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.
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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.
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Update: I wrote this article in 2009. In early 2011 WebKit decided to change their syntax to match that used in Firefox (and the W3C specification). The syntax contained in these articles will be maintained for reasons of backwards-compatibility, but you should use the new syntax for the future.
In the first part of this post I gave a potted history of the differing syntaxes, and provided an overview of how that affected linear gradients. In this second part I’m going to look at radial gradients.
Here the syntaxes diverge slightly more, with WebKit requiring more values than Mozilla; while that adds some flexibility, it also increases the complexity.
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As Firefox 3.5 brings open video to the web, the W3C decide to drop codec requirements from the HTML 5 spec, citing disagreement between browser makers and concern over patents. Luckily, there’s a way to make video for everybody, which means encoding each clip only twice.
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.
I’ve become one of the ranked masses of iPhone users, and now that I’ve come to terms with its limitations I’m generally pretty happy with it. One thing that strikes me as pretty strange, however, is the lack of support for the common data formats iCalendar and vCard — and, as a result of that, the non-existent support of the hCalendar and hCard microformats — in Safari.
It seems to me that a device such as the iPhone, with its built-in calendar and address book, would be able to make great use of the above microformats to pull contact data and events from web pages; it is, in fact, almost the perfect device for doing so.
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