IE8, Doctype and potentially broken default behavior

I woke up this morning and read the A List Apart articles (that I defered reading until this a.m.). The powers that be have decided that IE will now use a metatag to decide what rendering type (ie6, ie7, ie9, etc.) to use. This allows for backwards compatibility. Supposedly.

First, I don’t really care about the meta. It’s fine… it is just one more trick to add to the pile. Generally, I agree with Eric Meyer’s points, that it’s better than browser switching. And it is. It’s also better than conditional CSS comments.

There are a few problems that I see, however. The first one was actually thrown into my lap as a twitter discussion between Jeremy Keith (down-to-earth web guy) and Chris Wilson (works on IE). Following the twitter-timeline, first, second, third. Apparently the default behavior for rendering a document with a HTML 4.01 doctype will be IE7. That’s right, it doesn’t fall through, it will be stuck on IE7. That is just wrong. Hopefully, both Jeremy and Chris and the other powers that be work that detail out further before Microsoft proceeds.

My second worry is the case of “edge.” Edge, as far as I am concerned, stands for bleeding edge, and that implies an experimental version, where results will be unpredictable. (I infer that definition based on every other software release that I’ve heard of.) Hopefully that’s not the case, but there sure as heck better be a concrete definition of what they consider “edge”. Hopefully they’ll throw a “current major version” in there as well. Who knows.

The third, and probably largest concern that I have, is that we are now relying on Microsoft to include past browser rendering attributes into current browsers. So IE8 should be able to render all of IE7’s quirks, as well as IE6’s quirks. Based on the fact that Microsoft had a hard time fully flushing out all of the CSS standards for so long, whats to say that that they’ll accomplish this in full. Additionally, there are the worries that including past rendering attribues will yeild the “bloatware” that Eric mentioned.

And finally (at least for today) there’s the mess of doctype and meta. Now you get to define things in both places. It’s just sortof kludgy. One more thing that I have to memorize, and I hate memorizing things.

Anyway, it’s Day one of this stuff, and there will be much discussion to come, and I’m guessing a lot of other stuff as well.

Finally, I get feedburner

So I have off for Martin Luther King day today. I found myself with a chunk of time, and decided once and for all, to make feedburner work for me. Happily, I can now say that I did that, and can move on.

You will notice the bright orange RSS logo on the side there… that now squishes my blog, del.icio.us links, and flickr images together for a nice big mess. Just the way I like it.

Feedburner is not hard, but I had no patience for it. I was under the assumption that you added your feeds, and there would be a grand final step where you could parse them all together. I kept looking around for this final step, but it turns out this is not the case. Instead, you choose one of your feeds, and then add little “enhancements” to pull in specific alternate feeds, such as del.icio.us, and flickr. Lame, compared to what I was thinking, but much faster than writing my own parser.

Of course, I’m sure everyone else out there understood this, so I’m being redundant. Oh well. That’s what you get when you try to learn everything from scratch.

Twitter inspires similar thoughts (when broken!)

First, I just watched what can only be described as a “herd” of squirrels, run across a neighbors front lawn. I’ve seen one chase another before, but I have never seen 5 all move together with a direction change. Very odd. Anyway…

A few days ago, I questioned in passing, when Twitter would start operating as a decentralized service. I asked because it was down at the time (outages are annoying, and I was bored). Apparently it was due to the MacWorld keynote address… so basically, Apple did it. Who cares, I was still bored. My friends were probably doing something amazing…

My two-second solution to the outages (and my current boredom) was decentralization of Twitter. And apparently, I was not the only one. Some questioned twitter’s usefulness as an emergency alert system. (My gut tells me that system wouldn’t work. In an emergency, most will grab their phones, not run to post a tweet. Also, there’s no way I’m paying $20 for “industrial twitter.” Anyway, I digress…)

There were also a few implementation ideas tossed around. I would implement based on a bittorrent model. You want your friends updates (call him friend B). You both have friend A in common, and friend A has friend B’s updates. There are now two places to obtain friend B’s updates. Voila. What about storage… what happens when you don’t want to hold all of my 1700 updates? Well, that’s where a few redundant twitter history servers pick up the slack, and algorithms figuring out when they start picking that slack.

[there are those squirrels again!]

Protected permissions would have to be dealt with, so give the client instructions to handle them. And I do mean client. Extend twitterific or a similar program, they would be fine for such a task [though I may leave phone-based clients out]. Why use a client instead of a dedicated server? One of twitter’s biggest draws is ease of use. Lets keep it that way… installing a server app is annoying to some, impossible to others.

I may have overlooked some flaws, but the basic model seems alright to me. A social network like this seems tailor-made for a distributed model.

So those are my two cents. Which I’m only spending so that I’m not bored when twitter is down.

what I've been up to

Though I doubt it will mean anything to anyone… I threw this diagram together Monday night. It’s my application design for a default NCBI application. I’m pretty excited about it. Not too fancy, but a nice start.

I’ve also been thinking about writing a Firefox extension. It’s about time that I play around with it, and I was thinking that a pretty simple app (like twitbin) would be a good place to start. No plans yet, but… ideas.

Speaking of ideas, when is twitter going to become open source and (then) de-centralized? That would be awesome…

Alright, now time to take the design and make it generic… woo hoo overloading!

Website usability annoyance no. 1

When you do a search, and you click on a deep page. The website makes you login, which you do begrudgingly. Where do they take you? To your home page. Do they even offer to send you to the page you were looking for? Almost never.

Come on, guys & girls. That’s just too easy…