Coding & Dreaming Beta

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.

Yesterday, Dave Hyatt announced that the Webkit team have added a new proprietary value for the ‘background-clip’ property- go to my post on CSS3.Info to read more.

Perhaps the next nightly could removed the need for the webkit prefix on the ‘box-sizing’ property, rather than implementing any more proprietary features??

Peter pointed out in an article on CSS3.Info that Safari 3.1 had been released both as a standalone install or automatic software update for OSX [curses software update check been set to weekly rather than daily]; for this reason, until I read his article I had no idea they’d released it so early.

It’s a nice surprise to see what CSS/SVG support they’ve implemented:-

• complete CSS3 selector support - wahey, we can now start thinking about using nth-child’s, :target’s more seriously now.
• CSS3 Web Fonts - stop thinking Arial, Tahoma, Georgia… start thinking completely custom fonts.

This will be my first trip to a conference this year and there looks to be some good speakers which I look forward to hearing from- it’s also just round the corner from where I’m working at the moment, which is ideal!

If you’re planning to come along, holla back and we’ll have to try and meet up at the event.

On a separate note, I’d be interested to hear your feedback on what you think of the social bookmark plugin I added a few days ago - what does everyone think? Is it a bit too much? Get in contact…

The age-old problem of having to use the conventional Level 2.1 box model in conjunction with padding and/or border values is solved using CSS3. Up until now, this problem was a major stumbling block for developers, particularly in the instance of specifying a border/padding value in relation to a fluid length element, but the new ‘box-sizing’ property answers this problem.

Forgive me for possibly coming across as ignorant - but when the IE team decided to implement this function, who did they think would use it? Is this a half-hearted attempt at a tool aimed at developers to allow them to test on both IE7 and IE8 on the same browser? Or is it a feature that they think their target market group are going to make use of?

Paul Cutsinger, IE’s Lead Program Manager explains over on the IE Blog that “it will help you with everyday browsing and with quickly checking your site as you work on it”; let me break his quote down:-