I am going to forgo the normal article this week, because there is so much talk about compatibility mode in IE8. As any web developer knows, IE6 and lower is different from IE7 is different from the W3C standards. The problem is that as IE improved the engineers at Microsoft not only needed to support standards, but also the thousands of people who had already built websites according to the previous, non-standard compliant versions of IE. This continued up through IE6, then when they released IE7, Microsoft took a different route, supporting more standards, but being less backwards compatible with IE6. As a result the web community cried foul, frustrated at having to support yet another browser (and one that is not completely standards compliant at that).
Enter IE8… IE8 is standards compliant, as we all learned when it passed the acid test. However, it is not backwards compliant with IE7 or IE6 and the engineers realized that there did not yet exist a good way to allow backwards compatibility, which they would need to support their, “don’t break the web” mantra. As a result, they have introduced an IE8+ only meta tag (it won’t affect any other browser at all) that allows the web designer to specify which browser their site is compliant to.
Example 1: Meta Tag
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />
This solution is simple, elegant, and degrades nicely. My hat is off to Microsoft on this one; I believe they are doing this browser right.
Here are some key articles about this topic:
Compatibility and IE8 by Microsoft
The versioning switch is not a browser detect by PPK
Beyond Doctype by A List Apart
posted by Matt Snider at 9:35 am
No article for Tuesday this week. However, there has been some big news in the JavaScript community:
YUI has added a CSS selector utility, Flash graphing, plus a whole lot more.
ExtJs has improved their already impressive client-side application management system, with additional desktop-like features.
Really Simple History now supports Safari, uses the Module Pattern, and many other additional improvements.
posted by Matt Snider at 10:10 am
This is a topic I mention fairly often, but have not taken the time to write an article about. Fortunately, there is a lot of good information already available on the web. Chris Heilmann of Yahoo, Inc. and owner of the blog “Wait till I come!” just posted his thoughts, which he summarized into 7 rules:
http://icant.co.uk/articles/seven-rules-of-unobtrusive-javascript/
Here are some other useful resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtrusive_JavaScript
http://www.onlinetools.org/articles/unobtrusivejavascript/
The future of web programming is unobtrusive JavaScript, just look at the major portal companies and how they are separating JavaScript from design. If you have not invested the time to properly understand it, there is never a better time than now ^_^.
posted by Matt Snider at 12:33 am
No article today. Sorry all, I forgot I was getting my wisdom teeth pulled yesterday and I have not been able to focus.
However, Brian Dillard has posted an update on this Real Simple History beta. Check it out:
DOM methods, document.write and the art of library design
posted by Matt Snider at 2:31 pm
The really simple history project is being taken over by Brian Dillard. He is revamping it to use the Module Pattern and compliant methods wherever possible. For more information see my article:
More on Really Simple History
And Brians:
Coming Soon: Really Simple History 0.6 Beta
posted by Matt Snider at 2:08 pm
1) Dustin Diaz, writes about improving your “getXHR” Function. Using his code will create a very robust Function that finds the appropriate XHR Object, then overloads the executing Function so that you do not have to find the Object each time you call “getXHR”. Thus, removing the cost of a constant operation from your getXHR Function and improving the performance.
http://www.dustindiaz.com/faster-ajax/
2) Website-Performance.org goes live. This site is dedicated to providing good information, tools, and techniques for improving the performance of your website.
http://website-performance.org/
3) YUI is showcased by a design magazine, Smashing Magazine.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SmashingMagazine/~3/163652967/
posted by Matt Snider at 10:37 am
