2008 January Archive

My very kind and understanding bosses have just agreed to pay for me to attend this year’s @Media event in London, on May 29^th-30^th. If any readers are likely to attend, drop me a line and we could meet up to say hello.

The latest nightly releases of Firefox 3 (warning: download nightlies at your own risk) for Windows and OS X feature the new themes for each platform for the first time (click to enlarge the thumbnails):

Both are nicely designed and look as if they will integrate well with their respective desktops, although it must be noted that I don’t believe that either is in its fully completed state yet.

More interesting to me, however, was the news that JPEG decoding has been increased by 30%; I tried it out on Flickr, and the pages loaded extremely quickly; the updated Gecko engine is already fast, and now pages load even faster. Speed tests against Safari (currently the fastest web browser) should be interesting.

When learning CSS I relied heavily on Index Dot Css, a comprehensive guide to CSS support in browsers. It’s still very useful, although sadly not updated since October 2003. After that I turned to W3Schools CSS Reference (when I didn’t have my copy of the CSS Pocket Reference to hand); it’s nicely laid out and fairly comprehensive, although with some curious omissions (no list of selectors?) and no way of telling if it’s ever updated.

Now there’s a new face on the scene; Sitepoint’s CSS Reference is out of Beta, and it looks good; nicely laid out, up-to-date browser support lists, and allows feedback from users. I haven’t used it extensively yet, but it looks pretty impressive at first glance.

After two days of commotion regarding the Internet Explorer team’s decision to include a standards opt-in in the next version of their browser, Mozilla’s John Resig has noticed something rather important in an exchange on IE’s Chris Wilson’s blog; namely:

Internet Explorer 8 will support DOCTYPE switching for new DOCTYPEs (like HTML5).

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Predictably, yesterday’s announcement from Microsoft about the new standards opt-in switch has created quite a stir in the web development community. As I noted yesterday, the reaction from the other browser makers would be quite important — and it looks as if they’re not interested.

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The Internet Explorer team announced today that we will have to opt in to using the improved standards support in future versions of their browser, by means of a meta declaration in the head of our documents:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

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