Test, Test and Test again

If like me you like to have the latest updates or try beta releases of new products you may already have IE7 installed.Although it is important to ensure your website will work on IE7 is released the price you have to pay may be too high. IE7 upgrade is irreversible. Since it renders pages differently to previous versions you will no longer have a way of testing your work in the current IE release (IE6). Also IE7 will not let you view pages on your local machine. You have to upload the pages to a webhost or setup a local webserver on that machine or network.

The solution?
A company called tredosoft has come up with an installer that will enable you to run multiple versions of IE at the same time. This means you can have IE3 all the way through to 7 all on 1 machine - a testers dream.
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

I choose not to ever support anything older than IE5 so I installed IE5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 in addtion to my existing IE7 setup. The install couldn’t have been easier and I soon had my websites open in 4 browser versions at the same time.

I only use FireFox for browsing and viewing my designs but when it comes to testing I can now ensure IE6 AND IE7 support

Dave Long

Hacked to Death

Everyone working on the front lines (building for the front-end) will have likely encountered a page that despite being a coding piece of art looks great in one browser but falls apart in another.

If you don’t work for Microsoft you’ll know the problem is usually with the Internet Explorer browser. A lot of the time tweaking a style sheet a little can solve things but sometimes there is no other option but to add a hack.

No one likes hacks, in fact I go to insane lengths trying to find an alternative before I will use one. However, if it is necessary to ad a hack is there a good way, or is a hack always going to be ugly and we just have to face it?
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A Podcast Less Ordinary

This last week I’ve been re-discovering podcasting. In the past I’ve listened to gaming podcasts but until now hadn’t used the technology for anything but entertainment.

Now I’ve discovered a whole world of informative podcast featuring some of the greatest minds in web design/development.

I highly recommended checking out odeo.com - although not design specific it hosts many web dev podcasts including an excellent interview of Dave Shea (the creator of csszengarden) by Scott Fergette - check it out here.

The quality of the podcasts vary greatly from the surreal or outright nonsense to goldmines of tips and ideas.

I hope to start a podcast of my own once I get regular enough with my blogging. =watch this space=

Dave Long

dotMobi or Not Mobi

Today sees the launch of the .mobi domains. The purpose is to offer content specifically for low bandwidth mobile devices. Any owners of a .mobi domain have to ensure their site meets the dotmobi switch on! guidelines.

Essentially the site must be designed in a way that makes it acessible to mobile devices - i.e. low bandwidth requirements and scales to a small size/resolution screen. If your site fails to meet the requirements it can be suspended!

Is this a good thing?
Well I am not excited to see yet another TLD (top level domain) as we have so many already and it means I will probably end up buying a mobi edition of a few of my domains. However, as a heavy mobile web user, I’m happy that this may encourage companies to make mobile editions of their sites. The BBC and Google are excellent examples of mobile compatible sites. I see Dustin Diaz is keeping up with the times with is new Mobile Device theme that he has added to his site.
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Switching from Transitional to Strict

I’ve been using XHTML Transitional for while and been happily validating my code on the w3c website until I heard a podcast from Dustin Diaz. Dustin said he prefered HTML strict to XHTML Transitional.
Looking into the reason I used Transitional - because it’s a bit more forgiving - I realised that I should try and make the move to xhtml strict. Looking at my code I was pretty confident that switching to Strict would be fairly painless.

Overall I have to say it wasn’t too much of a headache but the 2 attributes I had to abandon were:
target=
border=
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