Voice

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• After more than 3 years of development, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group has voted to move the HTML5 draft specification to Last Call status.

• Ad Age looks at the demographics of social media.

• This week Facebook began allowing brand tagging on photographs shared on the site. This reminds us of IKEA’s Showroom campaign implemented in 2009 (see a case study video here.) Think about what they’ll be able to create next using this new functionality.

• However that’s not the most significant Facebook news of the week. After four and half years Facebook has been granted a patent on image tagging.

• LinkedIn’s very successful IPO, launched Thursday, is seen by many as a watershed moment for Social Media.

• Another must see Google Labs Chrome Experiment Film: Rome’s 3 Dreams of Black.

• WordPress.com has dropped support for IE6.

• Macworld has a great collection of articles taking a close look at the 10th anniversary of Apple’s first retail stores.

• Put the ritalin down: In Praise of Shortened Attention Spans.

Pete LePage
Senior Product Manager, Developers & Security for IE

IE 8

IE 8 is a hybrid, has two engines; IE 9 will have three engines: IE 7, IE 8 and IE 9. This way can ensure site works in future versions of the browser.

IE 8 supports session and local storage (see presentation by Marcus Lofthouse to the New York Web Standards Meetup). Added addition to spec: a way to remove all.

Mutable DOM prototypes: take a DOM element and add properties/methods to it. Add method to

. There are a number of things not implemented in IE 8. Can write a chunk of JavaScript that adds functionality to browser. This will be used by people writing the JavaScript frameworks (jQuery, Dojo).

Native JSON support.

Network events

CrossDocumentMessaging and CrossDomainRequest

Selectors API

Fixed getElementById.

Demos at ie8demos.com (browser-sniffs and only wants to work in IE 8).

IE 9

• Faster; speed is important. Finally comparable to FF.
• A lot of work on standards-support. Will implement border-radius. Acid3 score went from 20 to 32. IE 8 Current CSS3 support is vertical-text. Hope to more than double it in IE 9.

Questions/Answers

Q: Why always trying to play catch up? Why not just adopt Webkit?

A: A lot of things that make adopting Webkit or Gecko more difficult than it seems.

Q: Any release date for IE 9?

A: No dates as of now

Q: Still trying to get Canvas out of the spec for HTML5?

A: Not sure; might be a miscommunication

Q: Any major updates planned for IE 8?

A: Probably not; next major version will be 9. Security updates will be released for 8, but the rendering engine will not change.

theMechanism follows Yahoo!'s Graded Browser Support and agrees with the GBS approach:

In the first 10 years of professional web development, back in the early '90s, browser support was binary: Do you—or don't you—support a given browser? When the answer was "No," user access to the site was often actively prevented. In the years following IE5's release in 1998, professional web designers and developers have become accustomed to asking at the outset of any new undertaking, "Do I have to support Netscape 4.x browsers for this project?"

By contrast, in modern web development we must support all browsers. Choosing to exclude a segment of users is inappropriate, and, with a "Graded Browser Support" strategy, unnecessary.

The two principal concepts of GBS are a broader and more reasonable definition of "support" and the notion of "grades" of support.

As Jan Odvarko notes, "I was surprised how many Firebug extensions … exist out there." Check out his list of 12 extensions at http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/list-of-firebug-extensions/. All extensions include a brief summary of what they do, a screen capture and a link to the download page.

Two that I use are YSlow and Odvarko's own Firecookie.. YSlow analyzes Web pages and determines why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites. Firecookie makes it possible to view and manage cookies within the familiar Firebug UI.

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

via Webmonkey:

Variables in cascading stylesheets are now available in the nightly WebKit build.

CSS without variables:

With CSS variables:

Jeffrey Barke is senior developer and information architect at theMechanism, a multimedia firm with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.