Firefox 3 on the horizon

You can download this blog post in audio format here (right-click and save target/link as..) or play it using the podcast player on the right.

Firefox 3 - code named Gran Paradiso is under development. It will use the Gecko 1.9 engine and the latest build released already is said to have passed the CSS Acid2 test. Although Opera, Safari have already achieved this it’s a big landmark for Firefox and a good sign of things to come.

Firefox 2.0 already features the most advanced CSS 3.0 support including CSS rounded corners and alpha transparency and Firefox 3 is set to have full support. Other features include improved graphic rendering and support for Javascript 2.

Of course we can expect there will be many bug fixes and tweaks making Firefox faster and more stable. It has been optimised to make better use of your systems hardware so if you have a good graphics card you should notice big improvements both in visual quality and speed for sites that take advantage of this.
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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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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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