Blog Surfer

IE8 renders the acid 2 test
I’m not sure why I don’t see that many people talking about the fact that IE8 renders the acid 2 test perfectly now. It really seems Microsoft is starting to move forward again, after starting to feel some pressure from the open source world. Will they be able to pick up the speed needed to […]

YUI ready to celebrate 2nd Birthday
The Yahoo User Interface library is now almost 2 years old and the team is getting ready to celebrate with a party on the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, California. If you’re around on 26th of February, why not drop by for the celebrations, meeting the people behind and get some inside information about what the future […]

The Yahoo User Interface library is now almost 2 years old and the team is getting ready to celebrate with a party on the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, California.

If you’re around on 26th of February, why not drop by for the celebrations, meeting the people behind and get some inside information about what the future holds for the YUI. Apart from that, there’ll be the obligatory food and beers and of course some schwag to take away. Space is currently limited to 150 people, so be quick if you want to come.

You can find out more about the party on the YUI blog and sign up for the party on upcoming.

IE8 Compatibility with X-UA-Compatible
If you want compatibility to work well in IE8 and lower, then it is time to get to know the X-UA-Compatible header. This is according to Chris Wilson in his post on compatibility and IE8. He links to Aaron Gustafson’s new article on the issue, and summarizes himself: Aaron Gustafson, one of the members of the WaSP-Microsoft […]

If you want compatibility to work well in IE8 and lower, then it is time to get to know the X-UA-Compatible header. This is according to Chris Wilson in his post on compatibility and IE8.

He links to Aaron Gustafson’s new article on the issue, and summarizes himself:

Aaron Gustafson, one of the members of the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force wrote an article detailing where we ended up that was posted on A List Apart today; I highly recommend reading it for a different perspective. I’ll summarize, though, that:

1. “Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content.
2. “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content.
3. If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple element. Aaron gives more details on this in his article.

We believe this approach has the best blend of allowing web developers to easily write code to interoperable web standards while not causing compatibility problems with current content. We also think this approach allows developers to opt in to standards behavior on their own schedule and as it makes sense to them, instead of forcing developers into a responsive mode when a new version of IE has different behavior on their current pages. I’m excited by all the standards work we’re doing in IE8; I’m even more excited that we won’t cause a lot of compatibility problems for our users and web developers.

Sam Ruby has chimed in saying that he just wants IE to do the right thing, as best as it can, and thus put the following in his .htaccess:

BrowserMatch MSIE best-standards-support
Header set X-UA-Compatible IE=edge env=best-standards-support

He finished with some questions:

• What is MySpace supposed to do? Users copy/paste input into text areas and the result is wrapped in a template. Multiply this question by all of the sites (Blogger, WordPress, etc.) that do similarly.
• How does this affect feed aggregators? Use xhtml:meta as extension elements? How are planet / river of news aggregators supposed to cope?

Then, Eric Meyer came out to talk about switches versus targets:

The second major difference between browser sniffing and version targeting is that browser sniffing looks forward while version targeting looks back. Looking forward is one big reason browser sniffing is fragile: it’s hard to predict the future. To pick one example, Safari’s inclusion of “like Gecko” in its user-agent identifier broke a fair number of sniffer scripts—even those that were comparatively well done. The authors of those scripts had simply failed to predict that a non-Gecko browser from Apple would include the word “Gecko” in its user-agent identifier.

And PPK of quirksmode spoke of the different between versions and browser sniffing.

The Art and Science of JavaScript Games
James Edwards has written a very detailed tutorial on using dhtml to create a game which is part of his book: In this chapter, we took the languages of CSS and JavaScript well beyond the tasks for which they were intended?the presentation and basic behavior of HTML documents — and used them to create an interactive […]

James Edwards has written a very detailed tutorial on using dhtml to create a game which is part of his book:

In this chapter, we took the languages of CSS and JavaScript well beyond the tasks for which they were intended?the presentation and basic behavior of HTML documents — and used them to create an interactive 3D maze.

First, we looked at the basic principles by which triangles can be displayed using only CSS. We then extended that concept to render a perspective view, creating the illusion of three dimensions. Next, we established a convention for specifying floor plan data, and for dynamically translating that data into a perspective view. By adding listeners for user events, we successfully created an interactive maze that can be completely customized and extended. To top things off, we added some usability aids, such as a top-down map, and accessibility aids including keyboard navigation and captions.

While I haven’t delved into the details of every method that comprises the game script (there are plenty of comments, so I’ll leave that for you to pursue in your own time), I hope this chapter has convinced you to look at JavaScript in a new light. The possibilities really are only limited by your imagination!

Wowser

jquery Hover Sub Tag Cloud
Tag clouds When, used properly, they can provide visitors with an instant illustration of the main topics of the site’s content. And although we don’t have that much choice in designing them, we can still find our way to come up with new design approaches and solutions. Here is a new approach: Using jQuery  to reduce […]