Tag Archives: development

Roger Black’s Advice for Young Designers

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“On the skillset side, what you’ve got to do as a young person entering the field, is really equip yourself with some basic development skills. You have to be able to understand HTML and CSS. You have to know what JavaScript can do and what it can’t do. You don’t necessarily have to write cool JavaScript transitions, or even in CSS, but you’ve got to know what you can do in each. And you’ve got to be able to design so that if you have a more adept coder working with you, they know you know what you’re talking about.”
– Roger Black

Be Nice

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“I don’t care how good you are at programming, finding bugs, whatever. If you’re rude, or if you speak poorly to people who don’t understand your… quirks… you will wind up being shunted to the side. No one wants to work with someone who makes them feel beat down all the time, or someone who they simply can’t understand, or someone whose reaction to every issue is to start wailing about the end of the world.”
– Catherine Powell (via 37signals)

Version Targeting and IE8 Followup

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Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post).

“In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting ‘Standards’ mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s ‘IE7 Standards mode’ will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach).”
– Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8

To clarify, version targeting will still exist in IE8, which is a good thing. The change is that instead of defaulting to IE7′s rendering engine, it will default to IE8 — which is the behavior you would logically expect.

You know, it’s really nice to make a post where I can say something nice about Microsoft, and that’s been happening a lot more often lately, thanks to the IE development team. Way to go, guys!

Note: This was originally posted on my work blog, and I’m re-posting it here for archival purposes.

Version Targeting and IE8

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Previously onWeb Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by using a valid DOCTYPE. A lot of people, including Jeremy Keith, think this is a bad idea. Here are some of the more interesting points that have been raised in the discussion so far. Continue reading →