Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

Microsoft have now released their first beta of IE8 for Web Developers and Designers; it’s available to download right now!

New features include:

• “Activities” - updated context menus, with links to social networking sites and various other MSN based services
• “Web Slices” - take a slice of dynamic content and keep up to date without loading the browser
• Three different layout engines to choose from: Quirks Mode (to emulate IE 5.5 etc), Strict Mode (for IE 7) and Standards Mode
• Apparently faster and more reliable
• More compatible with other browsers, meaning code should look the same across the board

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So we have the iPhone coming next month, it’s time that us in the UK and Europe began to take this seriously. The iPhone and iPod Touch, as I’m sure everyone in the tech industry knows, comes with a fully functional version of Apple’s Safari browser along with decent support for on-the-go internet. As you can appreciate, this is going to cause havoc for web developers.

Well, this isn’t really the case. Semantic markup done properly will work in any browser on any screen. If you have an iPhone or a Touch, head over to www.tropicana.co.uk and see for yourself! This site was built (by me) using XHTML 1.0 Transitional simply so that it would work perfectly in “normal” browsers. Now, seeing as Safari IS a normal browser, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work.

There are, however, a few things to consider: (more…)

Now that IE7 is pretty much mainstream and doing a lot better at complying to standards etc it should be easier to make your website look the same over all the browsers; this is not necessarily the case.

There are still some quirks that IE7 has when rendering a page, so I found - on one site - that I needed to use two conditional comments to get the thing to look right across the board. However, now I have found a better solution, although technically it is a hack it works very well and is less bulky than importing yet another stylesheet.

I don’t know if this hack has a name, but I’m pretty sure that I’m not the first to discover or use it, so I won’t call it the BeetleJoose HTML Parent Hack, although that’s a pretty good description of it. ;-) (more…)