Im James, Im 20, Im a UI developer and this is my blog. I’m fanatical about web standards and about creating the leanest, most semantic markup possible.
First off, the site isnt optimised for IE6/7 - my demographic are going to be people who are actually aware that there are other browsers in existence other than IE. With that in mind, the site makes use of the many new CSS3 selectors and properties that are available - in some cases, Ive had to attach vendor-specifc prefixes to some of the properties (this multi-column layout for example).
OK, maybe a bit of a haphazard title for a post (but it is very late in the day, and I really should be getting to bed) . Anyway, the anticipated release of Beta 2 was sometime this month (August) and it was finally released yesterday.
It was always a given that Beta 2 was going to be focused on delivering an enhanced and more seemless user experience, rather than concentrating on ‘under the bonnet’ enhancements like Beta 1 tried to deliver. However, on the surface of things, they appear to be very similar; one feature that I immediately noticed had gone (at least from the top toolbar) was the ‘Emulate IE7′ button- to me, this wasn’t much of a suprise as I simply could never see a practical use of that feature for end-users.
I’ve been watching the status on the Connect ticket almost daily as this is probably one of the most popular tickets in the whole system, I imagine (along with this one, this one, and this one.
The call for supporting the Opacity property in IE8 stems from the team removing the proprietary ‘Layout’ concept, which renders the filter property useless (as this document explains), although there had previously been some talk of the longhand value working - this means there is currently no way to emulate opacity in IE8 (the first browser for 10 or so years that doesn’t support a way of emulating this)!!!
Found another a couple of days ago which was first highlighted to me in this ticket
Essentially IE8s implementation of the :hover pseudo class is buggy and whether it exhibits the expected behaviour is dependant as to what nesting level the element appears at.
Recently, I accepted an invitation from the IE devs to take part in their ‘closed’ technical Beta program- essentially filing reports on any bugs I come across (and believe me, there are a huge amount of them already in Connect) in IE8.
If you follow CSS3.Info then you’ll notice my post last week regarding the UI that Facebook have come up with specifically for iPhone. You’ll also notice that some managed to misinterpreted the information I was trying to put across (your apology was welcomed, but in case any of you are still unclear as to the meaning behind my post, please read my subsequent comment).
Yesterday, Google software engineers Ron Adler and Janis Stipins announced that ‘they’ve greatly improved their ability to index Flash’.
Whilst it’s a huge step forward (in the right direction, I’d like to add), there’s still no alternative (and I doubt there will be for a long time to come) to textual content being marked up with the correct HTML semantics if you wish for your Flash-based content to be a) accessible, b) on an equal footing with its semantic HTML file counterparts for ranking results (based purely on internal factors in this particular context), c) quick to download… the list goes on. Add to that the ability to aggregate physical files (HTML, video formats) into an XML sitemap, rather than relying purely on Google to identify your new pages through crawling links, and you have still no excuse for not correctly marking up your textual content semantically.
If you have Google Web Accelerator installed on your machine, it’s best for you to not to use any web apps that incorporate destructive links, as you might find out one day that you’ve removed page content, left groups you intentionally joined, deleted users on your site etc - the list could go on.
“Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.”
I was browsing the Guardian newspaper a couple of months ago (I meant to publish this post a couple of days after reading the article) and came across an article entitled, “Internet Explorer aims to embrace the web again“, so decided to take a closer look. Admittedly it was the first time I had read the Technology section of the Guardian, and considering the mainstream format that a lot of broadsheets have, was pleasantly surprised to find the article went into somewhat more depth than I had expect it would do.