The Internet Explorer team have announced the (first?) release candidate of IE8 (download it here). I used it briefly last night and it seems perfectly stable; I doubt it will change much (if at all) before the final version.
If you know anyone who uses IE as their primary browser, encourage them to update as soon as possible; we need to get everyone onto standards-compliant browsers so we can stop wasting time pandering to IE6.
I’m having a bit of a love affair with jQuery, the Javascript library, at the moment. I know my way around JS but am far from an expert, so jQuery’s simple syntax is a godsend for me, and provides huge savings in my development time.
One quick technique I used yesterday was to make three elements of equal height; it’s very simple and won’t cope with dynamic content, but is perfectly suitable for simple page layouts.
Web Directions have posted the results of their 2008 survey today; full results and selected highlights are available. The most shocking result to me is that 10% of respondents still use tables for layout.
I don’t think I’ll be going out on a limb if I predict that the hot topic of 2009 will be HTML5, the proposed update to the markup language which acts as the foundation to everything we (web monkeys) do.
This week saw the publication of a few articles on the subject written by respected members of our industry. While a lot has been written already about the potential of the new language, these are notable for their more practical approach.
For no particular reason other than idle curiosity, I made a demo of a broken neon sign, using CSS Animations (you’ll need Firefox 5, Safari or Chrome to see it). It doesn’t degrade well at the moment, the root cause of which is down to what I think is a bug in Firefox’s implementation — I’ll need to confirm that.
One quick learning from making this: it would be really useful to have CSS Mixins when using a lot of repetitive keyframes, as I do in this animation. The W3C seem to be quite against them, however.
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