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March 30, 2008 - 6 comments

Thematic mapping with the Google Charts API: A brief tutorial

This brief tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of the Google Charts API, but no knowledge of the new map chart type. This tutorial will cover all of the required and optional Charts API parameters for the map chart type and will culminate in displaying a US map of red states and blue states.

Producing the base map

United States of America

To produce our base map using the Google Charts API requires a URL similar to the following one:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=350x200&cht=t&chtm=usa&chd=s:_

Read more

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

March 28, 2008 - 6 comments

IE 8, version targeting, and conditional comments

As promised at last night's NY Web Standards meetup, this morning I tested to see if IE 8 would recognize IE 7 conditional comments when set to render in IE 7 standards mode. The unfortunate answer is no. You can review the test here: http://themechanism.com/barkode/demos-tutorials/ie8-version-targeting.php

Aside—I installed Safari 3.1 (525.13) on my PC (Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1) this morning and, for the first time in months, it runs!

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

March 27, 2008 - 4 comments

The Struggle for Web Standards

Sorry for posting two Chris Heilmann reblogs in such short succession (I know, I know, like a poor man's RSS reader), but not only is his stuff so good, I wanted to reference this in tonight's NY Web Standards meetup.

From "The struggle for web standards—my presentation for Coder's Saturday in Montreal" on Wait till I come! by Chris Heilmann, published on 22 March 2008 at 7:24 PM.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

March 27, 2008 - Comments Off on How to play well with others: Bring back the version targeting, Microsoft!

How to play well with others: Bring back the version targeting, Microsoft!

In anticipation of tonight's NY Web Standards meetup, I present this trenchant criticism from Joel Spolsky on Microsoft's decision to not make IE8 behave like IE7 by default:

The idealists rejoiced. Hundreds of them descended on the IE blog to actually say nice things about Microsoft for the first times in their lives.

I looked at my watch.

Tick, tick, tick.

Within a matter of seconds, you started to see people on the forums showing up like this one:

I have downloaded IE 8 and with it some bugs. Some of my websites like "HP" are very difficult to read as the whole page is very very small… The speed of my Internet has also been reduced on some occasions. Whe [sic] I use Google Maps, there are overlays everywhere, enough so it makes it ackward [sic] to use!

Mmhmm. All you smug idealists are laughing at this newbie/idjit. The consumer is not an idiot. She's your wife. So stop laughing. 98% of the world will install IE8 and say, "It has bugs and I can't see my sites." They don't give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic "standard" that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don't want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.

From "Martian Headsets" on Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky, my favorite new blog on software development and the internet. So far, I find everything on here very well-written, reasoned, and developed into coherent essays (long is good!)

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

March 7, 2008 - Comments Off on Safari CSS hack update—The end of the star seven hack

Safari CSS hack update—The end of the star seven hack

From Surfin' Safari:

For those of you using the star seven CSS hack to target current or older versions of WebKit, this parsing bug has been closed in the latest WebKit nightlies. Acid3 specifically tests for this, so any browser that wants to be compliant with Acid3 will have to fix this CSS parsing bug.

For more information about this hack, see:
http://diveintomark.org/projects/csshacks/star7.html

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

March 7, 2008 - Comments Off on IE8’s layout modes

IE8’s layout modes

From an informative post to the IEBlog on IE 8's layout modes and how/when they're invoked.

As you may have heard by now, Internet Explorer 8 will ship with three layout modes—Quirks, IE7 Standards, and IE8 Standards. The saying goes: "put your best face forward" and, true to this, Internet Explorer 8 will use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default when encountering standards content. The behavior looks as follows:

IE8 layout modes
Page Content Declaration Layout Mode
Known standards DOCTYPEs and unknown DOCTYPEs IE8 Standards
Quirks mode DOCTYPEs (includes the absence of a DOCTYPE) Quirks

To invoke IE8's IE7 Standards layout mode, it will be necessary to "opt-out" of the default layout modes (see above table) by using the following <meta> tag:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

Note—The <meta> tag declaration will always override the DOCTYPE.

Learn more at my 27 March 2008 presentation on version targeting and IE 8.

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism

March 5, 2008 - 2 comments

Version targeting and IE 8: Maybe not

The uproar over IE 8 and version targeting may be over—according to 456 Berea Street "Microsoft has reversed its decision to make IE8 behave like IE7 unless specifically requested."

It seems that Microsoft actually responded to developer outcry and reversed its earlier decision—now, to get IE8 to render as IE 7, one must opt in using version targeting. Wow!

If you're not sure what this is all about, you're in the New York area, and you want to find out, come to my 27 March 2008 presentation on version targeting and IE 8 (plug, plug!).

Published by: jeffreybarke in The Programming Mechanism