Artryst.com: Design by Gregory Tarnoff

Internet Explorer 8 beta Released to Designers and Developers

Hot on the heels of announcing that IE8 would be standards compliant by default, Microsoft has announced the first beta release of their new web browser. Lots of new features abound including web clips (similar to Mac web widgets), better jscript handling, better AJAX handling, and extensions similar to what Firefox has. It automatically detects and imports from Firefox, however i haven’t installed it yet so I don’t know how the import of extensions works or if they are com patible. I will also be curious to see if they import form Safari, Netscape and Opera.

Something to be warned about, It does appear that Microsoft hasn’t learned to allow multiple installations of its browsers. IE8 will replace whatever working copy of IE you currently have running include 7 and 6. Install with caution.

Get the beta here.

Internet Explorer 8…now with more standards compliance

When I first wrote about IE8 and the new HTML 5 standard the plan was that by default IE8 was going to render in the IE7 mode unless you declared it to render in the new IE8 standards mode using a meta tag.

Today, Microsoft announced that this will not be the case. The new standards mode that render the Acid 2 Test with 100% accuracy will be the default mode. If you have an old site that breaks in the new IE8 you will have to go back and add the meta tag or adjust your server to allow for rendering under the older engine (aka quirks mode).

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

Some speculation behind the change points to Opera’s complaint and the recent European Union fine of $1.3 billion dollars for anti-trust tactics by Microsoft, but like any good spin-meister they deny this.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action. While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it’s the better choice.

You can read the rest of the article discussing the various modes at the MSDN blog.

An Old New Look

Something I have always been good with is paying attention to details. However this sometimes finds me spending more time on personal projects, or jumping between personal projects while working out these details.

Since working on client projects I have a clear deadline that forces me to stop, I have a tenancy to be more efficient in completing those. Well with my last theme change to the site, I never set a deadline for myself, and subsequently the features I wanted to add didn’t get resolved before I tired of the design. So I have pulled out an old theme (with a few modifications) from the past that I will have up until I finish the current theme I am working on. Which I have set the deadline on as being this upcoming Sunday, March 10th, 2008.

I figure I have enough time as that gives me all weekend and all day Wednesday (taking the day off from the regular job for my birthday) to get it done and it is more than half way there already.

HTML 5, Microsoft IE8 and Backwards Compatability

In case you haven’t heard the W3C has released the working draft of HTML 5 this week. Microsoft recently released a statement that the pre-alpha versions of Internet Explorer 8 has passed the Acid 2 test. However having achieved this, IE8 will need to break many existing sites, more than IE7 did. Or does it? more »

Google Lets You Associate Other Emails to Your Account

So this week Google rolled out this little new feature that in their words:

Adding email addresses helps Google associate useful information with your Google Account. For example, Google Calendar can show invitations sent to any of your addresses.

I thought this was genius. I am constantly having syncing issues with my calendars. I bought the iPhone in September because I thought it would be the solution, however the solution is to export my work calendar (from Outlook) and import it to Google Calendars which I have a feed imported into my Mac iCal. The loop hole here is that I don’t like exporting my work calendar daily.

This new feature could answer that. I associated my work email address with my Google account but when people sent me meeting invites, nothing happened. So I tried my Yahoo! email address and sent an invite to myself. Still nothing happened.

Has anybody gotten this to work yet? Is the invites thing something “coming soon”?