Coding & Dreaming Beta

I’ve recently decided to take a break from web development probably for a couple of months. One of the reasons for this is that I’m starting to feel very burnt-out (I haven’t had a break for more than a month in three years), and the time has come to get a change of scenery for my own sanity!

My tasks for my time off are as follows:-

1. Get super fit like I was a couple of years ago before a little thing called ‘work’ came along.
2. Go visit my mates who are at uni

Following on from the recent CSS WG F2F where issues relating to the concept were either resolved or noted, and from some email correspondence with Dave Hyatt, I’ve carried out an update to the article.
CSS3 ‘box-sizing’ article

A recent post on CSS3.Info regarding the CSS WG F2F in San Diego nicely sums up resolutions relating to possible up-coming CSS features.

Two resolutions that the post doesn’t mention however, are to do with the public disclosure of dialogue within the Working Group relating specifically to IRC log’s and meeting minutes.

It was decided that from now on the WG’s minutes and also IRC logs will be made public; there was also talk about opening up process-related discussions into a new public mailing list, although this has apparently been put on the back burner for the moment.

Just noticed this…

….and this font-size inconsistency (Safari 3.1 overlaying FF 2.0.0.12), both in OSX

Look’s like a couple of regression bugs as they certainly weren’t there in 3.0- think I’ll need to come up with a test case or two.

Today, Peter Gasston posted an article summing up a recent post from Daniel Glazman talking about possible future extensions to CSS, and in particular Symbolic Constants.

I’m really trying to get my head round why this proposal was put forward (possibly because I’m particularly tired tonight and am missing some blatant advantages, in which case someone please point them out to me), but I’m really not sure why we’re trying to turn CSS into a programming language (see last two lines of Appendix E).

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that Yahoo will start indexing Microformats including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN types.

It’s great to see one of the big players shape up and start to implement this relatively new technology, and it would be great to see the other major SE’s follow suit soon. What with IE8’s ‘microformats-to-all’ push with it’s Web Slices feature based on hAtom (although it does use it’s own top-level concept on top of hAtom),

The past week has provided us with some interesting news.

First off, there’s been a hype of activity from both Webkit and Opera - Webkit’s blog kept us informed that it’s Acid3 DOM test score was increasing, it seemed every day, which ultimately led to it announcing on Wednesday that it had released a public build of a successful Acid3 rendering pass (but not an animation pass). This announcement came very soon (on the same day, in fact) after David announced that Opera’s latest internal build had passed all 100 DOM tests- it was just very unfortunate that some people misinterpreted this information and started accusing the Opera team of pulling stunts and deliberately trying to mislead - a sad state of affairs, especially because it came a result of this great news.

Whilst carrying out some further QA, I’ve noticed at least one regression bug that has creeped in and in the process of notifying the guys at IE

23/03/08

I promised to bump this post, didn’t I? As I simply don’t have the scope to focus on IE8’s (many) bugs, I though I’d let these guys do it:-

• A pretty comprehensive list
• IE8 now has it’s very own little page at css-discuss

16/03/08

• html element padding - specifying a padding value (more than null) on html element has no effect (Test Case); corrected behaviour visible in IE7 and IE6.

Well, at time of writing support is non existent even in the latest nightlies (3.0b5pre), which to me is a slight bit surprising since both Opera and Safari have supported Media Queries for while now. I guess the main push behind module support for both Opera and Safari was to ease web development for their mobile/handheld browsers.

However, what with Mozilla planning a full scale drive into the mobile browser market soon with the release of Firefox Mobile, it’s crucial that module support is included. Judging by the relevant bug ticket, it looks as though there’s not much going on; David Baron’s last entry was in November 2006 simply stating that support is WIP- perhaps I’m missing something?!

Yes, today is a first for my blog - two posts in one day!

I was checking out Anne’s blog earlier and came across this link (PDF doc), which looks as though it’s an internal email from Bill Gates himself, talking (pretty franky, I may add) about the need for Office formats to rely on the proprietary capabilities of IE.

The PDF in question resides in a directory at egde-op.org - there’s lots of other emails in that directory, if you fancy a browse. I’m guessing (only from the directory name, and Plaintiff’s Exhibit stamp) that this is some public evidence relating to the Iowa Consumer Case vs Microsoft.