Matthew Knott

The HTML equivalent of an Anderson Shelter, a meta tag that makes IE8 render websites in an IE7 compatibility mode, has been released by Microsofts Nick MacKechnie in his blog this week.

I'm not sure whether I should say "thanks for the heads up" or "why the hell should I have to?". I mean, my site is standards based, I specify my doctype, and there should only be one way of displaying that document.

So yet again, after spending years slowly adopting web standards, Microsoft has yet again come out with a version of internet explorer that adds their stubborn feature set, prioritised above features that make it easier for developers to develop cross-browser compatible sites.

I really did think that this was Microsofts chance to build on the progress they had made with IE7, but no such luck. A couple of months ago I tried out IE8, and when I hit IBM's W3 intranet, All I got was a little blue bar at the top of the page, and nothing else. The majority of sites I've looked at with IE8 do not handle well, so this meta tag is going to be compulsary.

Perhaps Microsoft should absorb the cost that will be incurred by local business to have this line of code inserted into every page of their website, there bust be billions of pages of markup that will require changing, so profitable times ahead for web developers.

Tags: Standards Microsoft Web_Standards IE7 IE8 Developers Selfish Doctype W3C Stubborn

Web standards is a passion of mine. They are the guidelines set down for a document type, and should be followed. Being a devout standards follower can bring you kudos and appreciation, but your efforts may be let down by the web browser used to view the site.

Poor support for web standards in Internet Explorer mainly, and older versions of Safari, amongst others, means that your site may loose much of it's shape and pizzaz.

Until now, the challenge of the web designer has been to tailor their styles and code to be cross-browser compatible. Ultimately, you may have to reign back some of your design and functionality, sacrificing the overall product, but what if the situation was turned upside down.

Imagine if some of the biggest websites started blocking browsers that would not display their site correctly? It's not unheard of for a site to carry a disclaimer that it will only work properly in Internet Explorer, but you just do not see complete blocking at browser level, and because of this, there is no incentive for Microsoft to release patches for their slightly older browsers (which still dominate the browser demographic).

This type of motion would have to be started by a major site, one that could sway enough opinion and also encourage more users to upgrade, faster than if the smaller sites embarked on such a mission.

Legally, the site ultimately has impunity from prosecution on the grounds of discrimination because the browsers are not technically capable of displaying the content correctly and consitently, and therefore can be blcoked from viewing the content.

Morally, there is always going to be the desire to be open to all, but I think a day will come when major sites will force a browser upgrade before granting access.

Technically, there is a level of satisfaction derived from creating a site that renders near identically on multiple browsers, but the time it takes to achieve this compatibility, and time is money.

Tags: Standards Safari Web_Standards Browser Internet Explorer Leverage Web Giant Accessibility Blocking Discrimination

I currently use a rich text editor called Tiny MCE to write the articles for this site. When I started using it, I thought it was the bees knees, but I've come to find it has more than its fair share of drawbacks.

For one, I find myself circumventing it more and more, it strips my code tags, removes / from the beginning of internal links, and completely strips http://www.mattknott.com/ which can be annoying when you are referencing content from multiple locations!

In addition to all of this, I go into html mode a fair bit adding in syntax to try and maintain xhtml 1.0 strict adherence. There has to be an easier way.

This week I'm going to have a stab at a solution based around tag suggestion, similar to the Dreamweaver code editor, triggered by <, a list of tags appears, and refines as I continue to type. Clicking a tag will insert the text I want, the way I want it, including alt tags and title tags for images and links respectively.

I will post an update as to how I get on, as it's going to be a bit of a challenge, but with any luck it'll be something to expand upon in the future.

Tags: Syntax Standards Rich Text Editor RTE Rich_Text_Editor Dreamweaver Web_Standards Suggest Tag