And on that note, I’ll mention that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download. Go break the web!

ShareThis

But waitaminnit… What’s this stuff about forward compatibility by adding some new X-UA-Compatible header to my pages or my server? Am I reading this right? Are you telling me that in order for IE8 to use its fully compliant rendering, we have to add something new to our pages? And that if we don’t, it will fall back to rendering pages just like IE7? Is that what this means?

That’s just dumb.

Screw their stupid “don’t break the web” motto. Break it! Break the web in the name of progress! How will we ever move forward if you keep dragging us back? And while you’re at it, quit trying to misdirect us with that “don’t break the web” nonsense. Putting out a browser with excellent CSS support is not “breaking the web”, it’s fixing it! There’s no real shame in putting out a better product, and admitting that the previous versions had flaws. This is a concept called “continuous incremental improvement”.

There has already been a lot of reaction from the web development community. There are several big names behind the idea. There are several big names against it. I’m not a big name, but I fall in the latter camp. This is not “forward compatibility”, it’s not “forward” anything. This is keeping progress of the Internet Explorer browser and adoption of better standards at a crawl instead of letting them make an evolutionary jump.

Oh, and unless I’m missing something here, there was already a mechanism in place that the IE team has already encouraged web developers to use, which could do the same job: conditional comments. What’s that? Oh yeah, there are problems with that, too.

If you need more reading material on this subject, check out Mark Pilgrim’s links. At the time of this writing, he has pointers to 29 articles, and I’m sure there will be more.

ShareThis

I don’t know what they’ve done to improve the memory handling (it’s currently using 394M virtual, 161M resident, 19M shared), but the responsiveness has been awesome. In Firefox 2, my machine would have been thrashing like a dying wildebeest, slogging down the performance of every other app on the machine. But with version 3, Firefox itself has remained snappy, and switching between Firefox and other apps (Thunderbird, Pidgin, Skype, and a handful of terminal windows) has been just fine.

Of course, it could just be the fact that only 6 of my 43 installed add-ons is working right now… I’ll be keeping an eye on that. Maybe I should try running Firefox 2 tomorrow with a fresh profile, and see if the lack of add-ons makes a big difference after an extended session.

There’s also a few changes in the UI, that I mostly like. Such as the ability to bookmark a page by clicking a little star icon on the right side of the location bar. And scrolling through a long list of tabs is much smoother now. Plus, the active tab stands out from the others much better. That’s all I can think of for now.

Anybody else out there giving the new beta a test drive? What do you think?

ShareThis

After hearing one of my co-workers rave about how impressed he was with Fedora Core, I was going to give that a try. But the DVD he burned for me wouldn’t install for some reason. So I decided to go with Ubuntu. This was probably just as well, as we use a lot of Debian Linux stuff at work, and Ubuntu is Debian-based.

I won’t bore you with details of the install (which went smoothly), or with detailed lists of what I’ve done to customize my system. But I do want to point out some good links and highlights for the curious. Especially what I did about those pesky “can’t-live-without” Windows applications.

I knew that the main Windows application that I would miss was Photoshop. Yes, I know about the Gimp, and I’m sure it’s quite capable of doing 99% of the things that I do in Photoshop. But I’ve been using PS for about 10 years now, and I know my around that application. I’ve tried using the Gimp a few times, but I just can’t make myself use it enough to get used to that interface. I also know about Gimpshop, but I already own the real thing, and I’d prefer to use it.

Enter Wine. Wine is an implementation of the Windows API under Unix. And it really works. I just mounted my Photoshop CD, and ran wine Setup.exe, and Photoshop was installed into the default wine environment under my account. I did run into some glitches trying to run it at first, however. But after a bit of searching, I discovered that the solution was to remove some unneeded definitions for a Wacom graphics tablet from my xorg.conf file.

The other main Windows app that I thought I’d miss was iTunes. However, rather than running that under Wine, I decided to check out the native Linux offerings. I tried XMMS, but it was too much like WinAmp, and I didn’t like the interface. I also tried Rhythmbox, and it was okay, but just didn’t seem like I could tweak it enough. Then I found Amarok 1.4.2, which is what I’m running now.

Amarok has an interface and feature-set very similar to iTunes. It’s also very easy to hook into it and write your own scripts to interface with the player. I was able to whip up a perl script to send “now playing” song information to my web server very quickly. I just wish that there was a universally accepted way to transport song ratings from one system to another. I lost all my iTunes ratings, play counts, and such. It’s probably possible to extract that from the iTunes data files, but I don’t have enough spare time to mess with that. In any case, I’m pretty happy with Amarok.

And finally, I also found some simple instructions for running Internet Explorer under Ubuntu. This is great for web development, as I’ll be able to test pages with IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0. This procedure installs each version of IE into its own Wine environment, so you can run them all simultaneously without side-effects. I’m keeping my eye out for IE 7.0, but it might be a while, because it apparently depends on some bits of Windows XP that aren’t yet handled by Wine.

In any case, I’m still getting along just fine with Ubuntu. The main problem I’ve had so far is that some of my Firefox and Thunderbird extensions don’t want to work correctly (ForecastFox, for example). But I’m sure that the wrinkles will get smoothed out over time. If you are thinking of installing Ubuntu, or if you already have, and need some pointers on what you can do to tweak your sytem, try the following useful links:

• Mark Pilgrim’s Essentials, 2006
• Top 10 Ubuntu Apps and Tweaks
• 14 Days of Ubuntu
• Automating GNOME with Devil’s Pie

Sometime in the future, I might post more specific details on other utilities I’ve installed or configuration options I’ve tweaked to get my system set up the way I want. If you’d be interested in that, let me know!

ShareThis

Check out the examples for an idea of what you can achieve. In particular, look at the Nested Rounded Corners example. Then look at the table version at the bottom of the page. Note the difference in the source order. The table version forces you to reorder the information in ways that wouldn’t make sense if you were trying to decipher the HTML source (I’m speaking of all the “block N top” and “block N bottom” elements). The OTL version keeps related bits of information together in a straightforward flow.

This is going to take some time to properly absorb…

via: webgraphics

ShareThis

The recommended workaround is to use IE’s conditional comments feature to load a stylesheet with rules specifically for IE6 and older. For example you might put something like this in the <head> of your document:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="compliant.css" />
<!--[if IE lt 7]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”ie-rules.css” />
<![endif]–>

This would load the compliant.css file for all browsers. Then, the conditional comment would load the ie-rules.css file only for Internet Explorer with a version less than 7. All other browsers (including IE7) would ignore this comment. [Note, however, that this hack doesn't apply to the specific Slashdot example used in the IEBlog article. Read the comments to see why.]

Note that this only applies if you are using IE-specific hacks in standards-compliance mode. This includes hacks which target rules to only work in IE (like my favorite, the star html hack), or rules that only work in compliant browsers (like the child selector hack). And it may not be necessary in all cases anyhow, depending on how you are using those rules (the main problem is probably going to be that the star html hack won’t work in IE7 even in quirks mode). Theoretically, if you are using quirks mode, then you can probably just continue using your old hacks. However, I think most of us would probably prefer to keep to the standards whenever possible.

ShareThis

via: Weblog Tools Collection

ShareThis

The new version of Thunderbird has added improvements to the RSS handling, so that hacks aren’t needed anymore. You can import and export feed lists in OPML format, and you can even have sub-folders now — sortof. You can add multiple feeds under a single folder. But the feeds won’t be individually selectable — the items all just intermingle together under the folder. There’s also no auto-detection of feeds, or drag-and-drop, both of which would be really good additions.

For more information about what’s new in the Firefox beta, see Simon Willison’s Firefox 1.5 Developer Highlights.

ShareThis

In an effort to refocus energy on advocating for standards from a perspective of universal access and vendor neutrality, WaSP is handing over the reigns of the BrowseHappy campaign to the good folks at WordPress.

What does this mean to the average user? Not a whole heck of a lot. But it probably means a bit of good press for WordPress, BrowseHappy, and WaSP. It will be interesting to see how the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 affects the web standards balance. The IE7 team seems to be making an honest effort to improve that browser’s compliance.

ShareThis

So, what is Ajax? It’s a combinination of tricks which allow web developers to dynamically communicate with a backend server from the web browser without requiring a page refresh. This provides a more seamless experience to the user by making a web page behave a bit more like a normal software application. Typically, this is accomplished by some JavaScript code which exchanges data with the server by means of either a hidden <iframe> element, or by use of the XMLHttpRequest object in more modern browsers.

Again, this is not something new. Brent Ashley was doing this stuff five years ago with JSRS. So why all the hoopla now? Why did the name “Ajax” stick? Why the sudden Ajaxmania?

I think it’s just a “right time, right place” thing. It’s only been recently that big commercial companies have started using the technique for applications that are in the public eye. And that’s because it’s only been (fairly) recently that you could count on a significant percentage of web users to have browsers that supported it. Five years ago, there were still a significant number of Netscape 4.7 browsers out there. Internet Explorer 5.0 was still fairly young, and there were plenty of IE 4 and even IE 3 users. But now? IE 6 and Mozilla 1.0 dominate the browser landscape, and Safari is the king of the Macintosh hill. Basically, the web environment is much better able to support remote scripting now than it was five years ago.

So, sure, Ajax is “old wine in a new bottle”. Let’s not get hung up on the name. But, personally, I think that “Asynchronous Remote Scripting Engine” would have been great. Then if you were debugging your rich client application, you could complain, “I’ve got bugs in my ARSE!”

wine gift Free wine gift delivery in the UK. Fine wine merchant UK.

ShareThis