Unfortunately I couldn't make it to the Future of Web Design conference this year, partly because of the ongoing integration work (if you're following me on Twitter you know what that's been like) and partly because I wanted to save some cash for dConstruct 2008.

Luckily Jeremy Keith has done a fantastic job of liveblogging the presentations, so between his sterling effort and the torrent of photos on Flickr I can almost kid myself that I was there.

Roll on 3rd September.

Matt McAlister examines what it means to be part of the web of data:

It’s not about posting data to a domain and figuring out how to get people there to consume it. It’s about being the best data source or the best data aggregator no matter how people make use of it in the end.

Nate Koechley has a great companion piece entitled Data Ocean vs Document Lake.

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.”

- Jeremy Keith

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.

- Jonathan Lambert