A major breakthrough for the web design & development communities…

Yesterday (March 5th), at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, the IE team announced the availability of a developer beta of IE8 Beta 1 for Download. 

This normally would not be such a huge deal, but the folks at Microsoft are actually trying to implement standards compliance.  What are we going to do with all of the extra free time generated by not having to kick our code in the pants until it renders correctly despite all of IE’s quirks?

 Not only are they “attempting” standard compliance, as they have tried, and failed miserably in the past.  They’re actually testing the fact this time!

We’ve contributed over 700 test cases to the W3C CSS working group because we think a comprehensive certification test suite for CSS is important for true interoperability and we support the W3C’s effort to deliver such a suite. The CSS spec is good, but contains many ambiguities, and a test suite will help resolve them and benefit web developers and designers.

Also, it sounds like IE8 is going to deliver full standards-compliant CSS 2.1 support by default, instead of requiring specialized mark-up to kick it into action.  This was a reversal in stance by the IE team, after a substantial outcry by the design/development community.  I can only imagine the possibilities if they actually make a habit of listening to their customers…

Read much more about the IE8B1 release at the IEBlog.

One of the most important responsibilities of a professional web developer is making sure that your designs are accessible to all.

According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp, the latest browser utilization rates are as follows:

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x (IE6) - 36.9%
2. Fire Fox (FF) - 34.5%
3. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.x (IE7) - 20.1%
4. Opera (O) - 1.9%
5. Safari (S) - 1.5%
6. Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x (IE5) - 1.5%
7. Mozilla (Moz) - 1.4%

I do all of my Design and testing from within a 64-bit Windows Vista Operating system. So to simplify the debug process I need to be able to test as many of these browsers as possible from within windows. This is my setup:
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Due to the occasional small (or large) fluke, your entire Drupal website can become inaccessible because of a module.  This is how you solve the problem: disable the specific module by altering values in your Drupal database.

In our case, we’ll use phpMyAdmin, but you can use whatever utility you prefer for database manipulation.  So, here is what you do:

1. Login to your Drupal Database
2. Access the ’system’ table.  If you added a table prefix: <prefix>, the table will be listed as ‘<prefix>system’
3. Browse the table entries, and find the entry for the target module
4. Edit the table entry, and change the status from ‘1′ to ‘0′
5. The module is now disabled!

Hopefully that did the trick, and you can now use your website.

Microsoft recently announced the Beta release of its HealthVault platform. The platform is aimed at helping people better manage their health information. The information available from Microsoft is pretty cryptic, but basically it looks like the service is a massive database for storing and sharing health information.

Some are perturbed by the possible privacy issues, but I absolutely love the concept. I loathe inefficiencies, and the fact that every time I go to a dentist, doctor, etc. I need to fill out 5 pages of the same exact information I’ve filled out numerous times before, has never sat well with me. Streamlining patient forms is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to possible benefits of this new platform.
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So, I began testing all of my sites for XHTML compliance. I noticed that some of my nested lists were not validating. They all displayed properly, but (*gasp*) they weren’t valid XHTML. Here’s what I found the problem was, and the resulting solution: (more…)