After many months of hard work and a few weeks overdue, Mozilla has released Firefox 1.5 to the world. In the time that we have waited, a lot has changed. Opera went free, Safari had an update with Mac OS X 10.4.3, and even Microsoft promised a more feature laden IE 7 for Windows Vista. All the browser changes or talk of changes makes the 1.5 release of Firefox a little less underwhelming than when we were all testing it way back when as DeerPark Alpha, yet the 1.5 release does move significantly pass the 1.0 version to include such things as Javascript 1.6, an updated Gecko rendering engine, a much needed auto update feature, and overall improvements in speed. Somehow 1.5 feels just right for this browser, like it’s finally starting to feel like an actual competitor to the main stream IE. Definitely on Windows, Firefox is a definite alternative for users who want tabs, but don’t feel comfortable with Opera.

In the update process, many extensions were lost, and it has become clear that Mozilla has tightened up extensions to a point, where third party developers need to be a little more precise about what they want to add, and security has once again become a focus for Firefox development.

More importantly, the long process from 1.0 to 1.5 has not only made Microsoft put together a new IE, but it was made Mozilla developers take notice of how long their actual update cycles were taking, and they too are now pushing for shorter release cycles and security updates. We can only wait and see how long 2.0 or in between updates, like perhaps 1.6 will take.

In the meantime you can download Firefox 1.5 from any of these sites:

• www.mozilla.com
• www.getfirefox.com
• www.mozilla.org/mirrors.html

Do you need a simple CSS layout or perhaps you want to see some examples of how you would style a data table? Or let’s just say you need to be inspired a little before your next CSS revision.

CSS Data Tables

Chris Heilmann’s site: ICant.co.uk, has an impressive CSS Table Gallery from multiple authors.

Instant CSS Layouts

For an online layout generator, check out InkNoise.com’s Layout-o-Matic, which lets you design a layout from a variety of options and then use the code for your own project.

Every now and then someone asks me how they can learn how to put together web sites, and I always find it somewhat difficult to answer this question, when I do not know much about the person asking the question. Honestly site design can mean so many different things that there is not one answer that will satisfy everyone. Instead of trying to give an overall answer, let me be more specific. Suppose you have a lot of patience, you have an internet connection, and a lot of time to spend on a computer, but you do not know anything about web servers or HTML, but you at least know how to use Word on your computer. Basically you are starting from scratch.

The first thing you need to do is go to your local library and find the computer books section. This section will have lots of old outdated computer books which no one has read in over a year or two. However, the HTML 4 and XHTML books are what you are looking for. Browse through them all until you find a few that you are comfortable with and go home and read them. At the same time start looking at web sites that cover XHTML and CSS.

Eventually you need to start creating your first site in basic HTML on your computer. You will make many revisions and versions, the more you create, the more you will get the hang of it. Once you have the experience of working with HTML and CSS, you probably will need to re-read some of those books you checked out the library and this time around you probably will gravitate to certain areas of web design that you find more interesting. At this time I would recommend you check out The CSS Anthology, which is a great overall CSS book. You will also come to realize the differences between XHTML and HTML and hopefully gravitate to at least Transitional XHTML. For an overall argument for XHTML check out Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards and for practical applications of XHTML you can take a look at Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm.

After all the reading and hands on coding, you can explore the infinite resources of the Internet and HTML and XHTML will just make sense to you. There is always more to learn, but this is just to get you started. Good Luck!

This week I added an SSL certificate to WebKeyDesign, so that our clients could have encryption for some of the services they use and to assure new clients using our web hosting form that there information was secure. Needless to say if you have taken a look at the SSL market, the prices do seem to be out of line with the web hosting and domain registration markets. For example a small personal site for hosting and domain registration could cost as little as $60 for the year, but a basic one domain only SSL certificate costs you anywhere from $49 to $150 for the year! This does not even include the fee that most web hosts have to charge you for installing the certificate, which could be another $50.

The main reasoning for SSL certificates is that for ecommerce, you really need to offer encryption for credit card transactions, but also SSL certificates are suppose to convey some sort of validity to your site visitors. The encryption is easy to do, you could generate what is called a free SSL certificate, but no browser would recognize your certificate as being properly authorized, hence free certificates convey no such trust to your site visitors, and so are inadequate for ecommerce sites. This leaves you with only a proper authorized certificate, which come in many forms and which offer different features. The idea being that the more features a Certificate Authority offers you, the more trusted your site will seem.

As a webmaster then, it would seem that if you just pick the most expensive SSL certificate, then this would equate into more transactions, but this is not always the case. The problem is that many internet users do not know the difference between an expensive SSL certificate and an inexpensive one, most site users end up just looking for the little padlock icon that shows up somewhere in the corner of their browser. No padlock, means no security in the mind of most site visitors. The case is only slightly different with more adapt internet users, but it still comes down to just secure or not secure. An avid internet user may just look for the url to start with https and view that as being secure. For the most part both of these conclusions are correct, that the padlock and https urls indicate secure encryption, or at the very least some sort of secured connection between the browser and the web site. However that is far as it goes, you cannot really know how any SSL certificate or feature will really be viewed by site vistors. Trust level is something that may be very hard if not impossible to properly quantify. Yet all the Certificate Authorities, try to sell their certificates on the idea that they do in fact make your site more trustworthy.

This is why the news that browser developers agreeing on new security features is big news for webmasters and the certificate authorities. It could mean that there will be more diversity in the SSL Certificate market, and that perhaps more webmasters will be able to afford recognized SSL certificates for their smaller web sites, while at the same time the market can expand and grow beyond the limited number of sites today. After all everything else in the internet market has come down in price, why not SSL certificates.

Mozilla’s Frank Hecker offers his own thoughts on where Mozilla’s Policy on CA Certificates is going, and then discusses the business of Certificate Authorities and why the market has been stagnant. It’s a rather interesting read as to why SSL certificates are still rather expensive and why security means different things to different people.

Last month I wrote about how useful I found the Firefox Extention Web Developer, and how even Microsoft had gotten into the act with their own IE Web Developer toolbar, which was still in beta (and which was just updated on 10/31/2005). This time around I’ll point out that Apple’s Safari and Opera have web developer tools of their own.

Opera 8-9:

Web Developer Toolbar & Menu are based loosely on Chris Perderick’s Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, and adds more features and references. You must install both the Web Developer Toolbar and Web Developer Menu. There is also a Micro Web Developer Toolbar with less features.

Safari:

In Safari’s case, I can’t find an actual toolbar, but Safari WebAdditions is a plugin which adds a menu. Safari WebAdditions enables disabling (hiding) images, showing table structure, blocking level elements (divs, paragraphs, forms), displaying diverse image properties (size, path) and links. Les Nie has made separate versions for Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4. You can download Safari WebAdditions from Les Nie’s Download Page.

Part 1 of Web Developer Toolbars covered Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.