Category: browsers

Prompted by the announcement on 37Signals that their next platform update would not support IE7 or IE8 (or many other older browsers), a vigorous debate took place on Twitter around the subject of for how long we should support browsers which don’t have the most modern features. For all its many positives, Twitter is no place for nuanced argument, so this article is for me to try to frame my opinion a little better.

Read the full article

Opera recently released a Labs build of their browser with support for CSS pagination; that is, removing the scrollbar from documents and adding page controls instead (this is ideal for non-desktop devices, especially TV, where scrolling can be onerous). The syntax (as described in the Generated Content for Paged Media module) is very simple; you first use a media query with the paged media type (prefixed in Opera) like so:

@media -o-paged {}

Then use new values for the overflow property on the scrollable element to control whether the pagination moves horizontally or vertically, and whether or not on-screen controls are shown, like so:

@media -o-paged {
  html {
    height: 100%;
    overflow: -o-paged-x-controls;
  }
}

This paginates the whole document horizontally, and adds controls. To see this working, you’ll need to download a copy of the Labs build (available for Mac, Windows, Linux and Android), then you can visit this example page from Dive Into HTML5 I quickly set up. Navigate by dragging/swiping, cursor keys, or the native controls.

I really like this; it’s still early days, but the syntax seems clear and logical and works well in the demos I’ve seen, and I think it’s going to be really useful as the web migrates away from the desktop and onto other connected devices. More information and examples are in the ‘Paging the Web’ article on Håkon Wium Lie’s website, and I’ll definitely be delving further into this.

This weekend I attended the London Web Standards group’s State of the Browser, a one-day event with representatives of many of the major browser makers giving us status reports on their products. Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Blackberry were all there; a member of the IE team was due to show but had to pull out for personal reasons (he viewed the live stream and answered some questions from home). The notable absence was Safari, whose community engagement is really not good enough.

There were long talks and shorter breakout sessions, as well as plenty of time to socialise; the LWS must really be congratulated on organising such a good event. There was plenty of news and talking points throughout the day — far too much, really, for me to write here, so I’ll just write up notes of what I found most interesting to me.

Read the full article

I’m not a blind Microsoft-basher, neither am I an MS fanboy (in fact, I think the whole idea of aligning yourself with any single technology or brand is pretty narrow-minded). I think MS do some things well, and some things poorly. I am going to have a bit of a pop at them at the end of this article, but I’m going to start by defending them.

Read the full article

I downloaded the IE9 Beta last night, and while I haven’t had the chance to give it a proper once-over yet, I’m pretty impressed with its capabilities so far. The real star is the hardware acceleration, which opens pages so fast it seems like magic. The new HTML5 and CSS3 support is very welcome.

You can read an in-depth review of it at ZDNet, except it seems to be written by someone who doesn’t really understand CSS very well.

Read the full article

HTML5 allows the use of block elements inside the a tag, which was not permitted in HTML4. This means that you can wrap a link around whole sections of markup, making all of the child elements of the a become the link. You use it like so:

<a href="http://example.com">
  <div>
    <h3>I'm an example</h3>
  </div>
</a>

You can begin to use this straight away, as every browser supports it — although you must be wary of one rather glaring bug in Internet Explorer.

Read the full article