Elliot Swan

Looks like Google gave us a PR update last night. Unfortunately, this blog didn’t get any PR (after all I just released it a few days ago), though it was indexed. Looks like I managed to skip the sandbox, which is nice.

Uppervent.com did mangage to jump from a 2 to a 4
Elliotswandesigns.com mangaged to get to a 3, I believe it had a 2 before.

How’d you folks fair?

Now this is more like it. Microsoft just released on their IE blog how they plan to finally comply with standards and CSS2 (.1) in IE7.

They have posted a list of bugs they’ve already fixed, as well as some new features they’ve added support for including the :hover property on things other than links, abbr tags, and fixed positioning. It looks like more fixes are on the way.

From the post:

I want to be clear that our intent is to build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards, in particular CSS 2 ( 2.1, once it’s been Recommended). I think we will make a lot of progress against that in IE7 through our goal of removing the worst painful bugs that make our platform difficult to use for web developers.

Awesome.

Just got back from Batman Begins…what an awesome movie. I have to get myself a car like that.

EDIT: Looks like they might support the standards after all, see IE7 Finally Releases Plans for Compliance with Webstandards and Better CSS Support

IE7 just launched as beta 1–sort of. Here’s a blip from their blog:

The beta versions of Windows Vista and IE7 that have just released should be interesting to developers and IT professionals. For this reason, the beta is available to MSDN subscribers and a pretty small set of pre-enrolled beta test participants. Our goal is to get feedback from this group, do a bunch more work around quality (performance, security, reliability, etc.) and some features (e.g. additional standards support beyond what’s in beta 1, additional functionality around tabs and RSS, etc.), and release Beta 2 much more broadly.

I must say, I’m disapointed. Microsoft said they were releasing IE7 beta this summer, they never mentioned it was only to people who pay hundreds of dollars for a MSDN subscription. Though of course, they still could release a public beta before the end of the summer.

And from the feedback the article I linked to above is getting, I’m guessing I’m going to be pretty disapointed in the browser as well. Here’s a comment that was posted on the IE blog by José Jeria:

After playing around with IE 7 for a while, I can only say that I am truly disappointed.

First thing I did was to test it with some of Eric Meyers CSS edge demos. And to my surprise (well, not really) none of them that didn’t work in IE 6 worked fine in IE 7.

Not even
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/demo.html !!!
This means that IE 7 still doesn’t have full CSS1 support. Year 2005.

I also tested out CSS2 selectors with no luck, :hover for example, still only works on links. This means no CSS menus in IE. I also tested other irritating bugs

….

So actually, what was really fixed in this release? I read about 2 CSS bugs being fixed. Wow, you work on this browser for years and you fix 2 CSS bugs? I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

IE 7 feels like IE 6 but with a new GUI. While the tabs are nice (welcome to the new millennium IE), this beta is nothing more than a big disappointment. Actually this even beats the Netscape 6 disappointment, and I would never imagine that could be beaten.

Internet Explorer, R.I.P

José Jeria

You may have noticed the uprising of JavaScript comment previews lately, and I must say, they are awesome.

I wanted to get in on the action, but I didn’t really want to write my own. Luckily, I found a WordPress plugin that does it quite nicely: Live Comment Preview.

It will automatically preview comments beneath the comment form, but one can quite easily change where it previews the comment by inserting

< ?php live_preview(); ?>

wherever you wish. Pretty sweet stuff…

Wordpress has a feature which puts

rel='external nofollow'

in any urls that appear in comments, including the link to the posters own site. This is, of course, put there to stop spammers, but I believe somebody who’s taking the time to comment at my site should be able to benefit from it, and I doubt it will cut down much on spam anyways.

Well, I found a plugin that strips the “nofollow” from the rel tag, you can check out the plugin for yourself here: Strip “nofollow” tag from comment URLs

Looks like the big Y! just bought Konfabulator, and interestingly enough, made it free. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. Last time Flickr, this time Konfabulator, and next time….who knows?

Once IE7 comes out soon, I wonder if older versions of IE will stay in use? What if we (as designers and developers), made IE7, FireFox, Opera, Safari, or another newer browser a requirement?

All the older versions of IE came with Windows, and in order to get a newer version you had to get a new OS. But IE7 will be downloadable, and thus much easier for people to upgrade. There’s also FireFox of course, which is also downloadable. Sites now require Flash, so why not require a newer browser?

Of course, this would only work if there was a mass boycott of older browsers (ie developers refuse to code for them), and I doubt that would ever happen.

I forgot to add in my last post that I’m also using WP Tiger Administration, a WordPress plugin built by Steve Smith over at Ordered List. If you use WP and FireFox, I’d definitely recommend it.

He said about it:

I wanted the utility to feel more like an application, and less like a traditional website.

And this it does. Beautiful design, and quite accessable.

Well, first off welcome to elliotswan.com. And second off, I encourage you to bookmark this site (or even subscribe to my RSS feed), and keep on comin’ back. There should (hopefully) be lots of good content.

As my first official post, I’ve decided to give a list of “whys” about the new site and design, including why it doesn’t validate.

Why I used WordPress

To be honest, I picked it because it was easy to install and it looked like a fairly good piece of software. Now that I’ve been using it, I’m pretty impressed. Very nice to theme.

The Colors

Over at MorgueFile I found this awesome photo by Zach Carter of a door with a 3 painted on it, so I had to use it. I put it in my header, and most of the colors came from it as well.

I had used pink on my last blog, and actually put up quite a fight for it. I remember having comments posted on it such as this:

It’s…like…PINK…o_0

But seriously, I didn’t overdo it at all, just some accents…So anyways, I eventually won that battle, and I just had to keep it in this new design.

WHAT??!! IT DOESN’T VALIDATE!!11!!

Nope. And the basic reason for it can be spelled out in two letters:

IE.

But for a more detailed explanation:

Standards and validation were made for a reason, and that reason wasn’t bragging rights. It was to create accessable, cross-browser sites. Most of the standards were well thought out, but Microsoft, of course, didn’t want to follow them and along came IE. Things like transparency can’t be done on IE using standard code (as it can on more newer browsers), but Microsoft does recognize non-standard code to do the same thing. Then why not use it? To follow the book of validation but not the idea just plain doesn’t make sense.

Don’t get me wrong, I put this site through the validator several times. The validator is a good tool, but it is nothing more than exactly that–a tool. It’s not a designer, it’s not a developer, and it doesn’t know what you are trying to achieve.

Follow the rules of validation, and you can have a pretty good site. Follow the ideas of validation, and you’ll have an even better one.

If you want to read more about it, click the button over on the sidebar or read Mike Davidson’s post on it.

Well that’s all for now.