Workshop for IE8 Compatability

We decided yesterday that we would run a workshop to share the tricks we have learned so far to get IE8 to show the various cases we found solutions and work arounds for.

Still choosing a date. Will keep you posted.

Quick review of Microsoft's new IE8

My first experience with IE was a pain. I was hoping that after the candidate release that MS would have fixed many of it's errors, but, alas, its being released out to the world via the Windows automatic updates as a critical update!

What's the issue?

The looks and the tabs handling etc. would not be something that would worry me. Those things one gets used to. My issue and bug with IE8 is that it renders many (some fairly normal markup) differently to every other browser out there.

As designers and developers, we already have to contend with browser differences. We have IE6 still being used quite widely - I was visiting a prospective client yesterday and they still use IE6.

IE6 being very different from the IE7 which, in turn, is different from Firefox, Chrome, etc.

Now we have another browser which renders certain things completely differently from all the other browsers.

Well, its more work for all of us!

That, wouldn't be so bad, except for this: how does one charge for something like this? Clients expect you to have all your design ducks in a row. Ouch!

Welcome to 2009!

We are all fully back at work. Yes, I started early and did a Silverlight workshop with my most enthusiastic student, Mark Mann.

While there is a long way to go to become experts at Silverlight, we both learned so much! The most interesting project was to create a fully dynamic menu system, i.e. a menu that will work from data in a database.

Clearly some clever things were done by Microsoft's developers and it looks like Silverlight will have quite a following. But, whether it will be a Flash beater is yet to be seen. Flash has a long track record and has a lot of support. But it does seem that Silverlight has an edge when it comes to integrating into the back end, be it at this stage only really ASP.Net. But, I am sure some work will follow to provide support for other back end technologies.

PS: In case you are wondering what Silverlight is. It is primarily a front end (running in the browser) technology to provide what is known as a rich user interface (really meaning graphics and text that can move, zoom, fade in and out, play movies, etc.).

What is interesting about Silverlight is that aside from a plug-in (which must be installed on the browser) and a little JavaScript, is that the "Silverlight instruction set" gets sent from the server in XML format (the particular application is XAML). Though, now (from Silverlight version 2), the XAML file actually gets compiled to a XAP file. This does two things: (a) it compresses the file for quicker loading over the network and (b) the XAML isn't exposed for all to see (and steal).

Interesting stuff.

Night Classes

We are ending our year with night classes.

For a while I didn't want to do night classes. I am already working the whole day. But it has been interesting that the demand was sitting there all the time. And after starting the second set of night classes I met some really nice folk. In fact, from our previous class, I have gained an employee.

So all in all it has turned out to be quite fun!


Happy holidays to you!

Some definitions

There are two terms bandied about that often times cause confusion. So I thought I would define them as I see them:

Designer:
The person that designs good looking and suitable graphics and layouts for web pages. Some technical knowledge is needed but nowhere near that of the developer.

Developer:
Different from a designer in that a developer writes programs and designs data access structures. A developer needs to have some of the knowledge a designer has but can get away with not knowing how to design good looking graphic designs as the developer can work with a designer to do this.

In certain organizations even the development tasks are split. For instance, the web application developer and the database developer. But often, these tasks are combined. The size of the development usually determines the how tasks are split. Large developments usually require an additional post which is that of the Project Manager.


Hope this clarifies things for you (if you needed this to be clarified).

[TIP] CSS: How to center an element

CSS can be strange at times. Most of CSS makes logical sense, but some CSS techniques defy any logic.

Where this got highlighted for me was trying to teach one of staff CSS. She often gets confused when I demand more advanced CSS. So I concluded that some CSS just needs to be remembered and cannot logically be figured out like one does in a computer program. Ah Well!

Here is one such example:

Centering an element in CSS.

The HTML:

<div id="main">
<!-- content goes here -->
</div>

The CSS:

body {
text-align: center; /* Center main in IE */
}
#main {
width: 768px; height: 768px;
margin: 0px auto -1px auto;
/* Center main in other browsers */
}

Firstly there is a difference between IE and other browsers. The IE one is kinda obvious but seems not to be standards compliant. The use of the margin property is interesting. In case you didn't pick up on it it is the "auto" value that does the centering.

Hope this helps someone.