Digital Gemstones Blog

A few years ago, I wrote on the whiteboard above my desk 'Build a login script'. It sat there in the corner, along with a few other ideas, some have since been completed, some have been long forgotten. As I said in my last entry, I just learned how to work with XML, and what I learned inspired me to finally upgrade my Simple User Authentication script to work with multiple users. I've done more than just extend the script however - I have created a fully functional, fully independent user authentication class. Include it, load the XML file, and you're good to go.

I promised myself I wouldn't update Digital Gemstones until I'd filed my tax returns, and now that that's finally out of the way, I've got several things to talk about, so expect more articles in the coming days. To get started, I just finished reading No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP, which covered the topic of XML quite excellently.

Since first installing Firefox a few years ago, I have customized my install in nearly every imaginable way short of modifying the source code. I thought I'd put together an entry discussing my suggestions on improving Firefox. These include add-ons I find useful, shortcuts that make navigating lightning fast, and other useful tricks.

I intend to continue adding to this as time goes by, so check back every now and then.

Well what do you know - the people seem to have won out against the powers that be - a friend linked me to this IE Development Blog Entry, and it seems the IE development team has changed their mind. The article suggest the primary reason may be Opera's lawsuit filed in the European Union, though I'd like to think that it had more to do with the general public consensus. In either case, this particular fight is almost over.

The posting does not address what will happen in future editions of IE, will they continue allowing people to build for IE7 well into the future? Will standards only be slightly better off, or will future versions retire older versions, like they should? This is a highly important question which needs to be answered before we all celebrate.

I've been following the debate over Version Targeting on A List Apart for a little while now, and felt like I should throw in my two cents. I would suggest reading these Pro and Con articles on the subject to give you a decent idea of the arguments for and against.

Here's a brief description of what Version Targeting is - if you already know, go ahead and click 'Read More' and skip over this. There was a time when Internet Explorer 6 controlled more than 95% of the browser market – and of course everyone built their websites around IE6 - HTML/CSS standards were little more than ideals, if a developer had even heard of them at all. Then, in late 2006, Microsoft rolled out Internet Explorer 7, their first browser update in six years. This new browser still has quirks and errors, but it is far, far more standard-compliant than IE6 was. What happened next was referred to as the breaking of the web – suddenly all those websites built for IE6 didn't work, and many developers had no idea why. If you switched from IE6 to 7 shortly after it was released, you probably came across some websites that looked broken, didn't work quite right, or just flat out failed to render.

Since then Internet Explorer has lost 20% of its market share to Firefox, Safari, and Opera; even so, the vast majority of people who build websites (I reserve the term web developer for people who actually know what they're doing) continue to develop poor, invalid, insecure and browser-specific code. Microsoft is now preparing IE8, which will (hopefully) follow the standards for HTML and CSS, as well as removing JScript (Microsoft's proprietary version of JavaScript) in favor of standardized ECMAScript. Rather than risk, as they say, 'breaking the web' again with this new update to IE8, Microsoft is implementing what they are calling Version Targeting to give web developers the ability to code standard compliant websites, while not breaking everyone else's layouts and browser side code. This will be implemented by setting the default rendering option for IE8 (and all future versions of IE) to IE7, unless you specify otherwise.