Coding & Dreaming Beta

I was browsing the Guardian newspaper a couple of months ago (I meant to publish this post a couple of days after reading the article) and came across an article entitled, “Internet Explorer aims to embrace the web again“, so decided to take a closer look. Admittedly it was the first time I had read the Technology section of the Guardian, and considering the mainstream format that a lot of broadsheets have, was pleasantly surprised to find the article went into somewhat more depth than I had expect it would do.

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.

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.

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?!

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??

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:-

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).