Category: Asides

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.

Mozilla recently launched a very early version of Bespin, their online IDE (Sitepoint have a nice overview). It’s hard to make too much of it at this early stage, although it is impressively fast and responsive; time will tell if that continues to be the case as new features are added.

This responsiveness seems to come from the front end being created using JavaScript (only 62kb compressed, apparently) and the HTML5 canvas element (update: more on that implementation). Seeing other examples of what its capable of, I really need to start learning more about canvas.

I’m happy to see that IE8 includes native support for console.log, the JavaScript command which writes information to your preferred debugging tool (mine is Firebug). If you leave it in your code – as I did on my latest project – it throws an error in IE7 & below.

The way around it is to quickly check that the command is supported by your browser, and to provide an alternative (I use that old standby, alert) if not; and the quickest way to do that is with the if…else shorthand:

window.console ? console.log(foo) : alert(foo);

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.

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.

Textpattern have announced the release of version 4.07. In case you don’t know Textpattern, it’s a lightweight and easy to use CMS with a nice XML-like template tagging system. The major new feature is a new tag parser, allowing for a lot more flexibility in site development. However, the admin interface still uses the fiddly design from previous versions, so I strongly recommend you install the restyled interface mod as soon as possible.