Posted by Matthew on December 24, 2007 at
10:44 am
Hey, our lawmakers in Washington have done something decent this year! Following moves already made by the Australians and the EU, the US has passed an energy bill that, among other things, bans the ubiquitous but hugely inefficient incandescent light bulb from being sold after 2012. The bulbs that will most likely replace them for most consumers, the funny-looking spiral-shaped ones (available now but for substantially more than incandescent — although the price will obviously plummet once they’re the only option and are mass-produced in greater quantities) use only a quarter of the energy (and produce only a quarter of the heat) of incandescents and last 5 to 10 years — clearly a huge leap in terms of being friendly to our environment.
So hold onto those old bulbs — they’ll be antiques soon!
And now a story about something that is near and dear to my heart: web design standards. Wait! Don’t run away…this has the potential to affect everyone on the web, even if they don’t know it.
The internal version of Internet Explorer 8 — the yet-unreleased version of Microsoft’s web browser — has passed the ACID2 CSS compliance test for web standards. This is huge news; allow me to elaborate.
I spend most of my time designing web sites. I design web sites at work, and I do it on the side. Creating the visual component of the web site — the user interface — involves laying out and styling your page elements with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a language for describing visual properties like font size, box width, color, background images, position on the page relative to other elements, etc. It should be simple, and in most browsers it is. For FireFox, Safari, and Opera, I can hammer out pages with almost no trouble at all. I understand all the parts of CSS and know how they should interact with each other. Internet Explorer, however, has always had its own set of rules. Let me bring up an analogy I wrote long ago:
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, think of it like this: the XHTML/CSS involved in web site design is like a recipe. Say the recipe calls for the oven to be 400 degrees. On ovens made by Mozilla (FireFox), Opera, and Apple (Safari), asking for 400 degrees means you get 400 degrees. Even though manufacturing standards say all ovens should be able to be set to 400 degrees, Internet Explorer cannot be. For my recipe to work right on Microsoft’s Internet Exploder Oven, I have to include additional instructions for the oven to first heat to 500 degrees, then cool it down to 350 with ice, then add steps for building a fire in the oven to raise it to 400 with a rare redwood only available on the rocky slopes in the Washington state mountains carefully stacked to form a combination Microsoft-swastika symbol that must be ignited by two monkeys rubbing sticks together as they attempt to recite the version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet they banged out on typewriters while filling in for the engineers who were supposed to be designing the Internet Exploder Oven.
Now even when Internet Explorer 7 came out last year, Microsoft only improved CSS compliance slightly over IE 6 (58% compared to 52% compliance, I believe; all other browsers are at least in the mid to high 90s). The ACID2 test is a stress-test of a browser’s ability to properly render tons of CSS properties — a browser that passes is considered to have a perfect rendering engine. Ideally, it shows a smiley face built out of dozens of CSS instructions. However, until recently, most browsers showed a garbled mess. If you check out the rendering comparison I prepared, you’ll see that even the current FireFox 2 doesn’t pass the test (although FireFox 3, which will be out early next year, does). For IE to go from that red, bloody mess you see for versions 6 and 7 to perfect for version 8 is…well, it’s almost too good to be true. I’m having a hard time believing it, actually. It’s like peace coming to the Middle East overnight. Or Bush admitting he made a mistake. But I digress…
As I said, this is truly huge news. Web designers such as myself spend an appalling amount of time debugging sites for IE; I estimate that, depending on the complexity of the design, anywhere from 30% to 60% of my total time writing CSS is writing stuff specifically for IE, after the site already looks perfect in every other browser. It’s infuriating and frustrating, because its behavior is hard to predict sometimes. So even though we’ll have to back-design for people stuck with IE 6 and 7 for some time (years) after IE 8 comes out, there is now a light at the end of the tunnel. What does this mean for the average Internet user? Probably better-looking sites in some cases, as people become unfettered by the limitations of IE 6/7, and it definitely means sites can come to fruition faster.
The wording of the IE development team’s blog post (”IE8 now renders the ‘Acid2 face’ correctly in IE8 standards mode“), and their insistence that they aren’t going to break all the existing sites that have been mangled to render properly in IE 6/7, makes me think that the browser will have two modes: legacy and standards. My guess is that it will render in legacy mode by default, so existing pages don’t have to be changed, and then developers can have a special tag at the top of their pages (probably a conditional comment or something similar) that will kick it into standards compliance mode.
That sound you hear? The rejoicing of web designers all across the Internet.
Posted by Matthew on December 15, 2007 at
11:08 pm
We went to see I Am Legend this evening — braving ultra-sticky snow and consequently nasty roads to do so — and it was everything I had hoped it would be. My wife even called it one of the best movies she’s seen in a long time.
I’m not going to rehash the particulars in great detail, since I think everyone knows them by now, but basically humanity has suffered a catastrophic infection of a man-made virus and there is nearly no one left on the planet. Dr. Robert Nevill (Will Smith) is one of the rare ones who is immune, and as an army pathologist he was working on the cure before the outbreak became global. He is a survivor living in New York City, along with his dog Sam, and is still looking for the cure. The catch is…he’s not truly alone.
For at least 80% of this one hour and 40 minute movie, Will Smith was alone on the screen (excepting the German Shepherd). It takes an amazing actor to carry that many scenes completely alone, and although I’m not sure he could have done it in his younger days, he certainly has the knack now. I’ve always liked him a lot, but I can’t picture the amusing but somewhat flat Will Smith of Independence Day (circa 1996) pulling off what I just witnessed. He now brings a deeper, more textured performance that goes a long way in conveying how very, very lonely — and tortured — the life of Robert Nevill is. It brings to mind Tom Hanks’ performance in Castaway. Personally, I liked Smith even better.
The direction and production of the film was exceptional as well. Movies in which New York City is destroyed or suffers some calamity are a dime a dozen, but this abandoned and desolate look was well-done and unique. The way some shots were done with jerky handheld cams — following close to Smith during intense moments — and the way others were held a few beats longer than you would normally expect — to let the loneliness sink in — all contribute to getting you inside the world of Nevill. The suspense was palpable throughout — I greatly enjoyed the “enemy” in Legend.
I’m sure it won’t be for everyone (I saw at least two couples just get up and leave during the movie), because if you’re expecting some typical, shallow, cheap thriller you’d better look elsewhere. This movie is a little more complicated; it demands your attention (the detail in every scene is fantastic and offer a lot of clues), it plays hard on your emotions, and it likes to screw with your head by getting you inside Nevill’s. It’s a very entertaining piece, and we highly recommend it.
Some good info has surfaced about 2008 plans for Google, which is a little unexpected from a company that’s almost as unforthcoming about future product releases as Apple. The discussions in which Scott Johnston, VP for Product Development, was participating were concerned mostly with Google Apps.
First, Google Sites is apparently an upcoming evolution of the (somewhat lame, IMHO) Google Page Creator. Sites will be based off of tools from JotSpot, a company Google acquired, and will allow businesses to create intranets, extranets, and (hooray) project management tracking. I can only assume that such project management tools would integrate with the your Google Calendar, which I already use and love.
The other big piece of news is that Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Spreadsheets will all soon work offline via Google Gears, a technology that can transparently store a web application on your computer so you can use it when you don’t have an Internet connection. In the case of Docs’ and Spreadsheets’ collaborative capabilities, it sounds like it will use a smart versioning system to integrate the changes into the group document once you come back online. Very cool. If you’ve never used Google Docs before, you should check it out. For most people, it’s all the Word and Excel they ever need — and it’s free, and it stores your stuff online so you can access it form anywhere. It also allows you to easily share documents with others, and even (as mentioned) have them make additions or revisions.
For those not aware (and I always like to tack this on, because not enough people are), Google Apps is one of the coolest free things on the ‘net. It allows you to use all of Google’s services — Gmail, Calendar, etc — but with you own domain name. For example, all of my whatever@rogersmj.com email addresses use Google Apps. It gives you the power and reliability of Google’s systems for your own domain. It’s much better than any lame mail service offered by your web host. And it’s completely free. Get your own domain name for less than $10/year, and then you can have Google handle your mail. Imagine how cool it is to be able to hand out a totally unique email address, and know you’ll never have to change it again because you graduated/got a new job/changed ISPs.
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Hey, our lawmakers in Washington have done something decent this year! Following moves already made by the Australians and the EU, the US has passed an energy bill that, among other things, bans the ubiquitous but hugely inefficient incandescent light bulb from being sold after 2012. The bulbs that will most likely replace them for most consumers, the funny-looking spiral-shaped ones (available now but for substantially more than incandescent — although the price will obviously plummet once they’re the only option and are mass-produced in greater quantities) use only a quarter of the energy (and produce only a quarter of the heat) of incandescents and last 5 to 10 years — clearly a huge leap in terms of being friendly to our environment.
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