Posts in the Tech Category

So IE7 beta 2 is out.  As you might expect in a beta, it has some things that don’t work as one might hope, whether due to long-standing behaviors or brand new bugs.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: don’t panic.  Trying to fix a site that’s “broken” in IE7b2 is kind of like deciding to raze your profitable gas station just because you heard car companies are experimenting with hydrogen fuel cells.  When the final version of IE7 comes out, then you can worry about what to do.  Maybe your site won’t be “broken” any more, and you won’t have to do anything.

In the meantime, what you should do is figure out what’s causing the problem you’re seeing in b2, create a very minimal test case that causes the problem, and submit that to Microsoft.  By doing that, you give them a chance to identify the problem and fix it before IE7 goes final… at which time, you won’t have to do anything about your site, because it won’t be broken.

That’s if they fix the bug in question.  They might not; they don’t have infinite time and energy.  But I can absolutely guarantee that they’ll never get around to fixing a bug nobody told them about.

In the CSS world, there are some points of concern, including bugs that are new to IE7b2.  The css-discuss community has started collecting information over on the wiki, and if you have test cases that demonstrate CSS bugs in IE7, you should feel free to add information and links to that page.

Before you do, though, make sure to observe the following (adapted from my post to css-discuss):

1. Make absolutely certain you’re testing IE7 beta 2.  IE7b1, which is available for download on various sites, had no known CSS enhancements.  It did not support CSS2.1 selectors, or fix any bugs on which CSS hacks depend, or just about anything else.  If you test with IE7b1, you’re wasting your time.  Again, be SURE you’re testing with IE7b2.

2. If you’re testing property, value, or behavioral support in IE7, make absolutely certain that your test case uses no hacks, filters, conditional comments, or other measures.  If you’re testing float margin-doubling, for example, but you still have in a CSS hack targeted at IE6, you might get completely spurious results. Make your tests as simple as humanly possible while still showing the problem.

3. If you’re testing support for hacks, filters, or conditional comments in IE7, try to make sure you’re testing using simple effects. For example, here’s how I’d test for IE7 support of a child combinator:

      p {color: red; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;
         text-transform: none;}
      div>p {color: green;}
      div > p {font-style: normal;}
      #test>p {font-weight: bold;}
      #test > p {text-transform: uppercase;}
   
      <div id="test"><p>Bold uppercase green</p></div>
      <p>Italic normal case red</p>
   

   This approach uses property/value combinations that we all know IE/Win has supported for a long, long time.  If I tried to test with widths and margins and padding, I’d be concerned that a box model bug was sneaking in and making me think there was a selection bug.  With the color-font-text approach, this is far less likely.  (Not non-zero, but close.)

   Similarly, to test arbitrary-element hover, I’d do nothing more exciting than:

       p:hover {color: green; background: cyan;}
   

4. If you find a new bug, as Al Sparber has with the a:hover/@import problem, absolutely document it with a basic test case (as Al did) and feel free to ask others for confirmation.  But remember the previous points when you construct your test case.

The goal of all this isn’t just to make sure Microsoft knows about every CSS bug under the sun, though that certainly wouldn’t hurt.  What I also hope to see happen is that we get an idea of what’s new, what’s broken, and what absolutely must be fixed.  To pick a hypothetical example, suppose it was discovered that in fixing float margin-doubling, IE7 broke clearing behavior.  That would absolutely have to get fixed before IE7 final.  Doing so would be far more critical than, say, adding support for generated content, or even fixed positioning.

Again, don’t panic, but please do help find any bugs or other problems in IE7b2, so that we have a chance of seeing the problems corrected.

Addenda: so just after I posted this, I found out about the IEblog post What’s New for CSS in Beta 2 Preview? and the in-progress MSDN technical note Cascading Style Sheet Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7.  Those might come in handy as a baseline of “here’s what I should see” while you work to find out what you actually see.

• Charting IE7b2 was published on Friday, February 3rd, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, CSS, and Standards categories.
• There have been thirty-one replies.

Registration for AEA Atlanta is now open, so y’all sign up and come see us, y’hear?  It’ll be both a hoot and a holler.  Shoot, we can all have a Coke together.

Just make sure to sign up before March 3rd, unless you want to miss out on the $50 early bird discount.  If you need to exert a little pressure on your boss to cough up the funds, AEA Philadelphia sold out about two weeks before the early bird deadline.

Just sayin’.

• AEA Atlanta Registration Open was published on Monday, January 30th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been three replies.

That’s right, folks, it’s on.

An Event Apart.  Atlanta.  April.  Alliterative!

We’ve also given a tiny little peek behind the schedule curtain: Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles (not necessarily in that order) will be future AEA stops in 2006.  There may be one or two more in addition to that, but we can’t give away all our secrets, now, can we?  Like the actual dates we’ll be in those cities.  Nope, couldn’t possibly give out those.

Okay, the dates aren’t really secrets.  We just don’t know yet.  Scheduling a road show isn’t an exact science.  There’s a lovely and near-continual juggling act with other travel commitments, venue desirability, and venue availability.  The last thing we’d want is to say we’ll be in City A on Date X, and then have to change it later on.  That’s not simply unprofessional—it’s just plain rude.

Of course, if you’d been subscribed to the AEA RSS feed, you’d already know all this.  In fact, you probably are, and do.  Sorry for the redundancy.  Forget I said anything.

Atlanta!  Be there.  Or, you know, be at one of the future shows.  Either way, we look forward to seeing you!

(P.S.  We know that these are all U.S. cities, and there are many of you in Europe who’d like to have the show come there.  We don’t have any non-U.S. plans yet.  Yet.  One day, maybe, but for now we’re going to stick to the country we know.  It makes calculating taxes a lot simpler, plus there aren’t any awkward customs forms to fill out.)

• AEA: Atlanta Bound was published on Friday, January 27th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been six replies.

So I’ve been putting off upgrading from Panther to Tiger for quite some time now.  My base reason is that I’ve been really, really busy, but the other reason is that I kept hearing that it wasn’t worth it.  Now, I’m used to the 10.x.0 version of any major OS X release being unstable and the source of many complaints, but it’s up to 10.4.4 now.  That seems like enough time to work out the kinks.

Plus, I have to use Tiger if I want to play with the Mac version of Google Earth.  So there’s that.

Admittedly, I do have Tiger installed on a partition of an external drive, and I’ve played around with it a little bit.  Still, that’s a very far cry from upgrading my laptop’s hard drive from Panther to Tiger.  I know that any major OS upgrade will mean time and energy spent on managing the transition, including re-installing or upgrading some third-party software.  That’s where the “I’ve been busy” thing comes back into play.  It’s a lot easier to take the lazy route: the system I have now works, so why mess with it?  Then again, that same attitude would have kept me in the Classic OS if I’d let it.  At some point, you have to upgrade.

So I put it to the crowd: is Tiger (now) worth taking the plunge?

• The Lazy or the Tiger? was published on Thursday, January 12th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been thirty-eight replies.

Just as a quick update, I’ve done some testing of S5 1.2a1 in the latest version of Opera I have available (which, under OS X, is version 8.51).  I’m happy to report that this copy of Opera has all of the S5 features supported in other browsers.  Incremental display, font scaling, keyboard navigation, and even the notes window are all present and account for.

To use the notes feature, here’s what I do.  Upon loading the base slideshow into Opera, I position the window on my secondary monitor, which is here taking the role of an LCD projector.  Then I hit “n”, causing the notes window to appear on my laptop’s monitor (in the role of the presenter’s machine).  After bringing the slide show window back to the fore, I select “Full Screen” in the “View” menu, and the presentation maximizes itself to the secondary monitor.  As I navigate through the slide show, the notes window stays perfectly synched with the presentation.

There may be better ways to get the notes window on the primary monitor and the presentation on the secondary monitor, but that one worked for me.

I did notice some odd bugs here and there in Opera 8.02, a copy of which I also have hanging around, but nothing that was a show-stopper.  The one that sticks out in my mind was that multi-slide jumping wasn’t cleared out after the jump.  For example, from the first slide I’d type “3 (right arrow)” to skip to slide four.  Hitting the right arrow again jumped me to slide 7, which is wrong.  Opera 8.5 acted as intended, so I’m going to assume that it has something to do with how the JavaScript is written.

If there are problems in Opera 8.5 or Opera 9 that my testing didn’t uncover, let me know.  I’ll fix anything I can—and if there’s anything I can’t, I’ll turn it over to the Opera community to figure out.  Members of that community have already been invaluable in figuring out how to work around bugs in Opera’s CSS handling in order to make the controls available, so I’m confident they’ll be able to handle anything I can’t figure  out.

• Opera and S5 1.2a1 was published on Thursday, January 12th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Browsers, S5, and Tools categories.
• There have been three replies.

At the risk of being a bit backward-looking, on 21 December 2005 I was quoted in the article “Year in Review: CSS, Standards, Microformats and Flash“.  (And I wasn’t even the one who talked about microformats, Jon!)  This was the second half of a year-end review by Stephen Bryant; part one, “The Highs and Lows of Web Design in 2005“, is also online and quotes many familiar names.  I was going to blog both at the time, and, well… I forgot.

For historical purposes, here’s the whole block of text from which I was quoted, in response to the question “Generally speaking, did you see much progression in the adoption of Web standards this year? In CSS use? Can you give some specific site examples?”:

As in previous years, 2005 saw standards adopted more slowly than I’d have liked, but faster than in previous years.  I think this was the year when it became self-evident that standards-oriented design is the way to go.  I can’t remember the last time I had to defend the practice, and whenever that was, it wasn’t in 2005.  At this point, it’s basically all over but the training.  I think the biggest gap now is between the people who want to go standards-oriented, and their ability to do so.  That’s not an easy gap to bridge, but I think we’ll get there.

I mean, it’s the point now that desktop applications are using XHTML and CSS to drive their layout.  Just recently I discovered that Adium, a multi-service chat client for OS X, uses XHTML+CSS for its chat windows.  [E]very chat session in Adium is just a single XHTML document that’s dynamically updated.  Which means that you can define your own markup and CSS to create your own chat window theme.  It’s amazingly slick and powerful, and some of the themes are just gorgeous.  There are other programs doing similar things, and I expect the trend to continue.

The new-in-2005 CSS-driven sites that immediately come to mind: Apple, Slashdot, Turner Broadcasting, AlterNet, McAfee… and I’m sure there were hundreds of others I missed.

Hopefully this won’t lose me the bonus points Jeremy awarded me.  C’mon, man—at least I didn’t post my answer to the question “Best books, blogs, design? Best CSS layout?”!

• Before I Forget was published on Monday, January 9th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Web categories.
• There have been five replies.

It’s back: S5 1.2 alpha 1 is now available (177 KB Zip archive), and you can play with either the OSF or XOXO versions of the latest development version if you just want to preview it online.  In addition, I’ve set up a contact address specifically for S5 questions and feedback.  You can find a link to this new address on the main S5 page.

New to S5 1.2:

• The progress indicator (e.g., 6/10) is now a permalink to the currently-displayed slide.  This will require an update to any S5 1.1-era themes, but it’s a minimal thing.  Granted, the current alpha doesn’t have updated styles to handle the presence of a link.  I’ll get to it.

• Bug fixes intended to make it more Konqueror-friendly.  I do not know if Konqueror will run S5 1.2.  I do not have access to Konqueror.  The fixes I included were sent to me by helpful S5 users, and may or may not have resolved all problems.  If there are still bugs in S5 when displayed in Konqueror, you are invited to submit bug fixes in the comments, or via the contact address I mentioned before.  Bug reports should be done in the comments, where other Konqueror users can see them, and not via the contact address.

• Vastly improved integration with Opera.  As chronicled in “Opera and S5 1.1“, S5 was originally intended to be a cross-browser emulation of OperaShow.  As time went on and features were added, the two diverged.  Thanks to efforts by Hallvord Steen, Opera should now be shut out of a lot less of S5 than it was.  In fact, it may well be feature-complete as compared to S5 1.1, and will get most of S5 1.2’s features.  With one possible exception…

• A “notes” window capability.  The notes view is largely the work of Shaun Inman, who wrote me last week to say, “Hey, I did this.  Interested?”  Was I ever!  I’d been meaning to do it ever since I saw the notes view in Keynote, but Shaun got there first, clever wolf that he is.

  

  To see this in action, in either the OSF or XOXO versions, hit “n”, or call up the controls and click on the three-line icon on the left.  A new “notes” window will open, looking very much like the “notes” view in Keynote.  This window displays whatever notes the author has created for the current and next slides; these are done by placing content in an element with a class of notes, pretty much exactly like the handout feature from earlier versions of S5.  The notes window also includes timers showing the time elapsed since the presentation was opened and the time elapsed since the current slide was loaded.  There’s also a pauseable countdown timer for those who prefer to keep track of time that way.  (I added the countdown timer.  Yay me!)

  The general idea is that you load up your presentation, open the notes window, and put the presentation up on the projector while keep the notes window on your presentation machine.  (Which is of course only possible if you turn off video mirroring.)  As you move through the slide show, you can see notes to yourself and keep track of time so you don’t run over.  Keen.  I don’t know how much I personally will use the notes, but I’m all over the timers like they were a stack of pancakes and I were Mrs. Butterworth.

  At the moment, the JavaScript that opens the notes window is minimal, so the notes window is fairly chromeless and not resizeable in IE/Win.  It’s also a bit rough in terms of some of its layout, as befits the alpha status.  I’m also considering adding a keyboard command for “fullscreen”, which would maximize all open S5 windows to fill the screen they’re currently occupying, and possibly also strip away the browser chrome.  I did a few experiments along those lines, but wasn’t satisfied with the results, so it didn’t get into this release.

  On a related note, I’m not sure that notes can be made to use with Opera so long as S5 relies on OperaShow, because OperaShow by its very nature makes all browser windows fullscreen.  If there’s a way to get OperaShow to put one window on one monitor, and a second on a second monitor, then that would be the answer.  If not, I’m not sure what to do short of abandoning OperaShow usage entirely, which seems strange and wrong.  But we’ll see.  If nothing else, we can verify that everything in S5 besides the notes feature works in Opera, and push those changes into an S5 1.1.1 release.

One known problem is that when Firefox displays an S5 show using the text/xml or text/xhtml+xml MIME types, which is necessary for slide shows that incorporate things like MathML and SVG, things break because innerHTML ceases to be supported.  I have a proposed fix submitted by an S5 user, but did not get it into 1.2a1.  I plan to correct this before reaching the first beta release.

A number of people have asked for a merging of effects libraries like Script.aculo.us and FACE, and there have even been scattered implementations of same.  It’s definitely tempting.  I’m not at all confident that this will happen for 1.2, though, mostly because I don’t understand enough programming to make the connections.  I’m also not sure how many of these I could pile into the code before the whole thing came crashing down.  I have hopes that we’ll be able to work out a “best practices” way to add such capabilities to any S5 presentation file, and let each author add them or not as they see fit.

So there you go.  Have at it!

• S5 1.2a1 was published on Monday, January 9th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the S5 and Tools categories.
• There have been twenty-six replies.

What is it about the Japanese that they loooove to blend colors?

Lest you think I’m indulging in some sort of bizarre racial stereotyping, I submit for your consideration the Technorati search results for blogs and other sites pointing to my Color Blender.  The Blender been moderately popular ever since its release, but so far as I can tell, the Asian market is just eating it up.  If I see a new Japanese site appear in my egorati feed, the odds are 49 out of 50 that it’ll be linking to the Blender.

So what’s the deal there?  Anyone have insights, specuation, or even translations that might shed some light on this little enigma?

(Note: it turns out that these are Chinese blogs using Japanese fonts, and not Japanese sites as I originally thought.  I’m leaving the original entry intact rather than update it.  Still, this means that the essence of the original question remains, even if the geography was off by a bit.)

• Japanese Color Blending was published on Friday, January 6th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Culture, Humor, and Tools categories.
• There have been thirteen replies.