Magazine’s artilce 12 Principles for Keeping your Code Clean includes using a Strict DOCTYPE, properly encoded characters and character set, human readable indentation, external stylesheets and JavaScript files, and properly nested tags. You should eliminate unnecessary divs, review your naming conventions, and leave the typography up to the stylesheets. Also, use ID on your body tag to help target pages and logical ordering of your content, and validate for consistency.

There are a number of web designers I could think of sending this one to right now - Are You Making These 10 CSS Mistakes?

Ignoring browser compatability, not accounting for smaller browser resolutions, not considering frameworks, not utilising generic classes, not validating the markup, not validating the stylesheets, using mammoth background images, using stylesheets for everything, using inline styles, and using too many files.

The W3C is discussing the need for a Fonts Working Group. If you follow the W3C mailing list fonts are definately one of the more interesting areas of debate for CSS3.

Roger has posted a couple of links to information about understanding character encoding and UTF-8.

The power of Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) in better browsers includes the ability to highlight different link types, for example external. Don’t refrain from offering better browsers more, as long as the older browsers get the baseline.