As for a crisis in web standards, there is none. Yes, there hasn’t been a ton of movement on CSS 3 and HTML 5, but thats not a crisis. More and more sites every day use and follow web standards and it’s been an amazing shift in the last 4 to 5 years. Most of the talk of a crisis is related to having new tools for web designers. Because these are voluntary standards and are not owned by one single company that can force compliance, progress will be slow.

Lets not forget how bad it was back in 1999 with the browser wars wreaking havoc on the web design profession. The whole web standards movement is mostly responsible for the growth of Firefox and in helping Microsoft get off their asses and make IE 7. Lets not whine too much, because it could be a lot worse.

Transmit

There are a myriad of FTP programs for Mac OS X and I’ve tried a bunch, but I always return to Transmit. The interface is slick and when you connect to a server the folders and files view work similar to Mac OS X’s Finder. A recently added feature is the ability to open a number of connections in different tabs; I use this all the time now and couldn’t live without it. I use Transmit in tandem with Textmate by clicking on files I would like to edit and saving them back down in Textmate. It’s pretty seamless. You can also attach any file extension to different apps that you would like Transmit to open as the external editor. So all of my CSS, HTML, PHP, and JS files go to Textmate and all graphics open in Photoshop. If you’re looking for a solid FTP program, give Transmit a try.

Textmate

Using Textmate is like a religious experience — once you use it, it’s hard to think of working any other way. Textmate is pretty simple on the surface, but where it derives its power is from the pre-installed Bundles. Bundles are a customizable set of Snippets and Commands. Most of the Bundles are for numerous programming languages and there are some great ones for scrubbing text and even ones for getting more Bundles. What makes the Bundles great are that they are fully customizable, so if I don’t like the style of the Bundles code, I can just edit it. A huge time saver are tab-stops. Basically, you type a short phrase and hit tab and the code is completed for that phrase. This way of working is so ingrained in my head that there are times when I’m in a web form and I’ll try to trigger code completion, not realizing I can only do that in Textmate. Textmate runs about $50 US so it’s not hugely expensive. I’m looking forward to the new Leopard-only version coming this fall.

Paparazzi

This is another tools that is super simple and works perfectly. It’s free to try and use, but i’d throw the developer a couple bucks via donation. Basically, Paparazzi allows you to take a full screen shot of a web page, not just a browser window. It allows you to specify the size of the screen shot and even allows you to delay the shot, in case there is some Flash on the page you would like to capture at a specific moment. I use this a lot when I’m making changes to an existing site. Most of the time the original mock-up for the site isn’t representative of what the site has grown to be, so it makes more sense to take a screen shot and add the changes.

Wrap up

Well, those are the tools I spend a lot of my time working in. If you work in something that you think is better, I would love to here about. Just leave a comment below.

• HTML Dog
• The Zen of CSS Design
• Stylin’ with CSS
• Designing w/ Web Standards
• Bulletproof Web Design
• CSS Mastery