Note that the Obama failure will end with the inauguration of the next president, which is scheduled to occur on January 20, 2013, at 12 Noon, Eastern Standard Time. In computer system time, this is 1,358,701,200 (seconds since Jan 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC).

The first option, if you would like a static clock, is to create it using PHP. This clock is calculated by the web server, and will only be updated whenever the web page is reloaded.

<?php
  $datearray=getdate();
  $sectot=1358701200-$datearray[0];
  $seconds=$sectot%60;
  $mintot=floor($sectot/60);
  $minutes=$mintot%60;
  $hourtot=floor($mintot/60);
  $hours=$hourtot%24;
  $days=floor($hourtot/24);
  echo($days);
  echo("d ");
  if ($hours<10) echo("0");
  echo($hours);
  echo("h ");
  if ($minutes<10) echo("0");
  echo($minutes);
  echo("m ");
  if ($seconds<10) echo("0");
  echo($seconds);
  echo("s");
?>

The second option, for a dynamic clock, is to create it using Javascript. This clock is calculated by the web browsing computing, and it will update the clock once per second.

First step, create a file called “obamacountdownclock.js”, containing the following function:

function obamaCountdownClock()
  {
  var now = new Date();
  var tnow = now.getTime();
  var msectot = 1358701200000-tnow;
  var sectot = Math.ceil(msectot/1000);
  var mintot = Math.floor(sectot/60);
  var seconds = sectot%60;
  var hourtot = Math.floor(mintot/60);
  var minutes = mintot%60;
  var days = Math.floor(hourtot/24);
  var hours = hourtot%24;
  if (hours<10) {hours="0"+hours};
  if (minutes<10) {minutes="0"+minutes};
  if (seconds<10) {seconds="0"+seconds};
  document.getElementById('obamaclock').innerHTML = days+"d "+hours+"h "+minutes+"m "+seconds+"s";
  t=setTimeout('obamaCountdownClock()',1000);
  }

Next, in the head section of your html code, add the following line to load the previous javascript file:

<script type="text/javascript" src="obamacountdownclock.js"></script>

Finally, add the following text inside your html code, where you would like the clock to appear:

<span id="obamaclock"></span>
<script type="text/javascript">obamaCountdownClock()</script>

Enjoy!

Note: If you are viewing this page through a different browser (i.e. AOL, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Safari, Opera), please close it out and reopen through Internet Explorer or all features of this application will not work.

Also, recently, I was required to complete an online orientation course for a college where I currently teach. (I will not mention the college name here, although you could probably figure it out if you view my resume.) I attempted to access the course with Mozilla Firefox, my usual browser. No good. Next, I tried Opera. No good either. By now, I was irritated. I tried both Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome out of spite. As expected, their website failed again. Finally, I turned to Internet Explorer and was able to access the course. Later, I found the system requirements page for their website, and Internet Explorer is listed as a requirement.

Now the scary part: This college offers an associate degree program in Web Development!

This aggravates me. Not everybody uses Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Depending on who you ask, anywhere from 50% to 80% of people browse the web with Internet Explorer. Or, alternately, 20% to 50% of people use a different browser; this is a significant number of people.

I’ve seen this before. Do you remember the old “Best viewed with Netscape” and “Best viewed with Internet Explorer” buttons that commonly appeared on most websites a decade ago? It was a nightmare. Half of the websites did not work properly with your preferred browser. I thought we were past these “browser wars”.

This is why we have web standards.

One of the major issues on the web is making sites available to all people, whatever their hardware and software. Presently, all modern web browsers possess decent support for web standards. Is it not reasonable to expect web sites and applications to conform to these standards?

There is no good excuse to not adopt web standards in your web development work. At the very least, you should check that your web sites and applications work properly in the five major browsers: IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari.

The Opera Web Standards Curriculum is a free online tutorial course takes students from complete beginner to having a solid grounding in standards-based web design, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript development.  This excellent course was created by Opera Software (makers of the eponymous web browser) to promote web standards, efficiency, ease of maintenance, accessibility, device compatibility, and search optimization.

W3Schools is a collection of free HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DHTML, XML, XHTML, WAP, ASP, SQL tutorials with lots of working examples and source code. Their web site is a useful reference on a wide range of topics.

The World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C, develops the standards, protocols, and guidelines that make the world wide web operational. They also offer the Markup Validator, a free service that helps check the validity of your web pages against the web language standards.