Sheep
March 24th, 2008
It is human nature to be part of a group, or to not be left out, so it is only natural to see trends in pretty much everything in society. You see it when you go to the mall, the “goth, emo, ghetto, punk, dirty, scary” kids who without a second glance are usually surrounded by their like. On Halloween, you see a group of kids who are not dressed up, because they heard one of their friends say they weren’t going to dress, then later on another one chimed in the same, and before you know it you are being harassed for candy by some stupid teenage bastard in front of your family for fear of a broken window. So, if we are human and we see this on a day to day basis, it is no wonder that there will be Web trends as well.
Web2.0 (the beast)
People LOVE to label everything they can. It is obliviously no different when it comes to the Web. We added a version number to the end of it and suddenly we are overrun with reflections, gradients, “beta”, rounded corners and other super stuff… If anything good has come out of “version 2″ it would have to be small steps towards a more semantic web. Great, right?
Well, yes, unless of course you factor in the residual sheep-like behavior aforementioned that comes with just about everything new. Now, we have some educated designers and developers really doing their best to promote these practices, and you have others just echoing what they see/hear/read.
I just saw some kid at the mall last weekend with a “Slipknot” tee on. Honestly, who has heard anything from them in oh, at least 4 solid years? I think the same thing goes with the web. You constantly see on css help forums people asking for help with layouts, and wonder why their nested table structure isn’t working right with malformed hybrid xhtml and css snippets copied from other sites. We can probably all remember back to horribly coded JavaScript for popup windows, and other “onload” functions, and sadly enough it still goes on. It really all comes down to what you are willing to put into your work? Is it ever good enough?
Bill Gates says to go to hell…pass it on.
With the beta release of IE8, you can bet Microsoft was under the close watch of all the development community to see if this time they got it right. One of the greatest things I think that Microsoft has done with this version of IE8 is to rethink their default behavior for standards mode. No longer will we be shafted! Hmm, well at least we can pretend that anyway…That is right. What this means basically is:
Taken from The Web Standards Project
So what does this mean? Well, a few things:
- Standards-based developers will not have to add an additional header to their server or another meta element to their markup to realize the benefits of IE8’s new rendering and scripting engines.
- Any non-standards aware developers will need to be educated to either a) implement version targeting, or b) get their site compliant.
- Anyone using JavaScript that engages in browser sniffing will need to replace that for feature detection (and check their third-party code too) as many assumptions about IE’s scripting engine could be proven false in this release.
Wha, wha whaaaa? No, your eyes did not deceive you, I think we might have somewhat of a winner here. We’ll see in the upcoming beta releases. If you haven’t already downloaded it, I suggest you do just for testing, or just for curiosities sake. You can still switch to IE7 mode to debug your sites in the beta release.
And looking forward
In the future who knows what we will be looking at. What types of beasts lurk ahead? Will IE6 support die? Never mind IE6, how about IE5? Oh, and what ever happened to OK Soda?
- Posted at 8:09 pm in web design
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