Thoughts From Eric Archive

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.

Inspired by some recent conversations and a post by Dave Shea, I’m going to share with you my Sooper-Dooper No-Patent-Pending DIY Anti-Jet-Lag Technique.  I used it in my trips to and from the UK, Japan, and Australia this past year, and I didn’t have jet lag going either direction for any one of those trips.  The technique is so simple, you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it first.  Unless you did, in which case you can feel all smug.

Here it is: after getting your usual amount of nightly sleep, wake up at your normal time in the target time zone.

All right, maybe it doesn’t sound simple.  What I mean is, figure out what time the day starts at your destination.  Then modify your sleep schedule to synchronize with it before you get there.  So if you always get up at sunrise, arrange things so you sleep your usual time and wake up at the same time the sun is rising at your destination.

I’ll use my trip to Australia for Web Essentials as an example.  Going there, I flew across America to Los Angeles and then had nine hours before my flight across the Pacific.  The United flight from LAX left at 11:15pm, and arrived in Sydney at approximately 7:00am Sydney time.  Perfect: that’s about when I get up anyway.  I need about six hours of sleep in a night, and the flight was 13.5 hours long.  So I kept myself awake for the first half of the flight, and slept for the second.  When we landed Tuesday, I was all ready to go.  Sure, I was tired, but I was completely synched up with Sydney’s time zone. 

Coming back was tougher, because we departed Sydney at 1:30pm and landed in Los Angeles at 11:15am the same day.  Still, I knew what I had to do: wake up around 7:30am Los Angeles time (give or take an hour; I’m not overly picky about the time I wake up).  So I slept only an hour or two the night before leaving, in order to intentionally shorten my waking time during the flight.  Part way through the flight, I went to sleep, and woke up a few hours before landing.  While I was exhausted all that day, I was in step with LA’s time zone.

As I say, I did the same going to and from Japan, and when I went over to London.  Synching to the UK was actually pretty simple, because going there was a seven-hour direct flight that landed at 7:00am.  I just made sure to sleep for as much of the flight as possible.  The return flight was a special case, as it left in the late morning and landed in the early afternoon, Cleveland time.  So I just kept myself awake until my usual bed time, and got a full night’s sleep.  Ta-daaa!  No jet lag.

It is no shame to support this technique with medication; I do it myself, in fact.  Tylenol PM works well for me, as does Ambien.  I do not, however, medicate myself into wakefulness upon arrival.  No melatonin, which never has any effect on me anyway; and no caffeine, which I basically never consume in any form.

If you use this approach, odds are that you’ll be pretty tired on the day you arrive.  Just keep going until whatever time you’d normally go to sleep, and then sleep until your normal wake time (or maybe an hour or two later, if you’re feeling indulgent).  The next day, you’ll be back up to speed and still in synch with the local time.

Admittedly, this does require some forethought and planning, but it works for me every time.

• How to Avoid Jet Lag was published on Sunday, January 29th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Travel category.
• There have been thirteen 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.

Aw, man!  I was just innocently minding my own business when all of a sudden Jeffrey got meme all over me.  Now I have to go shower.

Four jobs I’ve had

1. McDonald’s grunt—excuse me, “crew member”
2. Customer Support Specialist (a.k.a. computer lab monitor)
3. Hypermedia Systems Manager at CWRU
4. Standards Evangelist for Netscape

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Aliens
2. The Fifth Element
3. The Killer
4. Monsters, Inc.

Four places I’ve lived

I’ve lived four other places besides.

1. Ware, Massachusetts
2. Bolingbrook, Illinois
3. Lexington, Ohio
4. Cleveland, Ohio

Four TV shows I love enjoy

1. Iron Chef (either current American or original Japanese)
2. Good Eats
3. Beakman’s World
4. Blackadder

Four places I’ve vacationed

1. Churchhill, Manitoba
2. Ragged Point, California
3. Rosarito, Mexico
4. Guilin, China

Four of my favorite dishes

1. Carne asada, medium rare
2. Cedar plank grilled salmon, medium rare
3. Shrimp scampi
4. Notso™ Fries at Yours Truly

Four sites I visit daily

1. Google (but of course)
2. CNN.com
3. New Scientist (not quite daily, but close)
4. meyerweb (to check for comment spam)

Four places I would rather be right now

…so long as my family is with me.

1. Bora Bora
2. Cap d’Antibes, France
3. Santorini Island, Greece
4. U.S. Virgin Islands

Four bloggers I am tagging

1. John Allsopp
2. Ferrett
3. Molly Holzschlag
4. Ethan Marcotte

• Four Things was published on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been seventeen replies.

So if you were wondering what An Event Apart Philadelphia was like, well, you’ll have to come to a future Event.  There’s really no substitute.  We’re working hard to get some new cities lined up and announced, as was mentioned earlier today, so hopefully that little tease won’t be a tease for much longer.

But in the meantime, you can check out the little video number Ian Corey did for us, linked to from the new AEA Philadelphia page.  It’s almost two minutes long, four megabytes in size, and eight tons of fun (and requires Quicktime 7, given that it uses the spiffy new H.264 codec).  It has Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and me.  So go check it out!

(Note to the deaf and hard of hearing:  the video is captioned for your viewing pleasure.)

• Scenes From An Event Apart was published on Thursday, January 19th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Speaking category.
• There have been six replies.

Excerpt from an IM session that just now concluded:

Molly Holzschlag: you seem to be a bit more organized than I do

Molly Holzschlag: although your office looks a lot like mine :)

Eric Meyer: My data is organized.  My life is not.

• Scenes From An Adium Window was published on Thursday, January 19th, 2006.
• It was assigned to the Humor category.
• There have been thirteen 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.