Coding & Dreaming Beta

Over the past couple of days, the IE Blog has become a hot bed of activity, with some readers complaining about recent “article floods”- at least it’s better than the drought we’ve had up until recently!

Up until now I’ve been impressed by Firefox for several reasons; what with it’s once pioneering level of standards compliancy I’ve found it a great platform to preview my sites on, going with the principle ‘code for FF, hack (workaround) for IE’. A biproduct of FF’s success has resulted with the guys at IE pulling their finger out and delivering a half-decent ’standards-compliant’ browser.

But recently however, I’ve become a bit discontent with it; as far as I’m concerned it’s lagging behind the competition somewhat.

After browsing Eric’s site the other day, I came across a thread notifying readers that he had put together an amended reset stylesheet to help in the battle for cross browser compliancy. A List Apart also describes the same solution in more detail.

One thing that caught my eye was a declaration that Eric had input on from Paul Chaplin. The purpose of this particular declaration was to remove the quote marks that standards compliant user agents automatically generate around a Q tag using the :before and :after pseudo elements; the author then has a ‘blank canvas’ to work with where he/she can manually input the relevant ampersands into the markup.

A few hours ago, the guys at IE released the first beta of IE8. First off, it was a surprise to me that they decided to release it before SxSW; also because only a couple of days ago they released details on how they reversed their initial decision regarding the proposed opt-in standards compliancy mode.

After frantically copying over a Parallels base image to create a test bed soley for IE8, I installed it - the UI looks virtually exactly the same as IE7, with the notable addition of an ‘Emulate IE7′ button (more on IE7 emulation in IE8) and the address bar highlighting the domain name (I’m guessing to try and combat phishing attacks).

Yesterday, Dean Hachamovitch announced that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what they announced initially which prompted a huge amount of feeback (good and bad) within the web community.

Dean goes on to mention that the change of heart was due to MS recently publishing a set of Interoperability Principles and suggesting that “…IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action”.

Full blog post

With the closing date for developers able to feed back to the CSSWG regarding it’s revised charter being only a week away, a few of us at CSS3.Info are discussing among ourselves about what we would like to see in CSS3.

I’ve finally succumbed to the wonders of CMS’s for blogging, and now I have made the switch, I don’t know why I didn’t sooner! Wordpress is a breeze to mod on a theming level - all in all, it took me around 10 hours to theme it into what it looks like now from it’s standard off-the-shelf theme.

In terms of CMSs I’ve a good deal of experience dealing with Drupal theming; granted, Drupal is a far more complex CMS distribution and leaves Wordpress (more of a blog anyway) in the dark when it comes to expansion capabilities. But seriously, Wordpress is sooo easy to theme.

I recently published an article on CSS3.Info about a new technique I devised for creating tooltips using CSS3. The method uses the :before (or :after) pseudo element combined with the :hover pseudo class.