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!)

Chris Heilmann deals with the topic of how following web standards helps your team to be more successful:

From Wait Till I Come. Slides available on Chris's site.

John Resig hosted a panel discussion on the "Secrets of JavaScript Libraries" yesterday. The slides are here and the original post is on John's blog at http://ejohn.org/blog/secrets-of-javascript-libraries-sxsw/.

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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

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:

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.

• IEBlog—The Default Layout Mode
• Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!—Jeffrey Zeldman
• A List Apart No. 253—IE8 and version targeting
• MSDN article on DOCTYPEs

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!).

Notes and links from last night's presentation on web mapping and the Google Maps API to the New York Web Standards Meetup Group. Thanks to everyone who made it!

Please contact us if you'd like to present at the March or April meetup.

Listen to Part 1 of this event

Listen to Part 2 of this event

Subscribe to the podcast of the event

Feedburner podcast link

Web Mapping Part Two: Google Maps and Beyond

We'll discuss best practices, our favorite mashups, and what makes the good ones so good. We'd also like to see if anyone in the group has any experience with the Mapstraction library.

Google Maps Wrap-up

Last month we talked a little bit about web mapping in general and ran through a Google Maps tutorial. All of the materials from last month's meetup are available on our website, including a podcast of the presentation.

• Web Mapping Part 1
• theMechanism neogeography demos + tutorials
• schiller labs GIS Day 2006 materials
• Donna Lichaw's post "Web 2.0, Maps, and You! LOL"

Any questions about developing Google Maps? Any observations?

Other Mapping APIs

Has anyone here worked with Yahoo! Maps, Live Earth, or MapQuest? If so, what do you think?

I remember that Marco was very concerned about the fact that Google is a corporation last month, but OpenLayers is an open source solution.

I briefly worked with MapQuest in 2006, prior to driving directions in Google Maps, but I found it kind of a pain and would stick with Google—their API is faster, cuter, and easier

When initially working with the the MapQuest OpenAPI, I had a lot of difficulty getting the map to render correctly. The culprit turned out to be the DOCTYPE directive! Remove it if you want your map to display at all in Firefox and correctly in IE. Not sure if this is still true.

Open Discussion

What are the best practices when doing a mashup? Is it using abstraction layers? What makes a good UI? What are people's favorite mashups and why? What makes a good one so good?

Google has a New Year's Resolution to help produce more usable maps.

Favorite Mashups

Vincent Lim sent this one: http://www.onnyturf.com/subway/. Custom tiles. Stemless markers.

From Dominic Espinosa: Stamen Design: Oakland Crimespotting

They also released an open source interaction library called Modest Maps for displaying tile-based maps like Google's in Flash.

NYC bike maps
CrimeStat 2.0

MapCruncher

Mapstraction—Client-side abstraction layer

As I was perusing the glorious mess of code, bits and other fanciful nonsense we refer to as the “web”, I came upon some delightfully useless .js files and could think of no other purpose for it than to share them with the small, yet potent & planetary contingency that is our Readership...

Behold, disbelievers! A tutorial that allows you to change the favicon in your browser (on Opera and Firefox only) via a tickling of your keys...Have a peek.

Michael Mahemoff, a wildly talented London-based software & usability dude, as well as the author of Ajax Design Patterns, presumably came up with these scripts, so don’t for a second think that we’re slagging the cat. You will find it a worthwhile expedition to dig around his site.

But seriously, if you can think of a real world application of the mighty Favicon Demo, please let us know. Or perhaps, sometimes you just have to do stuff because you can, and ask the questions later...

From Google Maps API Blog:

This seems like a very cool idea and I think theMechanism will get involved:

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team. Our friends up at NetSquared recently opened a mashup challenge to engage developers in helping nonprofits realize some of their web ideas. The concept is pretty simple. First, nonprofits post ideas on data they have and what they'd like to be able do do with it on the web. Then, product managers and developers peruse projects and sign up to help produce specs and bring them to life over the course of the next month. Nonprofits with the coolest mashup at the end are eligible for grants totaling $100k at this year's NetSquared conference in May. This year there's extra emphasis on openness, from standards and data to software and ideas. If your mashup can itself be mashed up, all the better. Mix and match APIs from different sources as you see fit—the only goal is to meet a need that a nonprofit has expressed. We like this idea a lot, and we want to help it—and potential volunteers like you—succeed. On March 7, we'll be hosting a hackathon at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, for participants, where you'll be able to talk shop with API experts from Google. We'll also be inviting gurus from other API providers in the area to join us so you get all the help you need. If you sign up to work on a project you'll hear more from NetSquared about this event and others like it. Go check out some of the projects, think about how you might be able to apply your design skills and API wizardry to help these groups out, sign up, and mash away!