Coding & Dreaming Beta

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?!

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:-

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