New IE7 Build Available from MIX06!

Today is the first day of the MIX06 conference. Internet Explorer team members are presenting this week on much of the work we’ve done for IE7. [snip]

One of the other items on the CD is an updated build of IE7 for MIX06. This is build 5335 of IE7. In order to give something to those of you who didn’t attend the conference and to address concerns or bugs that have been reported, we’ve made an updated IE7 build available to the public. This is actually an update from the build we put on the CD for the conference so it is the most up to date build available anywhere. It is build 5335.5 and it is now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/. This build is for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and shows the current state of IE7.

Alex has gone all nutty and added his own Vanilla powered forum to CSSBeauty called SkillShare.

Alex has relaunched CSSBeauty complete with *tada* a jobs section powered by my current random project dujour Ekwipment. It still has a couple little features he’s not using very much in there, but it’s looking pretty good to me.

Fingers crossed it will hold up well under some real user action and I’ll be able to crank out the next version (getting it closer to a public beta) over the weekend.

Call to action: The demise of CSS hacks and broken pages

We ask that you please update your pages to not use these CSS hacks. If you want to target IE or bypass IE, you can use conditional comments .

Remember all those CSS hacks everyone had to learn to get stuff to work right? (* html anyone?) All of those will make pages break in IE7 now. So all that stuff you did totally in CSS with hacks in it? Now you’ll have to go back and recode all that CSS to move your hacks into Conditional Comments to just give them to the version of IE that needs them.

A good read for how CSS selectors and specificity work, for the nerd set:

Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and geeks!

A few weeks back in Cupertino, I saw Molly and Aaron explain how the specificity of CSS selectors is calculated in a way which I hadn’t seen before. Then today I came across a knotty problem while building XHTML and CSS templates for a new project where two selectors behaved differently to how I expected and I realised that I had not completed my training.

More related info at Molly.com as well.

Web Development Trends for 2006 from Anil Dash has some interesting little bits for everyone to mull over when thinking about the coming year.

Curious about what technologies and techniques are going to be popular in the coming months and into the next year? Well, our crack team of editors here at dashes.com (that is to say, me) have assembled a list of up-and-coming trends that you should keep an eye on. Call it vocational education for people building Web 2.0.

Want to file for aid online? Better run Windows

FEMA site requires assistance seekers to use Internet Explorer 6

The good news: If you’ve survived Hurricane Katrina, the government will let you register for help online. The bad news: But only if the computer you’re using is running Windows.

Yes, it turns out that to make a claim with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Individual Assistance Center, your Web browser must be Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 or higher and you must have JavaScript enabled. It even says so right on the page itself. One problem: IE6 isn’t available for Macintosh or Linux computers.

Three articles (most of which I should have stumbled across long before now) shamelessly ripped from RockBeatsPaper which was found in turn after Andy mentioned how much he liked Jake Tracey’s site (and I agree) earlier.

• Web Standards ROI
• The Business Value of Web Standards
• Real Life Savings Through Web Standards

But if and when the time comes again, I’ll have to do it using S⁵: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System.

S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible.

So while in New York I picked up a copy of Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide to read on the train while I was headed home. And I will admit that once the author gets into the sections on actual CSS it makes for a decent primer. However, being a fairly particular nerd, the first 30 pages (on XHTML) had me on that tenuous borderline between “somewhat bothered by gaps” and “machete wielding bloody rampage”.

So without further ado, here’s some of what bothered me so much.

1. Declare a Doctype (Page 12)
   If the author of the book is to be taken at strict face value then the only doctypes available are XHTML1.0 Strict, or HTML4.01 Transitional and 4.01 Transitional framesets. No mention is made at all of XHTML1.0 Transitional or XHTML1.1 or what makes the various flavors of XHTML doctypes different (target=”_blank” anyone?).
2. Using encoded values for special characters (Page 16)
   While the author makes it a point to say “if you want to use an ampersand you must use an encoded ambersand”, he totally shoots past that ampersands used in URLs and links must be encoded as well. Obviously the argument can be made that if it’s meant for one, it’s meant for all, but that’s not the way the rules worked in HTML4 so I (personally) wouldn’t want to just assume that everyone would pick up on that change. (Wevah has pointed out that I’m a retard and that actually was the rule in HTML4, I guess I didn’t think of that since I never used to really validate stuff way back then. Either way, it’s a thing that a lot of people tend to glide past without paying attention to.)
3. You can also use the @import tag to link to a style sheet… (Page 19)
   @import is a CSS directive used between style tags, not a tag unto itself (which would imply an <@import /> syntax of some sort).
4. Code example (Page 22)
   It could just be a quirk of how it was laid out or edited, but if you just strip the text off this page and keep the example code then there is one start div that ends twice.
5. These same markup techniques can also be applied to the abbr (abbreviation) tag. (Page 23)
   Despite coining a new acronym that would be a perfect match for this situation IDWIMIE, nobody feels the need to mention that abbr doesn’t work in Internet Explorer.
6. A personal peeve that I can’t find the right page for
   alt is an attribute, NOT A TAG!

Having the neighbors clog up all the washing machines when I need to be doing laundry for my NYC trip makes for a good time to finally record that “about the new site” podcast I threatened in one of my test posts. It’s my first attempt at recording with a laptop so there’s a bit of odd noise (and Bailey barks a couple times in the background) but I think it came out alright.

• Firefox Hacks
• Firefox Hacks: Hack #27 - Fix Web Servers to Support Firefox Content
• Comprehensive guide to .htaccess
• Mod_Rewrite
• Textpattern
• WordPress

I totally spaced on the fact I was suppsoed to be redesigning everything over here for the CSSReboot. I started a new design, I just never got around to rebuilding anything. Crap.

CSS Zen Garden Entry

I suppose since that icon came out of a dingbat font I can’t really sue for copyright infringement or anything.

Chris has finally launched his new blogified version of placenamehere.

So, I think I have managed to clean up all the CSS and such to work cross-browser (except NN4, of course) here and not have anything go too weird or the likes, so I guess that means things here are ready for action.