Recently in a project I’ve been working on, I stumbled across something that I haven’t seen before: one AJAX call was possible to make in the web page, but after that it stopped working.

Continue reading

One of my top annoyances when surfing around is when some “clever” web developer has chosen to use a script that resizes the web browser window to what they think suits their web site. Stop doing that! The size of my web browser window is the one I like, and I very much like to keep it that way.

Do you hate when this happens to? Please sign the petition (or, rather, write a comment) below, to state:

No, we don’t accept you resizing our web browser window anymore! You resize, and we’ll leave your web site forever.

Don’t worry, this is not a post about Internet Explorer’s support (or lack thereof) of code support, but instead solely focused on the end user experience. I regularly try out a number of web browser, and I have one question:

Why would anyone use Internet Explorer?

Continue reading

I’m constantly baffled why most companies and web developers don’t understand, or care about, the importance of using good semantic URLs. Therefore, I though I’d outline some reasons to help you understand why you really should care.

Continue reading

When I got my first computer back in 1996, it was an IBM PC with Windows 95 on. Since then I got into web developing and I’m living a fairly computer-intense life (at least in the daytime), and I’ve realized more and more that I’m phasing out one Microsoft product after another from the software I’m using.

Continue reading

With the advent and following mass adoption of Internet Explorer 7, I’ve been pondering what web browsers to ensure support in, and which one to finally ditch. I’ll explain my choices below, but while reading the post, something like TheCounter’s Browser Stats for February 2007 can be a good reference point.

Continue reading

Firefox, The Little Memory Hog lived happily together with his family, the Mozillas, in a land far far away. Firefox had now turned 2.0.0.1 and it was time to attend kindergarten.

Continue reading

Recently I got a bug report from marketing (don’t all bug reports come from there? 😉 ), about an unexpected problem in Firefox in Mac OS X. The end users had problems tabbing through the web page, and especially through forms. Since I, at the time, sat on a PC, I couldn’t test with my settings, although I knew I hadn’t seen the problem on my Mac at home.

Continue reading

Say that you’re using a web page and you find the text, the images or the layout in general too small. What do you do? Some web browser makers understand just how important this issue is and some don’t; some have set a good example and some still linger on under the impression that being able to resize text is sufficient.

Who are the good guys here? Microsoft and Opera.

Continue reading

Now that Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 and the whole web development world is trying to figure out what works in it, and, more importantly, what doesn’t (let’s just not go there right now, ok?), I thought I’d give you some solace to your doubts whether to install it or not on your main Windows machine (most likely you have doubts what will happen to IE 6, which you, unfortunately, still need to test in and cater to, for a long time to come).

Continue reading

When I wrote Looking for a good interface developer? Here’s what to ask to make sure you’ve got the right person, I wasn’t sure if I should reveal the answers to you or just let you do the research yourselves. However, I came to the conclusion that this web site is really about sharing knowledge, and also that some of you might have some good extra input on my answers.

So, here are some answers and links to more information about the questions:

Continue reading

For those out there who are interested in statistics, or want to know more about the other readers of this web site, I’ve put together a little overview of the visitors.

It contains information about countries people come from, what platform they’re on and what web browsers they are using.

Continue reading

Are you perhaps looking for a talented interface developer? You’ve heard that web standards and perhaps accessibility is good to have experience with, but you don’t know how to determine the applicants’ experience.

Don’t worry anymore, I’ve put together a check list of what to ask to make sure they’re suitable and in the loop with proper and modern web interface development.

Continue reading

It seems likely that at the end of 2006 Internet Explorer 7 will be released. First, let me say that the IE team has undoubtedly done some great work when it comes to fixing the numerous flaws in IE 6 as well as adding a heap of new CSS support (more detailed in Details on our CSS changes for IE7), although I think it’s a joke that display:table still isn’t supported.

But, my main question is: is catching up good enough?

Continue reading

If you’re obsessed with using the keyboard instead of the mouse as much as possible, and you have chosen to use the best web browser out there, Firefox, then Smart Keywords is the feature that will make your day and save you a lot of time!

Continue reading

For many web developers, CSS means numerous of ways to create flexible designs, control fonts in a powerful manner and a central location for controlling the entire look of your web site.

Unfortunately, CSS is far from perfect so I thought I’d list the most common disappointments I have, given the current state of CSS support, and I will also go a little into what your options are and what the future holds.

Continue reading

Convince a friend/lover/enemy to download Firefox before September 15th, and your name will be put in the Firefox 2.0 code. I found this a little while ago and naturally I want to help to spread Firefox, and also to get my name in there. So, do it you too; just go to Firefox day and make it happen! 🙂

This article is co-written with Anne van Kesteren, W3C Member and contributor to the WHATWG and Opera specifications, R&D and QA person.

When developing a web page, DOM methods are generally the way to go when dynamically altering elements’ attributes and performing other operations. But what about adding content to a web page in the most efficient manner, both code- and performance wise? We claim that innerHTML is unmatched by any DOM methods available and that it is in most, if not all, situations the best option.

People seem to have this feeling that innerHTML is evil. Instead of one line of innerHTML you would use about twenty lines with calls to the DOM. Every such line making one change. However, innerHTML is actually not that bad. The web browser pretty much parses it much like it parses the original page and builds some DOM nodes out of it which are then inserted at the requested location. Some mutation events are dispatched for the few who care and all is fine.

When it comes to having greater scalability in a web page, especially in AJAX scenarios, innerHTML offers unmatched flexibility. There has also been benchmark tests verifying that innerHTML is more efficient compared to using DOM methods.

The fact that it is not in a standard is simply because nobody got around to it. If you read the mailing list of the W3C Web API’s Working Group you can see that Opera, Mozilla and Apple want it to be standardized and we bet Microsoft would like the same thing. New entrants in the web browser market are probably interested as well given that it has to be supported anyway. That it’s not in a standard is probably its biggest problem, apart from the name which doesn’t really scale well. On the other hand, people complain a lot about document.write() as well which is part of DOM Level 2 HTML.

So, go on! Start, or continue, to use the best tool available for the job!

Related reading

• What’s wrong with innerHTML? by Jonathan Snook

Although news of this has been around for a while, many people seem to have missed it and/or didn’t think it was worth reading up on. On the contrary, the implications of this are huge and will most likely affect a lot of web sites. Due to the patent case with Eolas, Microsoft has been forced to update how ActiveX components behave in web pages.

This dreaded update, named Microsoft Security Advisory (912945), has been available for a couple of months, but on April 11 it will be forced out en masse through Windows Update so we have a few days till all hell breaks loose. If you want to test your web pages before that, you can download the patch and install it right now.

The gist of the patch is that no interaction with ActiveX elements will be initially allowed until the user has enabled the ActiveX by clicking it or tabbing to it and then pressing spacebar or enter. When hovering the ActiveX element the user is presented with a tool tip text that reads:

Click to activate and use this control

Examples:

Naturally, no one wants your Flash movies, videos and the likes to be presented to the end user like that. “Luckily”, there’s a fix for it, which I guess is because of some kind of glitch in the patent. If you create the ActiveX object, in most cases this means an object tag, through script, then you will bypass this security warning.

There’s an article on MSDN, Activating ActiveX Controls, which describes different techniques doing this. Noteworthy is that it won’t work with inline scripts in the web page, only external ones.

What I think of this

I don’t know any deeper details of the patent case, but I think the whole idea of this sounds ridiculous. My general opinions/fears are:

• Using Flash or video in your web pages shouldn’t, in my opinion, be dependant on if script is available/enabled.
• There will be so many cases of poor JavaScript practices trying to add content to a web page.
• I’ve done some testing and ran into problems in IE when adding param elements to an object using DOM methods. Instead, writing out the same HTML code by using the innerHTML property worked… 😐
• With this, XHTML web pages served as application/xhtml+xml will probably never see the light of day, since a lot of web pages will now depend on code like document.write and innerHTML (Note: innerHTML does indeed work in Firefox when the XHTML code is served as application/xhtml+xml).
• What happens if/when Microsoft manages to appeal this decision and win in court? Should we all then change the code again?

If this sounds like too much to you and you want a library/tool to do all this for you when it comes to using Flash, you can take a look at FlashObject (although unfortunately it relies on innerHTML to render the content).

How to uninstall the update

As life on the web goes, many web developers won’t be aware of this, which will result in that you, as an end user, will have to allow every ActiveX movie you see. The solution to this is to uninstall the patch (thanks to City Of Rain for the heads up.):

1. Go to the Control Panel
2. Choose Add or Remove Programs
3. Check the Show Updates box
4. Find Update for Windows XP (KB912945) and choose Remove

So, whatever you do, please read up on this. It will affect you, as a web developer, end user or when supporting your grandfather’s computer usage…

Today has been just one of those days. I had some work I needed to get done as well as posting something very interesting. What happens?
Internet Explorer dies on my computer…

It started out with Firefox opening up every URL I tried to open in IE. I restarted the computer and set IE as the default web browser instead. This resulted in that every web page was just white, no dialogs worked and I couldn’t view source. Since IE has got such a tight grip on Windows, you can’t just uninstall it and then reinstall it again, so that wasn’t an option to easy fix it.

After some long time spent to try different approaches to fix the problem, I gave up and reinstalled Service Pack 2. Problem is, when the computer restarted and before I got into Windows, the installation contained some kind of wizard in, yeah, you guessed it: HTML. A dialog came up asking me if I wanted to open the file or save it. I choose open, which resulted in IE opening just a blank white page. I closed that window and got an error message. I was stuck.

I turned off the computer by pressing the on/off button and started Windows in Safe Mode. Removed Firefox just to play it safe and restarted it again. No wizard this time, everything seemed fine and I got into Windows. Opened IE: blank white page. Ready to scream words no man should ever utter, I bit my lip and went online once again to find the solution.

What I then found was this: How do I repair Internet Explorer in Windows® XP? and IEFix. I went with IEFix but they seem to do the same thing. Basically, here’s the guide (run IEFix.exe to skip the first three steps):

1. Click the Start menu.
2. Choose Run.
3. Type in “rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 %windir%\Inf\ie.inf” and press enter/click OK.
4. Locate IEXPLORE.EXE/IEXPLORE.EX_ on the Windows XP SP 2 CD (or download and extract SP 2 using WinRAR to your hard drive and point to that).
5. Next, then locate mswrd632.wpc/mswrd632.wp_ which is located on the default Windows XP installation CD.

After that, my IE was actually whole again. All in all, though, with all problems I had, waiting, trying to find good guides etc I wasted about three to four hours of my day. The lesson is to never tie a web browser so tight to the operating system…

My feelings right now?

I.Hate.Internet.Explorer.

Last week I had a little tête-à-tête with Dag König where we talked about the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7 the latest beta preview and the future in general.

So, if that sounds interesting, or if you just want to hear my Sean Connery-like voice (yeah, right…), go listen now. The interview is unfortunately in Swedish, but, who knows, maybe the rest of you can pick up some Swedish web developing buzzwords…

Enjoy! 🙂

Microsoft has now publicly released IE 7 Beta 2 Preview, which you can download in their IE page. It is only available for Windows XP SP 2 as of now. Naturally, your favorite blogger (yeah, you know it’s true, just admit it! ;-)) has taken it out for a short test drive.

The good

The interface

It has a very nice and intuitive interface. I really like the rearrangement of menus and buttons; clean and sleek.

The zoom feature

Without a doubt, this is the best feature of this release! I wrote about my opinion about this in Web browser vendors are also responsible for accessibility and this is exactly what I’m looking for. The combination Ctrl + scroll wheel or Ctrl + +/- now zooms a web page.

Searching in the history

They have added a Search History feature. Seems like a great idea, but for some reason it never worked for me.

No more almighty select elements

It works positioning elements on top of select elements so they don’t shine through. Finally!

XMLHTTPRequest support without ActiveX

XMLHTTPRequest now works even if ActiveX controls are disabled.

Anti-aliased text.

It looks like the text in the web browser now is automatically anti-aliased.

Conditional comments support and consistency

Conditional comments are still supported and in a consistent way. You can use code like this to only include code in versions of IE prior to IE 7 (most likely CSS fixes):

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/ie.css" type="text/css">
<![endif]-->

The bad

No min-width/max-width or min-height/max-height support

This isn’t just bad but outright irritating! The incorrect handling of width and height is behind many flawed layouts on the Internet, and to see that this still isn’t supported is outrageous!

Lack of support for pseudo-classes

Pseudo-classes like :hover, :focus, :after and :before have no support (except for, naturally, :hover on a elements). Microsoft claim that :hover should be supported on all CSS
elements (what the hell a CSS element is…?), but I couldn’t get it to work on any other element type.

No resizing of fonts in pixels

Resizing fonts specified in pixels still doesn’t work. To my knowledge, the only web browser on the market that doesn’t support it.

Incorrect event model

It still doesn’t support the correct DOM event model for scripting.

The terrible

I found something that shocked me when I tested this web site: no content was shown but the background color. After some research and testing, I found the error. I use an element for clearing floats that looks like this:

div.clear{
	clear: both;
	height: 1px;
	margin-top: -1px;
	overflow: hidden;
}

The result of this that everything vanished! I thought that maybe it had something to do with the margin-top or overflow property, but no. It was height: 1px that threw it off so much. And the thing is, no matter what height I set the element to, it didn’t work. I had to completely remove it, and then things worked just fine. Terrible!

Running side by side with IE 6?

Since it’s possible to run IE 5 and IE 6 side by side, I was hoping that this was also applicable to IE 6 and IE 7. I also read Matt Brett’s Running IE 7 Beta 2 and IE 6 on Windows XP post, but unfortunately it didn’t work.

I also got a really interesting dialog when I was trying to get the IE 6 stand-alone version to work:

Have you tested IE 7? What are your experiences and impressions?

Related links

• What’s New in Internet Explorer 7
• Give Microsoft feedback on IE 7
• Installing and uninstalling IE 7 beta 2

The IE team has made a very wise decision to natively support XMLHttpRequest in IE 7. XMLHTTPRequest is the foundation of any AJAX usage, and I for one applaud the move to make it available without the demand for using ActiveXObject.

Using object detection, one can easily make your code backwards compatible as well:

var oXMLHttp;
if(typeof XMLHttpRequest != "undefined"){
	/* Code for: 
		IE 7
		Firefox, Mozilla etc
		Safari
		Opera
	*/
	oXMLHttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
}
else if(typeof window.ActiveXObject != "undefined"){
	/*
		Code for:
			IE 5
			IE 6
	*/
	oXMLHttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
}

Congratulations, all web developers! In IE 7, the select element and its rendering is finally fixed, according to the For the SELECT few… post at the IEBlog! Support for z-index and title has been added, as well as for zoom (Yay! ;-)).

This post is mostly applicable for Swedish readers, but I believe most of you in other countries stumble across this fairly frequently too.

Here in Sweden we have a publication called Internetworld , whose target group is mostly private users and small businesses. Their articles mostly deal with business gain, short press releases what has happened in the field of technology with things like new services on the web, Firefox increasing its user base etc. Out of general interest I read it, amongst a lot of other publications, just to stay on top of what’s going on and what people are talking about.

When I had worked a while in the internet business, I soon realized that they aren’t always exactly spot on with their articles, especially when it comes to technology choices, coding tips and its likes. However, what they’ve written has mostly been harmless and can at least be of some help to amateurs starting to code.

However, I just browsed through the latest issue with an article entitled “Web standards part 1 – Adapt the web site for different web browsers”. Just reading the headline, I realized it probably wasn’t going to be good. After going through it I came to the conclusion that it isn’t as bad as I first thought, they do, at least partly, try to convey the message that there actually is something out there called web standards and it is there for the device “Code once, run everywhere” kind of equivalent for web code.

Unfortunately, though, they have some parts and quotes that I sincerely think will hurt new web developers’ attitude towards web developing and that’s the reason for me writing this. They briefly touch on the fact that there are different interpretations by web browser vendors how web standards should be implemented. While that is to some degree true, it’s seldom knowledge that beginners need to know, it’s usually only interesting on a pretty high level, as long as you start out the correct way when you build your web sites. And it’s rarely a problem when you write HTML/XHTML, it’s usually when you code CSS that this will be more evident (which will, as I understand, be touched on in an upcoming part in this series).

The conclusion of the article is to follow web standards if you have no idea about your target group; otherwise, offer them an enhanced and web browser-specific version that only works under certain circumstances. Another conclusions is that web standards is an “advanced technique” and question if it’s worth to require that out the users to have such modern web browsers to be able to use your web site; talk about not understanding web standards.

I don’t know where to begin with to describe how damage such an attitude will do. Sure, naturally most if not every web site out there will work better in a later version in, say, Internet Explorer or Firefox than in Netscape 4 but that doesn’t give you the right to shut out users with an older web browser. It’s all about progressive enhancement.

Another thing is that even if you do know a lot about your visitors and the statistics, that situation can almost change overnight. Build an Internet Explorer-version on proprietary code just to realize a month later that many of them have started using any other web browser out there. Also, does anyone really know how many web browsers there are out there? Hundreds and hundreds, let me tell you that. Different web browsers on different operating systems, PDAs, cell phones, digital TV boxes et cetera. The only way to make sure that your code will work is to follow web standards. No, web standards will not solve your every problem, but that’s the closest you can get and definitely your best bet if you’re serious in what you do.

Let me quote some pieces in the article:

There are a number of reasons where you gain from following web standards, but here are also occasions when you don’t, which we will explain in some of the following tips.

After that, I never find any tip where the difference is proved. Also, that’s just the mindset that’s so dangerous and there has to be a realization that while web standards maybe won’t save the day automatically, they will never hold you back either.

In modern HTML, that is often referred to as XHTML…

What kind of crap is that? There’s HTML and there’s XHTML; they are two different things and none of them are really more modern that the other. Something that really bothers me is that that isn’t even mentioned and doctypes are totally left out. No wonder you think there are differences out there if you don’t know how to choose a doctype and what effects that choice will have on the rest of the code.

Usually the unit px (pixels) is the one unit that gets interpreted most alike amongst the web browsers

While I kind of get what he’s going for, like percentage rounding errors in some web browsers and its likes, talk about killing the accessibility factor. You can’t make such a statement that will give such repercussions without explaining it in a more detailed way. And what about ems? Ever heard of those?

Conclusively, maybe I’m way too hard on this guy. After all, I do sincerely believe that he meant well with the article and tried to help people, but my fear is just that he did as much harming as helping; hence this post.

I just got a tip from my friend Dejan about this; I couldn’t believe my eyes! What does this mean? Is it true?

Read Microsoft Buys Out Opera and please let me know if you know more, and what your opinions about this are.

Last night I held a presentation for SWENUG about web standards and what to think when developing web interfaces with .NET. Interesting with a crowd who are general web developers and not just working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

After the presentation we had an open discussion for an hour or so, talking about circumstances surrounding web developing and what the future might hold. A question that came up hit the nail on the head: if everyone abides to web standards, no more, no less, what’s the gain for them?

Let’s break this down. There are two possible scenarios:

• Not fully and/or properly implemented web standards.
• Fully implemented web standards and some extra features on top of that.

When it comes to the first bullet, I think the answer is pretty clear. We need some kind of minimum ground to stand on, the least common denominator where we start developing. So far, so good.

The second bullet is more interesting. If software makers aren’t allowed to implement something extra to get that competitive edge, what’s their incentive? For instance, why would companies put a lot of time and money into developing a free web browser? For the good of the world? I don’t buy that. I think Microsoft have a web browser to make it function perfectly with, as well as promoting, other products in their product family.

On the other hand, offering something more than web standards will result in product-specific proprietary solutions and add-ons. And we don’t want that either, that will bring us back to 1999.

I guess a natural follow-up question then would be: Is Microsoft on to something with XAML and WPFE? Should we expect software companies to start delivering products that will give a richer experience for some and downgrade automatically to others?

I don’t really have a good answer to this, but I believe in two things:

• Companies will want to deliver something more than their competitors.
• We will see a need for emerging technologies to give users a richer experience on the web. If that’s open like SVG or something company-specific, I have no idea.

This might sound depressing, but I think I’ve had enough. Not to exaggerate, but I think I spend at least one third of my working time covering up for flaws and inconsistencies in Internet Explorer. When using something like float or position: relative, text might disappear, get rendered incorrectly or something else that’s horrible.

The code can work in 99 pages, and then something just throws it off in the 100th one. I’m spending way too much time fixing things like this, being worried that it might break. No rules, just sheer luck if correct code works. I know IE 7 is supposed to work fine and support proper CSS, but I don’t know for how much longer I can stand it.

Sure, one can attack the hasLayout problem, but it’s definitely not a 100% guarantee that things will work. Raise your hands, how many of the problems mentioned in Explorer Exposed! have you come across? Let me list the names of them, and it might be a hint for you:

• Peekaboo Bug
• Internet Explorer and the Expanding Box Problem
• Quirky Percentages In IE6’s
• Visual Formatting Model
• IE/Win Line-height Bug
• IE6 Border Chaos
• Disappearing List-Background Bug
• Guillotine Bug
• Unscrollable Content Bug
• IE 6 Duplicate Characters Bug
• IE and Italics
• Doubled Float-Margin Bug
• Duplicate Indent Bug
• Three Pixel Text Jog
• Escaping Floats Bug
• Creeping Text Bug
• Missing First Letter Bug
• Phantom Box Bug

Please give me piece of mind! Maybe I should just use table layouts and some extensive DOM scripting; at least that works.

First, we developed layouts based on pixels. Along came accessibility and scalability, and we started to specify our fonts with ems instead. Then, those of us who wanted to be really out there created whole layouts using ems, so the whole layout would scale accordingly to the user’s current text size setting, giving a more consistent design impression. Hand in hand with this, we also created layouts that were elastic, expanding but with a fixed maximum and/or minimum width.

They way I see it, we break our necks calculating pixels into em, trying to make sure that every value is roundable. Then, of course, when the user changes his/her text size setting, it’s bound to be some rounding errors depending on the new size and things like inheritance of the em value into different elements.

Personally, I think it’s gone to far. The reason people started to use em for fonts weren’t because pixels were a bad unit, but for the fact that Internet Explorer didn’t support resizing of the text size when the font was specified in pixels.

Ever since I was a little kid, playing video games, I’ve been amazed by the fact that no matter what size one has of the TV screen, the game adapts and you can just start playing. When I started to develop web sites, I couldn’t believe the constraints of a fixed size delivered to everyone. Sure, vector graphics aren’t here yet for the web (I can’t believe why SVG isn’t already built into every web browser), but lately I’ve been testing something that gets us as close as possible: the Zoom feature in Opera.

I think it’s outright brilliant! Talk about making it more accessible while keeping the general look of the web site! You zoom a web site to desirable viewing size and it just works. Doesn’t matter if the font is in pixels, or if the web site itself has a hardcoded width. Scale, baby, scale.

My conclusion is that this feature should be mandatory in every web browser. Stop developing with ems, use your beloved pixels, and instead give us tools (read: web browsers) that offer users the features they need.

Let us instead focus on making sure no page demands JavaScript to function and that it’s possible to navigate around using only the keyboard.

The demo and the zip file are updated with a small fix to avoid generating invalid nodes while still offering the possibility to use custom HTML in any page, and the ability to display escaped code for presentations.

Updated the drop down to support pressing the spacebar and enter keys when it has got focus, to navigate directly to that certain page.

Important update!

By popular request, AJAX-S now supports XHTML code in the XML file as well. No escaping, no nothing, just write as you usually do! I think now that it is a real contender to Eric Meyer’s S5!

For some reason unknown to me, the XSLT files failed to work in some Mozilla web browsers on some computers when they had an .xslt extension. I’ve changed the zip file so it now points to XSLT files with an .xml extension. If you’ve downloaded a previous version that didn’t work, please try the new one. Big thanks to Karl and especially Henrik Box for doing some extensive testing for me (Henrik wants to meet the girls behind girlspoke as a thanks… :-))!

Release 2!

After listening to the feedback I got, I’ve now done some major updates to AJAX-S. It now supports incremental rendering, non-JavaScript users and also offers a printable version. Go check the updated demo.

Changed the JavaScript detect for support for the XSLTProcessor object so it asks users that lack that support if they want to go to the printable page instead.

Added check to scroll the current incremental step into view if it wasn’t visible.

Updated with a different look for active increment, past increment and coming increment, and a setting if one wants the first or last increment to be selected when backing from an upcoming page.

Updated with a different look for active increment, past increment and coming increment, and a setting if one wants the first or last increment to be selected when backing from an upcoming page.

Updated with a fix for two glitches in the keyboard navigation.

I’ve been thinking about creating an AJAX-based slideshow for a while, and today it happened! Today I wrote my first line of code in this project (probably not the last one), but for the moment I feel very content with the results. The code is probably not perfect, but I’m going more for the concept here. The tweaking options are endless.

The idea came to me because I wanted a lightweight slideshow based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but I also wanted to separate the data of each page from the actual code that presents it. Therefore, I decided to move the data into an XML file and then use AJAX to retrieve it. The name AJAX-S is short for AJAX-Slides (or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML Slides, if you want to).

Naturally, one of my inspirations for creating a HTML-based slideshow are from Eric Meyer and his S5. However, I wanted to take it one notch further, to make it more flexible and also usable for people with no HTML knowledge whatsoever. Another motivating factor was to just transform the data for the current page, as opposed to creating all the HTML needed for all the pages when the page is initially loaded. A leaner end user experience, basically.

It only works in IE 6 and Mozilla-based web browsers as of now. This is because of the need to do on the fly transformations on the client, which means the necessary support for ActiveXObject or XSLTProcessor has to be there. I think Opera 9 will support XSLTProcessor and probably some upcoming version of Safari too, so more widespread support in the future is very likely.

A freaky thing, which I hope is only a very unimportant detail, is that when I run it here at my host provider, I have to use the xml instead of the xslt one. However, most likely a hosting issue only.

But enough of that now. Download AJAX-S or view the demo of AJAX-S. Please let me know what you think, and if there’s any major error in the code. Not a requirement at all, but if you use it and like it, I would appreciate getting credit for it. 🙂

I’m sitting here; just sipping some nice red wine and eating chocolate, celebrating that the last seven days are over now. I’ve been working double shifts for about a week, doing my hours as a consultant daytime, and working on redesigning this web site nighttime.

So finally: redesign! And I wanted to get done with it as fast as possible, I couldn’t stand making a live redesign spread over a longer amount of time, like one of my friends does. There have been a number of reasons I wanted to create and implement a new design for this web site, and the factors and choices have mainly been these:

Write the code myself

When I launched robertnyman.com, I installed WordPress and looked around for themes written for it. My previous design was a theme designed by Shawn Grimes, that I tweaked a bit to personalize it. But with me ranting about how web sites should be developed, I ought to live up to what I preach at my own web site. You know, the shoemaker’s children and all…

Also, someone (in a jokingly way) teased me saying that I couldn’t create my own design. 🙂

The design

I wanted something that was really easy on the eyes, something that looked good and also being original to get some attention for that as well. All image material used here is from pictures I’ve taken myself. And since it’s an Easter Island theme, naturally there has to be an Easter egg; if you find and hold down a certain key combination, you will get to see a freaky picture of me! 🙂

Accessibility

I want this web site to be an example of being accessible to everyone:

• With or without JavaScript enabled.
• With or without CSS switched on/supported.
• With a wider or narrower window.
• With a smaller or larger text size setting in the visitor’s web browser.
• With or without using a mouse.

Technology

Since I work full-time with web development and also have it as a hobby, this web site should be a showcase of how I think a web site should be. Therefore, the layout is elastic and works in most web browser window sizes. I also use AJAX for the search functionality, thus not requiring a post back of the whole page to see the search results.

But naturally, everything should downgrade well too. The search has a fall back that works without JavaScript and all JavaScripts used are unobtrusive, meaning that all events are applied externally from a JavaScript meaning. The effect of this is that no elements have any inline event handlers whatsoever.

It’s possible to easily navigate through the web site just using the keyboard, leaving out the dependency on using a mouse.

Something that will interest certain people out there, and definitely Anne van Kesteren, is that this web site is using strict HTML, not XHTML. The reasons? First, I’m tired of everyone using XHTML without knowing the reasons why. They just do it because their tool/-s deliver it, they’ve heard it’s cool etc.

Second, XHTML should be served as application/xhtml+xml. In my previous design, that was the case first, but since WordPress wasn’t fool-proof and I still wanted it to be user-friendly to write comments on my posts, this ended up in me having to check the web site all the time just to make sure that nothing bad had gotten through. I then went to using text/html with XHTML for that design, according to Appendix C, but knowing that my code should be valid so I could switch to application/xhtml whenever I wanted to, I hadn’t used anything intentionally that should break.

However, now I use innerHTML in my AJAX script and Google’s ads use document write; two things that don’t work with application/xhtml+xml. So, my decision to use plain old HTML is definitely thought through and a very deliberate one. Maybe some day this web site will use XHTML again, but only the future can tell.

Testing web standards

I’ve haven’t had access to an Apple computer during this whole design face. It has been coded using web standards code, well-tested CSS approaches and object detection in JavaScript. My testing in Firefox and Opera 8, two of the most standards-compliant web browsers out there, leads me to believe that it should work automatically in Safari too. Apple user? Please let me know!

So, get going now! Resize your web browser window, increase/decrease your text size setting, turn off using any CSS, try navigating using only your keyboard, turn off JavaScript and test it!

When that’s done, and your eyes have feasted on the new layout, please let me know what you think of it! 🙂

PS. Don’t miss the two new cool map functionalities; they can be found at the bottom of the left column. DS.

PS 2. A big thank you to Henrik Box for helping me evalute my design sketches. DS.

I came across a problem yesterday that I just couldn’t seem to solve, so I though it would be a challenge to you, my dear readers. The scenario is that I want to have an ordered list where the list items are floated. However, for some reason, IE refuses to show the numbers then.

When having such a list and the list items aren’t floated, the solution is to add padding to the ol element to see the numbers, but I don’t know how to solve it when I want them floated. I tried with position: relative, tricks like height: 1% to get the element to render correctly with the hasLayout problem etc, but it just doesn’t work!

The HTML code is extremely simple, so the problem doesn’t lie in there:

<ol>
	<li>Item 1</li>
	<li>Item 2</li>
	<li>Item 3</li>
</ol>

Any ideas?

Chris Wilson just posted some interesting news about upcoming versions of IE 7. Amongst the new features are:

• The select lists will be windowless, so one can layer elements on top of them. Finally!
• A native XMLHTTPRequest object, instead of an ActiveXObject, and it will work when ActiveX is disabled.
• A Page Zoom feature. Sounds interesting, and it might help accessibility. Makes me wonder if it will support text resizing in the web browser on web pages where the fontsize is set in pixels, though.
• A Web Developer Toolbar. Can be really handy, I hope it’s something that matches the Web Developer extension to Firefox.

All this makes me happy, but also, unfortunately, I can’t stop thinking about for how many years we will still have to support IE 6 until version 7 takes over. Oh well, one day… 🙂

Recently, I got to my attention that some people at my company were going to perform a “Firefox investigation”. What this meant was that they had built an extranet for a customer who now had requested it to work in Firefox as well (goes without saying that it was a solution that only worked in IE in Windows). With me supressing the need to exclaim to everyone involved that if they hadn’t done such a piss-poor job the first time around, it would’ve worked in Firefox already (as well as Opera, Safari etc together with other standards-compliant web browsers), I decided to call the Project Manager and talk about this.

What I wanted to do was explain to him that it was dangerous to take on the project with the mindset that it should work in a certain web browser as opposed to following the given recommendations and standards, that by doing it with the general approach it would be a much better guarantee for future compatability, automatically targeting more web browsers and easier maintenance. Naturally, every web browser have some flaws that there might be workarounds for, but in general, if you write correct code you will get very close to a web site that will work in as many web browsers/platforms as possible.

So, I called him up, and it went a bit like this:

Introduction, bla bla bla
	- But what you're saying is that you have the necessary 
	skills to make things work in Firefox?
	- Well, yes. But I think it's really important that you 
	follow web standards when you rewrite/adapt your code, 
	instead of focusing on just a single web browser.
	- Yeees, we will try to do that...
	We were talking about using a so-called HTML validator 
	in this project, have you heard of those?
	- Er.. Yes (wanting to scream: of course I fucking have, 
	that's the foundation to make sure that the client-side 
	code you use is valid!).
	That's part of following web standards 
	(bla bla bla, is he getting me here?)
	
	We spoke for a while, he seemed to understand what I, 
	as well web standards, was about, and then 
	the call finished with:
	- But if we need to talk to someone, you have 
	Firefox skills?
	- Yes.... (Sigh.)

The problem in our call, as with many Project Managers and System Developers alike, is that they really don’t know about web standards and how it should be done. They never heard of the importance of semantic markup.
So, for all of you out there whose mindset is still set in the browser war era (Internet Explorer vs. Netscape):

Those days are long gone. There’s a myriad of web browsers and platforms out there, together with accessibility as well as other factors that need to be taken into regard. Read this line carefully, and then repeat it in every web project you go in to:

Do not write your code adapted for web browsers, write it according to web standards.

That’s your only hope!

At the end of July, there was a huge fuzz when Microsoft released beta one of its upcoming version 7 of Internet Explorer and it basically just contained new interface features and two CSS bug fixes. As a web developer, I was very saddened by this in my review, but only a few days later, Chris Wilson wrote a post about all the standards support goodies beta 2 will have (and yes, I agree with what many people have said, beta 1 should have been called alpha since it was far from feature complete).

And this got me thinking: from a business perspective, why should Microsoft care about supporting web standards? The reason Microsoft had to release a new version of Internet Explorer is because other web browers, I guess mostly the ones in the Mozilla product suite (Firefox etc), gained some user percentage and attention. But to the end user, seeing the new additions added to beta 1 of IE, that should be enough to slow down/stop people from switching to its competitors. I mean, most people don’t give a damn what web standards a web browser supports. Like above mentioned beta 1: if it contains tabs, popup blocking and RSS support like the other web browsers being available, while being as secure as well, that should be sufficient.
People started using other web browsers than IE because of security flaws and lack of some features, not because they weren’t satisfied with how IE handled standards.

Most users’ demands on a web browser is that its secure, contains the interface options they like and that web sites work in them. With the sorry state of most web pages out there today and Microsoft being allowed to bundle IE in Windows, I think, business-wise, that what they added in beta 1 would be enough to maintain most of the web browser market for a long time. End users don’t need more proper web standards support in their web browser than was implemented in IE 6, until most web pages are properly coded and take advantage of (or even, in some cases, rely on this to give the user the maximum experience of the web site in question) the things possible with CSS 2.1, correct DOM event handling and so on.

Don’t get me wrong here, I for one is very happy that Microsoft has decided to improve its standards support, and I guess we owe our thanks to the dedication of the IE developing team. But a part of me can’t help thinking that it wouldn’t have been necessary to keep their web browser market share.

Related reading

• IE 7 beta 1 – a first glance
• The danger of a better Internet Explorer by Roger Johansson

Oi, web developers, listen up! Microsoft has now released beta 1 of IE 7! Unfortunately, though, it’s only available for MSDN subscribers (however, it seems to be available from a number of BitTorrent web sites as well). I’ve only had a couple of hours to test it, but here’s the first impression.

The good

It’s got tabs

About time, to say the least. Open a new tab with Ctrl + T and close it with Ctrl + W. Works like it should.

RSS support

Finds RSS feeds for the current web page you’ve navigated to, and offers a view of the feed.

A search field adjacent to the address field

A small search field is placed just next to the address bar, for easy searching. However, I haven’t found out a way to open up the search results in a new tab, nor any keyboard shortcut for setting focus to search field.

The bad

No additional CSS 2 support

Yes, you read that correctly. Still no support for Child selectors, Universal selectors, Adjacent sibling selectors, Attribute selectors, Pseudo-classes (except :hover on a tags, but has been there since version 4) or Pseudo-elements. Why, oh my God, why? You tell me.

Only two CSS bugs fixed

The Peekaboo Bug and the Guillotine Bug, but to me it seems that the fix for the latter one isn’t a 100% stable, if you look at the tests in the test page. And they still haven’t fixed the doubled margin bug for floated elements. Sigh.

Correct event handling

Nope. Only the same ol’ non-standard event handling as before.

No support for the application/xhtml+xml MIME type

No support, and no validation of XHTML as XML.

Yes, I know, this is only the first beta, and a lot of things can happen before the release. But it certainly doesn’t look promising, to me it seems the focus has only been on the end-user and not for web developers at all.

Another thing that bothers me is that the beta isn’t publicly available (at lest not yet). I can understand the reason for only releasing certain products that will eventually cost money to MSDN subscribers, but IE 7 will not cost money, and they definitely need a lot of web developers to test it, to get the feedback necessary to avoid a scenario with a release that has to be patched soon after its release date.

Important update!

Chris Wilson just posted the extremely interesting post Standards and CSS in IE. In it, he addresses what will come in beta 2, where he outs this dream list:

Bug fixes

• Peekaboo bug
• Guillotine bug
• Duplicate Character bug
• Border Chaos
• No Scroll bug
• 3 Pixel Text Jog
• Magic Creeping Text bug
• Bottom Margin bug on Hover
• Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
• IE/Win Line-height bug
• Double Float Margin Bug
• Quirky Percentages in IE
• Duplicate indent
• Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
• 1 px border style
• Disappearing List-background
• Fix width:auto

Feature list

• HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
• Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
• CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
• CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
• Alpha channel in PNG images
• Fix :hover on all elements
• Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

If this happens, it really is amazing! I’m sorry for my doubts.
The one and only essential thing I can think of is missing from that list is correct DOM event handling. Support for the application/xhtml+xml MIME type would be nice, but as Jim states in his comment at the IE blog:

Anne van Kesteren’s suggestion for an Internet Explorer that can follow the specs 100% and still render old websites with quirks is a great idea, and I hope you guys will consider it for Internet Explorer 8 – implementing a buggy application/xhtml+xml will ruin any chance of it working though

The only thing I’m wondering about is why they didn’t let us know this till know. Weren’t they allowed to, or are they simple masochistic and longed for a real backlash like they got? 🙂

Anyway, I can’t wait to get my hands on beta 2!!!

Links

• A screen dump of the Windows XP version
• IE7 Technology Overview
• What’s New in Internet Explorer 7 for Developers

Many people have written about this, one way or the other, but I thought it was about time to explain how to handle width and height in CSS, and how it’s actually supposed to work.

There are three properties for width and height that allows you total control of the rendering, and their names are pretty self explanatory for how they work:

width/height

Sets the width/height of the element. It will be exactly this wide/high, no matter if its content fits or not.

min-width/min-height

Sets the minimum width/height of the element. It will be at least this wide/high, but will expand if its content requires it.

max-width/max-height

Sets the maximum width/height of the element. It will be as wide/high as its content needs, but never more than the set value.

Crystal clear, isn’t it? So is it that easy?

Of course not. Enter IE, who handles width/height as if it were min-width/min-height, and who doesn’t have any support for min-width/min-height or max-width/max-height.

What this means is that if you want the correct behavior in IE for width/height (i.e. a fixed size for an element, no matter what), or want to use max-width/max-height, you need to resort to one of these:

Dynamic expressions

Preferably used in an IE-specific stylesheet included with conditional comments, see RobLab’s CSS page‘s first item for more info.

JavaScript

You can either write the script yourself, or take a look at Dean Edward‘s IE 7 project (inevitably time for a name change now, right Dean? :-))

Related reading

The Real Reason Microsoft Won’t Support CSS2 in IE7 by Dean Edwards.

Apparently, Firefox Market Share Gains Continue, and it’s up to a whopping 10% (however, I usually tend to be skeptical to these kind of statistics). Either way, as I’ve said before, a perfect world would be where many major browser players have an equal market share, like back in the beginning of the web browser wars, and that it stays like that. It will keep web browser makers on their toes, and hopefully result in more possibilites and options, and more standards -based code working in them. I really wonder what IE 7 will hold.

Note: Why isn’t Safari mentioned at all in this piece?

Now it’s official: IE will have tabs. A pretty obvious step, but still a good one.

However, since the first beta is due soon and we haven’t heard anything about CSS and XHTML support, I start getting a bit worried…

Today is the launch of my lab web site, RobLab (yes, it’s a corny name), where I will have code, tips and tricks for anyone to use. For the moment, it only has a few things and I don’t know with what frequency I’ll be adding stuff, but that totally depends on the reception it gets. I hope the web site will act as a resource to you, and will be of use.

Now, take a look, why don’t you?

Anne writes about all the nice things that will be a part of Firefox 1.1. I can’t wait!

Ok, trying something new here. Two(!) posts, albeit shorter than the usual ones. I though I’d try and sometimes write the normal slightly longer posts, and some days, shorter ones with important links. Please let me know what you think about this!

So… On to the topic in the heading:
The team behind IE have the IE blog where they periodically write about the development of IE. Chris Wilson tries to address the big focus issues like upcoming standards support in version 7 of IE. I think he’s doing a commendable job so far, and it is very important that they gain the same relation with developers as the Mozilla team and Dave Hyatt developing Safari have.

Last Friday, Chris disclosed the first real details about the upcoming version. First, they will support the alpha channel in PNG images. Second, they will address CSS bugs, and the ones declared fixed are the peekabo bug and the guillotine bug.

Great, but still obvious that they had to do it. Also, it’s just a small small part of what they have to do.
But they seem to be on the right track, I hope they don’t stray from it and that they continue be as open as Chris has about what’s going on.

When developing web sites, making them as accessible as possible is crucial, both to people with different kinds of disabilities as well as to all kinds of different devices, web browsers and screen readers etc.
Why? Out of respect for the user, while making the web site available to as many users as possible.

You need to be aware of the fact that the web site will not look the same to all visitors, not all UAs handle CSS and other things. The solution isn’t to code in HTML 3.2 and avoid using CSS and JavaScript, since that’s just plain dumb. The most important thing is to code semantically correct, and use HTML 4 Strict or XHTML Strict. If you use JavaScript, make sure that there’s some option for those who have it turned off or a web browser that doesn’t support it.

Edward Clarke has written two things that I liked: Why your business benefits from adhering to the web standards and the Why WAI-AAA and W3 code validation don’t equal accessibility post at webdeveloper.com.

W3C‘s WAI group released in 1999 the 1.0 guidelines for creating accessible web sites (version 2.0 is still a working draft). They consist of three priorities:

• Priority 1
  Things the web content developer must satisfy. Fulfilling this leads to the Conformance Level “A”.
•  
• Priority 2
  Things the web content developer should satisfy. Fulfilling this leads to the Conformance Level “AA”.
•  
• Priority 3
  Things the web content developer may address. Fulfilling this leads to the Conformance Level “AAA”.

There are certain checkpoints for helping you know what to live up to. There are also HTML Techniques, CSS Techniques and information about the accessibility features of CSS available at the W3C web site, as well as information about the accessibility improvements in HTML 4.
There are also links and information about alternate web browsers there.

Amongst others, Joe Clark thinks the WCAG 1.0 guidelines have too little bearing in the real world, and he is eager to get people involved in the WCAG 2.0 guidelines in his How to Save Web Accessibility from Itself.
Matt May has written a short and concise piece about Accessibility From The Ground Up.

Eager to test you code now? You can check color contrasts with this tool that Roger gave me a tip about, there’s a colorblind filter service available, but most of all I recommend the excellent tool for checking accessibility: Bobby.

Since many of my visitors are Firefox users, I want to introduce extensions to you (if you’re not already aware of them). They are a wonderful thing and offers great add-on functionality, not just for doing personalization and customization (which are two very different things), but they are also very competent tools I use in my day-to-day work.

The extensions I use are (in favorite order):

• Web Developer
  Absolutely mandatory when developing web sites. My managers should pay the developer of this program for the time it saves me and the accuracy it leads me to in designing my code.
• Html Validator
  This is a close runner-up giving you the possibility to get your code automatically validated when you choose View Page Source. With its new look showing the code validation errors in the statusbar, I wonder if this one should be in spot number one.
  Unfortunately, it is for Windows only, so I think that’s what knocks it down to second place.
• Tabbrowser Preferences
  Amongst other things, automatically opens links from other applications, bookmarks and those who have target=”_blank” in a new tab/new tabs. Brilliant!
• Sage
  For reading RSS feeds in the sidebar without the need of changing to another program or navigating away from the current web page (I’m a RSS junkie).
• ColorZilla
  A tool for instantly seeing the hexadecimal color of the element you hover in the current web page, displayed in the status bar.
• GooglePreview
  A nifty extension showing (if available) thumbnails for each search result when doing a search on Google.

And these are two other extensions I found out about while doing research for this post, that I just have to try:

• JavaScript Console Status
  Displays a statusbar icon for JavaScript errors. I guess it will be similar to the one in the Web Developer extension, but maybe positioned in a place where it’s easier to notice it?
• Fangs Screen Reader Emulator
  Renders a text version of the current web page, to see how a screen reader would show it.

Amazing things for an amazing browsers! Extensions are just one of many reasons why I don’t understand why IE users persist in having it as their default browser.

Naturally, after I decided to write this post, I became aware of the fact that my friend Roger has written a very similar post. I hope they complement each other, and also that what you don’t find in my post you will find in his.

Happy extension downloading!

So, just to spice up the rumour about a Google/Firefox web browser: Google has introduced functionality that will enhance searching
with Firefox and Mozilla browsers. Is this just a result of a good
collaboration of the two, or that they unite in their struggle against
Microsoft? Or is it maybe some preparation before an upcoming launch of
a special Google browser, based on Firefox with lots of extra Google
functionality.

For obvious reasons, people speculate what Google’s and Firefox secret fling is.

I was also pondering about this in The future of Google.

What is Google cooking with Firefox?
Will there be a Google Firefox?

Those words, uttered by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, in the role as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, symbolized how it felt for me to have do develop things for Netscape 4. Luckily, Netscape has been declared dead now.

However, I read an interesting post which claimed that Internet Explorer has become the new Netscape 4 for us developers (original post found here).
I think that statement is a bit too harsh, but Internet Explorer
absolutely poses the biggest challenge in every day developing.

The thing that bothers me, though, is when pro-IE developers say things like: “So what’s so special about Firefox/Safari/[insert name of more competent browser here]? What does it have that IE doesn’t?”
It is that kind of attitude that scares me, that people are able to get
along in their professional life as developers without even knowing
about all the things Internet Explorer is missing, the far superior CSS
support (amongst other things) in other browsers and so on.

Well, I advise those people to take a look at Eric Meyer‘s css/edge site (of course, the examples here need that you use a competent web browser).

One of the things I miss the most in Internet Explorer’s CSS support is attribute selectors.
How about adding a look for all input text fields, without using classes,
and without affecting radio buttons, checkboxes, submit buttons etc.
Impossible, you say! Nope. Just code it like this:

input[type=”text”]{
width:300px;
background:#F00;
}

Ah, amazing, isn’t it? Eric Meyer wrote an article in three pieces about this in August 2000, part 1, part 2 and part 3. I recommend you to read these, especially the “box of possibilities”, as I’d like to call it, at the end of part 3.

Microsoft Watch has also got some interesting rumours about what we might expext in IE 7.

Personally, I’ve never liked the Opera web browser. Sure, they’re making progress, but I thought I’d present some reasons why I think they haven’t made it bigger.

They want to get paid

If you don’t buy a license you get a built-in ad space that is constantly present. Given how sick and tired people are of banners, pop-up windows etc, I understand why they don’t want to install a program with built-in commercial that is always present. Especially not when there are such a number of good web browsers available, that are free and commercial free.

Version handling

They release a lot of minor versions all the time. If something doesn’t work in your current version, you can easily upgrade to version 7.54 where the issue has been resolved. Sure, great, but this is a thing that just kills a developer’s interest in it. For a web browser that perhaps has got 1% of the web browser market, it’s impossible to motivate testing in 20 different versions just to see if it works in version 7 that is in the market right now.

Rendering bugs

Maybe this is just me, but the versions I’ve tested have been working just fine, except for some renderings bugs I’ve experienced when it comes to background colors rendered over a too big area etc.

The interface

A totally personal opninion, but I don’t think it looks good.

What are they doing right then? These two things are really attractive to me:

Good support for the W3C recommendations

Right on. I have nothing more to say about that.

SVG

In an upcoming version they’ve added support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Incredibly good move, and the day all major web browser supports natively, web user interfaces will be a new world. Something that is also happening in Mozilla.
About time for Internet Explorer too?

PS. Visited the Opera web site, where they’ve added the ENORMOUSLY annoying keybord shortcut alt+D that automatically sends you to the download page. For me. it’s the keyboard shortcut I always use to move focus to the address bar. DS.

PPS. I live for the hope of daylight-saving time now. My little daughter wakes up at 5 in the morning, and I really hope that daylight-saving time will nudge her time of waking up one hour forward. DS.

And so Microsoft have changed their mind…
They weren’t going to release a new version of Internet Explorer until
Longhorn, but now they’ve turned around and the first beta is expected
this summer.

So what will it contain?
My hope, as a developer, is of course that they implement better support for the W3C recommendations, especially when it comes to CSS.
Internet
Explorer has unfortunately held us back quite a lot, especially as of
lately when basically “every” other web browser on the market has got
better support for it.

Unfortunately I don’t think quite a lot will change in the upcoming version. Microsoft themselves have said
that they probably won’t do much about the CSS support: “We could
change the CSS support and many other standards elements within the
browser rendering platform. But in doing so, we would also potentially
break a lot of things.” Personally, I don’t find this to be a sound
attitude, kind of like “Everyone has been allowed to code the wrong way
so far, so let them keep on doing it forever.” Eric Meyer, the king of
CSS, has written an interesting post about this.

Then,
of course, I hope that they prove me wrong, but it seems that they will
“just” improve security and maybe add tabbed browsing.

I
would also like to point out that my opinions isn’t about acting
rebellious against the giant Microsoft, to me it doesn’t matter if the
name of the best web browser is Internet Explorer or Firefox (or, by
all means, Safari). I personally changed to Internet Explorer when the
lousy Netscape 4 hurt the market SO much, and then to Firefox when it
turned out that Internet Explorer was just stagnating.

The
ultimate situation would be if all web browser vendors made sure they
follow the existing recommendations, and then it would be up to the
user to choose the the web browser that offers the interface and extra
features that they prefer.
Basically, it’s like that right now, except for Internet Explorer that are lagging 3-4 years behind the others…

Of
course Microsoft’s decision is understandable from a business
perspective. Security flaws can make users to stop using Internet
Explorer out of fear, but better support for, for instance, CSS is
scarcely a motivator for the home user.

But the hope still lives that they fix EVERYTHING! 🙂