Skyfire is a web browser that works just like the web browser that runs on your PC. It supports Java, Javascript, Flash, Quicktime, etc, unlike the crap mobile version of Internet Explorer. I was searching and hoping to find a mobile version of Firefox and to my disappointment there isn’t one around (at least that I can find).

Skyfire allows users to access the same Web content, and interact with that content, exactly as they do on their PC. When users load their favorite sites such as myspace.com, youtube.com and heathersblog.com , they will not encounter unrecognizable content, unfamiliar page layouts, or missing content, like they have with other mobile browsers.

How does it work? From my understanding (not to be quoted) when you request the web page from your phone, Skyfire uses a PC running firefox (which im sure this explains the name Skyfire) with all the plug-ins to get the web page. This would explain the need for the connection startup screen when loading Skyfire. As much as that can be a lag when your in a hurry, I believe It’s worth it.

So if your sick of IE on your Smartphone like I was check out it out…

http://www.skyfire.com

What is Site Validation?

I used to ask this and I too never understood the process and why we should do such things. But now I make sure to do the extra process of validating, and it has helped me to become a better code writer.

Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML. It serves a similar purpose to spellchecking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with machine languages, not with the human natural language.

A very popular question among novices is, if the site looks fine in the browsers, then whats with the validating?

The answer to this one is that markup languages are no more than data formats. So a website doesn’t look like anything at all! It only takes on a visual appearance when it is presented by your browser.

In practice, different browsers can and do display the same page very differently. This is deliberate, and doesn’t imply any kind of browser bug. A term sometimes used for this is WYSINWOG – What You See Is Not What Others Get (unless by coincidence). It is indeed one of the principal strengths of the web, that (for example) a visually impaired user can select very large print or text-to-speech without a publisher having to go to the trouble and expense of preparing a separate edition.

It is perhaps unfortunate that the best-known browsers – Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer on Windows – are visually very similar indeed in their presentation of many documents, differing only in trivial details like margins and spacings. The “same” browser on a Mac or Unix/Linux display will often look far more different. The same goes with popular browsers like Opera and Firefox.