After some testing with IE6, IE7, IE8, Chrome, Safari (Windows and Mac), Opera, and Firefox, I came to the following conclusion: much less accommodation is required to reasonably support IE8 than its predecessors. For my site, this now reduces to four things: HTML vs XHTML, declaring HTML elements that will be used via javascript, don’t use self closing tags in SVG, and use jQuery instead of direct DOM access. Additionally, this site makes use of two features that aren’t supported by IE: rounded corners via CSS, and SVG.
Based on this, I decided that I’d do my small part to encourage people who wish to remain with IE to upgrade to IE8 by applying those techniques consistently across my site, starting this morning with the main page. Other pages will follow over the next few days.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Rails may be coming to cornerhost soon... Michal’s post also highlights an interesting trend... once upon a time the standard was LAMP: namely Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. MySQL is being eaten from below by SQLite3, and the time may be ripe for getting eaten from above. Over time PHP became “PHP, Perl, Python, and sometimes Ruby”. But the more interesting trend is that the language choice itself is no longer as primary as it once was, the real choices are increasingly drupal, django, and rails, with the language being a consequence of that choice.
Noticed more differences between IE8 and the rest of the world on this page with respect to date headers between comments. Investigating...
Sam Ruby : ...once upon a time the standard was LAMP: namely Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. MySQL is being eaten from below by SQLite3, and the time may be ripe for getting eaten from above. Over time PHP became “PHP, Perl, Python, and sometimes...
The power of good design. Interesting read about the different design decisions that went into the Amazon review system: This is a case of a simple question - asked in the right way at the right time - that can have a dramatic affect on the success...
I’m not sure sqlite3 is eating MySQL from below - it absolutely blows for any kind of multi-user access (including websites) since it locks readers out on writes. What it is doing is replacing all the custom data stores in single-user applications.
" the real choices are increasingly drupal, django, and rails"
For various reasons, PHP continues to have the most fractured situation (an optimist might call it "a wealth of diverse choices."). I’ve yet to have a client or employer ask me to use Drupal, instead the frameworks of choice, lately, have been Symfony and CodeIgniter. Ruby and Python both seem to have an obvious default framework to use for web work, but PHP has at least a half dozen good ones, fighting it out for mindshare. I’d be happy if one of these won out and came to be seen as the default choice. Symfony, CodeIgniter and CakePHP are ridiculously similar, they all try to imitate Rails, there is absolutely no good reason for all of them to exist.
Drupal’s prominence is hurting the growth of the PHP frameworks, such as Symfony
Drupal has become the most sophisticated piece of PHP software that non-PHP programmers are aware of. Therefore, increasingly, when decision makers are comparing technologies, Drupal is the one they use as their PHP reference. Consider this line...