If you’ve read any web design blogs during the past week you will no doubt be aware of the hornet’s nest that has been stirred up by Opera’s antitrust complaint against Microsoft. The issues at stake go well beyond Opera’s attempt to put a dent in Internet Explorer’s market share, and commentators have been quick to point out the ramifications for web standards, and the organizations that govern them.

Over at roScripts there is a nice tutorial explaining how to modify my FormBuilder PHP class so that validation is performed unobtrusively using AJAX. Check it out.

Reading though a preview of the HTML 5 specification over at A List Apart, I was somewhat surprised by the names chosen for two new HTML elements: header and footer. Like many other standards aware web designers I have worked hard to train myself out of the habit of naming divs non-semantically, only to discover that HTML 5 will undo all of my good work.