Archive for the ‘atmedia’ Category

Blogstorming X-UA-Compatible

Monday, January 28th, 2008

I’ve been trying to ignore this issue since I doubted I could have added anything to the debate.

I understand Microsoft, I first saw Chris speak in London and met him later at Mix07 at the POSH table. I can’t say I know what’s going on in his mind but from what I gathered he has a job many of us would not even want. How do you promote standards without breaking the internet – not only stuff other people made but also pages that are made by your own software (think not only FrontPage but also SharePoint) or networks you yourself need to maintain.

What Eric did to prevent a flame war between web developers was amazing. If all the discussions around the development and progress of web related technologies were this civil we’d probably already be using HTML 5 and CSS 3.

Broken by Jeremy Keith outlines the main problem with the technique – you have to use it to disable it. Pardon my language here, but that’s plain stupid.

Or is it?

Reasoning

Microsoft does not want support calls about IE8 breaking pages and they don’t want calls about their SharePoint breaking (believe me, it will). There is no way of knowing when the new IE8 engine should be used. There’s also no way of them saying “Hey guys, change your page for it to work in IE8”, since they’d ultimately be saying “We need to roll a SharePoint update for this.” If you’re making a page for IE8 you can just add this as you make the page.

The ultimate goal

What we need to achieve is that the feature is there to be used but the default for the rendering is IE8 or more generally the latest version of the browser we’re using. To put it another way I think that IE=edge should be the default.

Possible solution #1

IE is famous for it’s yellow status bar. I know people don’t usually see this bar even when it does appear but how about using a semi reliable logic to define whether to render in IE8 or IE7 (think Date header, Generator META tag, HTML features) accompanied with a bar like this:

Page rendered with a legacy display engine. Set the display engine for this domain.

If the META header would be added it would work as described. If it wasn’t it would check a Microsoft provided and internally updated list of set page-rendering pairs (per domain?). If there’s still nothing found we enter the fuzzy logic that is biased to present the page in the latest IE8 rendering. If the fuzzy logic decides that IE7 should be used it displays the infamous yellow bar.

Possible solution #2

Let’s assume that usually pages that are “broken” are broken all over the domain. If this is enough we can use a proprietary solution for this problem. When Adobe Flash wants to make cross-domain requests it first requests a proprietary file called crossdomain.xml. Let’s say that IE8 requests a ua-compatible.xml that contains the URL patterns with corresponding IE rendering engine version. This would defy the idea that there needs to be no change to current pages but I would say that a single file for the whole domain is not too much to ask.

Summary

I know the proposed solutions might not be what we’re looking for (yes, I think I, and all other web developers, have a say in this). What I think we need to do is find other possibilities that might not have the side effects that the current one has. Microsoft might want to elaborate on what they’re looking for – we won’t question their reasons, we’ll just try to find a solutions that suits all of us. So let’s have a brain storming of blog posts (blogstorming?) and we might find the ultimate solution.

The little bumps of the first time user

Monday, July 3rd, 2006

As you can see, well read actually, I have about 0 time to do stuff. I haven’t the best idea why but I’m guessing it has something to do with work and heat. The immense heat in this part of the world.

I have a few stories to share and I’ll try to get around to posting them this week. In the meantime let me say this – Feed Demon is great. I’m currently testing it and I think it’s the first piece of software that I really liked from the start. And still like it. If it were documented better it’d be perfect.

On a side note, there seems to be a lot going on about Flickr. I haven’t really used it ever, but I’m doing it while writing this – I’ve been trying to get around to posting my pics from @media for some time now.

The first annoyance was the authorization of the Uploadr. Good thing I have the CTRL+S reflex (well ‘Save and Continue Editing’ anyways), since it opened over my WordPress tab. Then I figured there has to be a limitation to the free account even though I never heard about it. I have no idea if I really wanna go pro at this stage you know. So I find but I can only upload 20MB per month. C’mon you’re Yahoo! now. You could easily say 250MB per year (500MB would be even nicer you know?). Well, I thought the Uploadr would ease the tagging process but since it didn’t all my images have “needstags” tag now (picked up from Tantek).

All in all my experience wasn’t that great. I guess Flickr is a nice tool/app but it ain’t all that nice for a first-timer. And it’s really common to forget about these people since when you’re testing you’re not really one. So do test on your family & friends. Once only, then change friends or get more. Well, just for testing part.

Update: I updated the info on all pics – titles, tags, licensing. The only problem was that I kept adding the tags to the wrong picture – the field bellow the description just didn’t work for me. A bit more copy-pasting than needed. How about “zebrastriping” the entries?

@media2006 report (part 1)

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

As I already said in the blurps I was at @media 2006 this week. It was absolutely amazing. I had that ‘5-year-old-kid-rush’ seeing all these people I read about and respect. Then I managed to take it all in and actually talk to some. I met a bunch of people who were really nice. Even though there was 800 attendees it was quite cosy on the parties. All in all it was a great experience.

The conference itself was great too. Amazing speakers with great topics. Mostly what I got was a confirmation that I am on the right path and I also got some new information. I’m sorry I missed Nate Koechley’s Yahoo! vs. Yahoo! – I hear it was amazing. Hopefully the presentation will be online soon.

I guess I should start off at the first day. Not the first day of the conference but instead with the pre-party. It was held in The Feathers on wednesday evening. Parties are where it all happens.

At first it was a bit weird – I knew nobody and most of them were grouped up in what seemed to be company based groups. After some wandering around and a pint of Stella I met Christoph from Germany and another guy from the Netherlands (sorry, I forgot your name, didn’t get your card). We chatted for a bit and as I was about to leave I met more interesting people outside. One of them, Ken Himschoot, actually took a picture of me and posted it on Flickr.

Ken introduced me to Glenda and they were both trying to convince me to come to Texas for the next SXSW conference. We’ll see, but it’s still in US. Maybe after I get fingerprinted by my own country. At the party I also saw Eric Meyer, Richard Rutter, Peter Paul Koch and a bunch of other great people.

To be continued…