Tag: Microsoft

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Two items of interest today: First, the Web Standards Project has announced the completion of the Acid3 Test. Like Acid2, it’s specifically designed to test features that are in the specs, but that have incomplete, buggy, or nonexistant support in current web browsers. Acid2 focused primarily on CSS, and Acid3 focuses more on scripting.

Also, Microsoft has come to their senses and announced that IE8, when encountering a web page that says it was developed for standards, will actually treat it that way instead of treating it as a page that was designed for IE7. This is a much saner approach to the version targeting scheme, which as previously announced would have (depending on developer response) either frozen IE in place or forced us to go through the same process all over again next time.

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Okay, I really have been out of it the last few days. I hadn’t heard that Microsoft was planning a hostile takeover of Yahoo!.

I have to agree with this Google blog post: this would be bad. Yahoo! seems to “get it” (where “it” is an open Internet) much better than Microsoft does.

Actually, it reminds me a little of Disney vs. Pixar in the past decade. Pixar, in adddition to mastering computer animation, had a great sense of story—something which Disney lost track of in the mid-1990s. They saw Pixar’s movies doing better than their own, and while they were still getting a cut, they didn’t understand why they did better. They thought it was the 3D animation, when really, it was the fact that they were churning out forgettable animated films like that cattle movie whose name escapes me, while Pixar was doing Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.

Actually, the only way I can see a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo! being good for anyone but Microsoft would be if it went down like the Disney-Pixar merger, and the Yahoo! people ended up in charge of web services. Not that I expect it to be likely, and even if they were, I’m sure the higher-ups would cripple them. I get the impression that sort of thing is going on with the IE team as it is.

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Internet Explorer.My feed reader is filling up with commentary on Microsoft’s proposal to lock web pages to specific rendering engines (funny how it doesn’t sound quite so forward thinking when you put it like that). Rather than link to a lot of them, I’ll just link to Opera Watch’s post which collects quotes from various standards & browser people.

The IE7/IE6 ratio on this site is still holding above 1 for the month (yay!) at 33.6% to 28.3%.

Also interesting: last week we got our first visit from Internet Explorer 8. Just one visit to Katie’s analysis of Wolfram & Hart’s work comp liability, but it loaded the relevant images, styles, etc., so it looks like an actual browser visit (and not some bot using a fake UA, like the spambot that keeps trying to post comments as Firefox 9). More importantly, it actually came from an IP address that’s assigned to Microsoft and resolves to a microsoft.com hostname, so I think it’s the real deal.

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Internet Explorer.Okay, this will mean nothing to most people out there, but to web developers, particularly those who use standards-based design to maximize compatibility with different browsers, this is monumental.

An internal build of Internet Explorer 8 has passed Acid2.

The Acid2 test was released in April 2005 to test a number of pieces of the HTML and CSS standards that, at the time, no modern browser handled according to spec. The purpose of the test was to prod browser developers into improving their products, and to do so consistently, so that developers would have more tools available for cross-browser sites.

At the time, Microsoft dismissed its its importance entirely. Even though they were working on rendering improvements for IE7, they stated that Acid2 was not one of their goals. Meanwhile Opera and Firefox were both in the wrong phase of their development cycles to make sweeping changes, so Safari jumped on it and became the first browser to pass. (Every once in a while I see someone say Opera was the first, and I have to wonder where they were.) Opera followed with version 9, and the Firefox 3 betas pass it as well.

With Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Safari), Opera and IE accounting for the four biggest web browsers and the most popular minor browsers (Flock, Camino, Shiira, etc., plus IE shells like Maxthon), this shows unprecedented convergence among clients. It will be much easier to develop a cross-browser website that runs on IE8, Firefox 3, Opera 9+ and Safari 3+.

There are, of course, many aspects of the specs that aren’t covered by Acid2. And there are emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS3. And there are plenty of other bugs, quirks, and extensions among various browsers (IE’s bizarre concept of having layout, for instance, trips up all kinds of weird issues). And then there’s waiting for IE8 to be released, and moving people up from IE7, not to mention all the people we still have to move up from IE6. Full benefit is probably at least 3 or 4 years away. *sigh*

(via WaSP Buzz)

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Dostoyevsky Comics CoverWhat happens when you put 1940s Batman comics and Crime and Punishment in a blender? No, not shredded paper, but Dostoyevsky Comics starring Raskol. Hilarious parody of golden-age comic book storytelling and classic Russian literature. Though some of the commenters seem to feel it was a personal insult against Fyodor Dostoevsky and Russian culture in general.
(via The Beat)

This next one doesn’t really qualify as a classic, but here’s 88 Lines About 44 Fangirls, a filk based on “88 Lines About 44 Women.” (via Comics Worth Reading)

And moving forward in time once more, we have an answer to the question I’m sure you were all wondering about: What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? It shows a step-by-step transformation, with a steady increase in clutter and a steady decrease in usability… sort of in the spirit of the If Microsoft packaged the iPod video. (via ***Dave)