Last night Microsoft announced the release of the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, which is no doubt very similar to the final release version. You can download it from microsoft.com/ie8 (notes on upgrading).
Webmonkey have a nice round-up of the new features, so I won’t bother repeating that; instead, here are my first impressions after an hour or so’s use.
A new beta of the W3C Markup Validator has been released, and the best news is that it supports the HTML 5 doctype, <!DOCTYPE html>.
This doctype will trigger standards mode in all current browsers, so you can start using it straight away*, secure in the knowledge that you can still validate your code.
* Note: See the first comment, below.
I’ve just finished reading John Allsopp’s book ‘Microformats: empowering your markup for Web 2.0‘, and thought it deserved a review here – marked up, of course, with hReview. I was given a free copy at the recent Microformats vEvent, but hope that hasn’t coloured my review at all. Markup for the review was generated by the hReview creator (and slightly modified by myself).
Just implemented phase one of my mark-up plans, by implementing hAtom across the site; you can check it with Optimus, although be aware that it’s Optimus that’s producing the errors, not me! Of course there’s no massive benefit in my using hAtom at the moment, but a little further down the line I’m sure I’ll be grateful – plus, it’s good practice.
Mark Boulton Design have been selected to redesign drupal.org, the website of the Drupal CMS. I’m a big admirer of Mark’s writing about design and typography, and I think it’s exciting that a big open-source project is going in this direction.
Now, if we could get him to design the Drupal user interface (as Veerle Pieters is doing with Expression Engine), that would really be something.
I’ve been doing quite a lot of site mapping recently, and looking for a way to escape the standard boxy top-down view. In searching for examples of different ways to present the information, that are pleasing to look at but still immediately convey meaning, I found a number of interesting examples.
Below are the pick of the results, along with a few that don’t quite work, and some old standbys. I wanted to include images to illustrate this, but in most cases the license didn’t allow.