CSSquirrel

I’m not a browser security expert, so I’m not weighing in on the topic as such. However, I am a web developer/designer/guy with a slash in his title, so I certainly feel free to hurl my opinion at the topic regardless.

Today’s comic is in reference to Internet Explorer’s dirty little habit of MIME-sniffing, a process by where under certain circumstances the browser politely thanks a file for trying to tell it what it’s Content Type is, then proceeds to beat it about the head until the file cries uncle and sobbingly agrees to be something else.

(I’m aware that all browsers to an extent have to do some sniffing around in certain circumstances. But rather than chastely sniffing a guest’s shoes, IE is the dog that has stuck it’s head up someone’s skirt, only to frequently come to the wrong conclusion as to what it found).

This is bound to be useful in some cases, I’m sure, such as backwards compatibility with old servers that serve all html pages as plain/text. However, historically there’s been an number of reasons to not do it, such as pictures with bad script hiding in them that IE goes ahead and runs, and the fact that it goes against specifications implementation. While we’re at it, it continues to subdivide the Internet into two different groups, those users that see a page as it should be (with a standards-compliant browser), and those that don’t (with IE).

The good news is that according to this post at the IEBlog, they’re fixing a lot of this with IE8. The bad news is, they’re not going as far as they should, for example: “…if Internet Explorer finds HTML content in a file delivered with the HTTP response header Content-Type: text/plain, IE determines that the content should be rendered as HTML.” All in the name of ‘compatibility’. The only way for a page to be rendered as plain/text in IE8 when it has an HTML tag in the file is for the server to include authoritative=true attribute to the Content-Type header.

So… wait, we’ve got to opt in for plain text files to render properly in IE8? That sounds familiar, a lot like IE8’s original plan to force developers to opt-in to rendering their sites correctly in IE8 with a new meta tag. If you didn’t include this little tag, your page would render in all future browsers as it would in IE7. Long story short, that created such a storm from developers that the IE8 team stepped back and changed their minds.

I don’t think that rendering plain/text files as HTML if they’ve got markup in them is an equally volatile subject, but it seems that this new, IE-specific attribute is another step away from standards, rather than toward standards. I think Microsoft is slowly wandering out of the dark and into the sunlight that is a standards-compliant Internet, but I get the feeling that the company will have to keep being poked with sticks to keep it moving in the right direction.

Perhaps it was unwise for me to create the newest comic, as I hope to attend An Event Apart eventually, and poking fun at the event’s creators/hosts/organizers (Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman) isn’t exactly the best way to go about doing that. However, I will admit, the first time I saw Zeldman in person, at Web Directions North ‘08, I couldn’t help but think “Gee, give him an axe and some chain mail and he’d fit right in in Khazad-dûm.” Mind you, I’m referencing the place when it was home to the dwarves, not its later days as Moria, home to a bunch of jerk orcs.

I’m not sure if that distinction is helping my case.

I did not, in fact, attend AEA: Boston. I greatly wish I had, but such was not meant to be.

Thanks to the very nature of the conference’s attendees (aka web people), though, I do get the opportunity to experience a great deal of information about what it was like to attend! There are flickr feeds, detailed blog posts about attendees‘ impressions of the event, summaries of each session’s relevant info (quite a few good ones by Luke Wroblewski), and slides being shared by the presenters. This is in addition to the various conglomeration of tweets that occurred during the conference itself, forming a real-time record of what was happening, while it was happening.

I’m still getting around to sitting down and trying to digest this cornucopia of second-hand information. With the speed at which technology changes, I can’t help but feel that there’s no such thing as taking a month off learning more about the industry I’m in. It’s a never-ending process. That’s why I think conferences like AEA are so important, as it provides a continually-refreshing wellspring of new, relevant views and information about what we do.

One piece of data that I have had the chance to digest, however, is the frequently repeated opinion that Jared Spool is an amazing speaker. I can agree, as I had the pleasure of listening to him at WDN08. I don’t know how someone can have that much energy when talking about user interfaces, but I’m glad he does, because it keeps the rest of us interested about the topic, which is admittedly pretty important.

As a response to the last comic that featured Opera (right here), viking descendant and Opera Software web opener David Storey simultaneously did three things at once:

1. He left a comment. Which I love. Feedback of any sort is appreciated, especially when it includes the phrase “funny comic”.

2. He defended his company’s product’s implementations of standards by pointing out that one of the three CSS properties I mentioned is in 9.5 (which is now launched), one is only experimentally implemented, and the third is as he puts it “not in a stable spec”. I’ll give him the first two, but I don’t think word-wrap is unstable enough to justify not implementing it.

3. Lastly, he threatened to attack me with the SVGorilla.

The idea of a smoothly scaling primate collided with my recent CSS3 rgba colors experimentation in my head, and spawned this week’s comic.

Opera’s been doing a fine job with their browser, and 9.5 is actually pretty slick. Will I use it day to day? No. It’s feature set does not offer enough to draw me away from Firefox, which is officially launching version 3.0 in mere hours. If addons became a big thing with Opera, I think it’d have a fighting chance in sucking me in, though. As a rule, I prefer browsers made by browser software companies, not operating system software companies.

That said… although the properties I’ve mentioned earlier (word-wrap, border-radius, and outline-offset, aren’t exactly going to see a lot of use by me. However, CSS3 rgba colors? I’m all over that. I especially enjoy the ability to set an element’s opacity without it affecting all of its children. I don’t think it was a good call for Opera to skip adding this into 9.5, as it means it may be a while yet before we see it in an official Opera release.

Well, on the plus side, it let me escape the vicious SVGorilla.

When I first started thinking up the idea for this week’s comic, I thought it was an absurd intrusion of the adoration video games receive into an the stately field of browser software. After all, despite the fact that web browsers are probably some of the most ubiquitous bits of software floating around on people’s computers, your average Joe doesn’t go bananas for a new release, do they?

Apparently, as I learned from this little tidbit at the Web Standards Project, the idea isn’t as far fetched as I thought. It turns out that Mozilla is looking to get Firefox 3 to be the most downloaded piece of software in a single day, with an event they call Download Day 2008, and among other things they’re building excitement for it by encouraging people to have launch parties.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m super excited for Firefox 3. I’ve been using the beta (now the release candidate) for weeks now, and I can’t help but feel that it’s an upgrade in every way, shape, and form. It’s faster, it’s sleeker, has sweet add-ons, and among many other things it now supports inline-block (the most neglected of CSS display types). Of course, it doesn’t have multiple-backgrounds yet, and is only supporting border-radius with a proprietary version… but I’m not expecting it to be perfect out of the gate (this doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to drag your feet on that, Mozilla.)

However, I never thought that browser software actually needed a launch party (well, outside of the company that slaved and toiled to make it.) But now that the topic has arisen, why not? As web professionals, we rely on constantly improving, standards compliant browsers to render our websites and run our web apps properly. Approaching 20% of the user browser share, Firefox is the forerunner in providing us with just that. It’s not only acceptable to encourage and celebrate it’s success, it makes great sense.

Of course, as near as I can tell from my short time in the field as a paid ‘professional’, developers don’t need a lot of excuses for a party.

Anyone going to be celebrating in Bellingham?

This will be the last post involving Twitter for a while, I swear. Unfortunately discussions about the service have dominated the various watering holes of web development for the past few days, so this is the only way I can get the topic to drain out of my head.

This one isn’t a deep commentary on corporate hypocrisy or a glam shot of Andy Clarke in his knickers, sorry.

Ultimately, I like the Twitter service. Although I don’t know if it’s best described as “micro-blogging”, “shopping list”, or “mutual voyeurism”, it’s an interesting service that lets you update details of your life or clever thoughts with a minimum of time investment. The 140 character limit helps provide limitations for people (like myself) who’d rather blather on about an inane topic for paragraphs.

I wonder if we could get politicans to do their talking in this fashion? It’d save us a lot of time.

The main problem with the service, which Twitter has become infamous for, is the tendancy of their whole server to buckle on a daily basis. I’ve come to expect it to be in an afternoon state of shock when I get back to the studio after lunch. It’s so predictable, it’s sad. I can’t help but wonder at this point what desperate straights they must be going through to reverse this trend… and this week’s comic is my theory on that topic.

And now, back to the rest of the world of web development.