Broken Links

Thoughts on web development and technologies by Peter Gasston

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March 2009 Archives - Broken Links Archive

Internet Explorer 8 has been released

Microsoft announced the launch of Internet Explorer 8 yesterday; I urge everyone to download it as soon as possible, and to encourage their friends to do likewise — especially if their friends are using IE6. It’s great that we have another standards-compliant browser on the market, and I hope that adoption is swift.

What I would really like to see from Microsoft now is a series of iterative releases introducing new standards; rather than waiting three years for IE9, I would much rather wait one year for IE8.1. General manager, Dean Hachamovitch, has stated that there is a commitment on their side as long as test suites exist, so I call on all browser makers and standards bodies to work together to achieve that.


CSS Animation Pong

The recent release of the Safari 4 Beta saw a new standards proposal from the Webkit team, for controlling animation using CSS. While there’s still a debate to be had about whether CSS is the right language for this (I still fall on the side that it doesn’t, strictly), I do think their implementation is well handled. I wanted to try it out, so I went back to the earliest form of digital entertainment: Pong!

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Aside

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.

[#] 3 Comments . More Asides.

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