IE8 proposes to check for simplicity in stylesheets

Taking the Bridge pointed out a couple of weeks ago how Internet Explorer 8 being ‘the most standards-compliant IE so far’ could antagonise web developers: ‘The problem with changing how IE renders web pages is that with so many web pages already made, and so much of the population creating pages to render correctly in IE6 or IE7 all of those pages could break.’

The solution proposed is to send a meta tag out to IE8 telling it your stylesheets are clean. Otherwise it will assume that they are purposefully laced with hacks and revert to the iconoclastic layout behaviour of the earlier explorers.

I reflected on this, and on the fact that I typically add two or three rules to a site that are tailored to IE6, and perhaps one for IE7. I don’t think that I agree that this is a huge problem, as the ‘breaking’ is nearly always as minor as, say, the indent on a list-item being different between IE and the rest of the pack. This barely makes it into the category of ‘degrading gracefully’ when you think about some of the things that used to go wrong a few years ago. But perhaps my CSS is boring and simplistic and if I was a real web developer – check shirt, rifle and all – I’d be properly worried.

So while I’d prefer not to have to tell IE that I’m clean I don’t know whether it will make any difference, in practice; IE8 users will inherit the slightly wonky layout that would be created by IE6 or 7, and perhaps eventually I will stop bothering to accommodate it.

And of course the assumption should always be that the stylesheets are clean!

Blast.app from the past

I rather liked this bugfix affecting OS X 10.5:

"Launch Services is an API to open applications or their document files or URLs in a way similar to the Finder or the Dock. Users expect that uninstalling an application from their system will prevent it from being launched. However, when an application has been uninstalled from the system, Launch Services may allow it to be launched if it is present in a Time Machine backup. This update addresses the issue by not allowing applications to be launched directly from a Time Machine backup. [...]"

There’s something fun about this collision between the nice, straightforward world of the Desktop, the Dock and their friends and the freaky world of backups, revision control and the like. I haven’t got hold of 10.5 (yet) but I'm looking forward to seeing how Apple have resolved this potential mindbender inside a GUI.

The Underground in 2016 and 2025

OK, these maps assume rather a lot of things, but they’re interesting nonetheless.

Conference: the Making of London & the South East

SERIAC 2008 is on 19 April at the University of East London. I’ll be going – I thouroughly enjoyed last year’s event. If you’re near London and interested in industrial history and its relationship to society you should come too: if you are under forty it’ll likely represent a significant shift in the delegate demographic, something that would be only too welcome, I suspect! And to cap it off, the keynote is about poo. There should be more information at www.glias.org.uk but I can’t find it. Perhaps later it’ll appear. Tickets are £10.50.