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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Responsibilities as Designers/Developers

This post was prompted by reading a feaure by Andy Rutledge in .net magazine. First let me start by saying - it was an excellent column. If you haven’t read it already I suggest picking up a copy of .net as it’s a particularly good issue this month.

I digress, the article discussed Back end Developers not keeping to standards or producing poor quality work. He suggested that developers that do not understand semantics and correct use of html and css should be fired! The entire article was very strong, but I think this was necessary to get the point across.

What I wanted to comment on was the admonition for front-end designers to report bad programmers to the boss if they are producing bad code or messing up your standards compliant code because they don’t understand correct mark-up. In fact Andy said we were obligated to do so.
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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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