In Traction

Although there has been quite some debate about the newly introduced X-UA-Compatible meta tag in Internet Explorer 8, I noticed it is only necessary for backwards compatibility (at least in the developer beta). If a website does not look good on IE8, designers can add a special meta tag to indicate which version of IE it will be rendered in:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

In my opinion, that’s a lot less harmful than having to add a meta tag to actually get the new standards compliant behavior. Consequently, IE8 renders my homepage correctly, which is great news. I made the decision not to adjust my design to be conform with IE’s rendering a while ago. The future is looking bright as the problem will solve itself after a while.

Here’s a screenshot of IE8 beta 1 correctly rendering my homepage

Most features that didn’t work before but do now are CSS related: content generation (for separating the breadcrumbs), unordered lists styled as tables, correctly positioning hovering submenu’s, etc.

Update: Apparently the IE developers changed their mind which is why standards-compliant websites now work out of the box in IE8.

I spent some time yesterday to update the Uiml.net homepage:

We set up a wiki somewhere last year to provide more information about our UIML research. However, since Uiml.net is the main focus of our research efforts, I reorganized the wiki to be more of a homepage for Uiml.net, while still listing our publications.

I am hoping to migrate all the content of the old website (still located at Kris’ homepage) to the wiki soon.

Lately I have been enjoying Launchpad for hosting my projects and Bazaar branches. It has integrated specifications (_blueprints_), bug tracking, some kind of forum (_answers_). I have moved Uiml.net over to Launchpad as well. Launchpad’s integration of Bazaar branches will be useful for managing multiple experimental contributions from myself, Kris or our Bachelor’s or Master’s students.

Finally I’m hoping to put out a more or less stable release of Uiml.net by September. More information can be found at Launchpad.

For some time now, I have had a weird bug concerning an Ajax updater script in a Rails application. The updater worked with Firefox but not with Internet Explorer (IE).

Yesterday I finally figured out IE can only update div or span elements, when I came across this message on the Rails list. I was trying to update a table instead.

After wrapping the table in a div, and updating that div, everything worked.

Would be nice if this would have been documented in Prototype or the script.aculo.us scripts though.

Apparantly, the redesign of the Ruby website will be put online in a few days.

The new design can be viewed at http://new.ruby-lang.org/. I sniffed around for a bit and found some interesting links:

• Ruby Inside
• Planet Ruby
• O’Reilly Ruby
• Ruby Corner
• RubyCocoa Resources
• Gruff

More Ruby-related links can be found on my del.icio.us page.

Well, let me explain this provocing title. I tried to render my homepage with Internet Explorer 7, and the result is even worse than with Internet Explorer 6.

Here are some pictures to prove my point. First the correct rendering with Firefox:

Then Internet Explorer 6:

And finally, Internet Explorer 7:

Please note that my homepage is valid XHTML 1.1 and valid CSS.

It seems IE7 is nothing more than IE6 with some trivial fixes, such as alpha transparency for PNG images. Of course, supporting modern web standards would lead to Microsoft breaking its own websites. Furthermore it would break all HTML that depends on IE’s non-standard rendering, such as the HTML generated by FrontPage or ASP.NET.

The last couple of days I have been working on a new, fresh design for my homepage. It was quite hard, since I’m far from a good designer. I have to experiment a lot before I end up with something that I really like, while Luk for example can come up with something astounding within minutes. Then again my designs are standards compliant and designed with CSS positioning instead of table layouts

Almost all content has been migrated to jozilla.be. There are still a few files to be uploaded. In the next couple of days I will setup a redirect at my old homepage.

I’m glad I finally have a nice blog again. There’s some news concerning Uiml.net and Cassowary.net that has been in the queue for a while now.

Stay tuned!