We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.
- Dean Hachamovitch on the IEBlog
This is great news, kudos to the Microsoft team for listening to the community and changing their approach.
(for more background see Jeremy Keith and Jeffery Zeldman’s articles in issue 253 of A List Apart)
The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of “breaking the web” in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches. In its current state, version targeting is a cure that will kill the patient. Version targeting could have been an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate innovation. Instead, the proposed default behavior demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the World Wide Web, a place that according to its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, will always be “a little bit broken.”
Most projects start off with a waterfall approach, which is to say that there [sic] started with a plan to turn it into a wireframe, which turns into milestones, which turns into a final product, which then gets fixed because it’s broken.
After a couple of days to recover from the wonderfullness that is Brighton I felt ready to try and knock all my d.Construct 2007 notes into something more coherent.
I failed spectacularly.
So instead what I’ve decided to do is offer up my (almost) verbatim notes scribbled during each of the talks. This gets them out of the semi-encrypted format that is my handwriting as well as creating a pretty accurate reflection of what points struck me as important or relevant at the time.
Now that they’re online it may also give me the chance to revisit them at a later point when my brain has had time to absorb everything.
For more d.Construct 2007 goodness there is a group on flickr, or you can follow the chatter via the dconstruct07 tag on Technorati.
I didn’t write a single thing during this talk as I was completely sucked into the history behind b3ta.com and flickr.com and the relaxed conversational manner that George and Denise used to tell those stories. One of the best talks of the day, and not just because of the gratuitous swearing (although that helped).
(I wrote a lot more notes during this talk, but to be honest they’re a bit gibberish and don’t make much sense. It was such an information dense talk that I’m going to go back and re-read Matt’s posts and see where that gets me)
Usability goes all the way. It starts right at the database design. Or actually even at the design of the programming language. Most people, working on system that can use a grain of usability, tend to think that usability is only and merely a magical trade of arranging elements on an interface. But, if the database architecture is wrong, the code will be wrong. If the code is wrong, the behaviour is wrong. And if the behaviour is wrong, then no javascript can ever solve the real problem.