Category: Technology

Categories
Web

IE8 readiness and MIX08 keynote

Update Oops! Available now. For those continuing to click the download button, IE8 will be available at 2pm PST, which is 4pm CST, by my SVG clock. More later, but we can confirm that IE8 does not support the XHTML MIME type. My opinion, based on what I’m reading and seeing, Microsoft will never directly support application/xhtml+xml. Or SVG. Or MathML. And will probably cherry pick on what to support for HTML5.

I guess IE8 beta will be available this week to the public. Anne pointed to the IE8 “Readiness” page at Microsoft, though the download links aren’t active. I imagine they’ll be active after today’s MIX08 kickoff keynote.

Speaking of which, Neowin has links to the keynote video stream. They keynote is at 9:30am Pacific time, which is 11:30am my time. Check my SVG clock–if you’re using a browser that supports SVG that is.

I might as well give a heads up that I may not be a particularly good mood later in the day.

Categories
XHTML/HTML

IE8: Not supporting XHTML?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Continuing from previous post

Following are the web log entries that contain the new MSIE 8.0 user agent string, with the specific MS IP address blocked out:

—-.microsoft.com – – [04/Mar/2008:01:55:29 +0000] “GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1” 200 1406 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; MS-RTC LM 8; OfficeLiveConnector.1.0)”

—-.microsoft.com – – [04/Mar/2008:01:55:29 +0000] “GET /standards/ie8-standards-mode-by-default/ HTTP/1.1” 200 29177 “http://www.techmeme.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; MS-RTC LM 8; OfficeLiveConnector.1.0)”

Typically, IE access to this site results in only one log entry: the entry for the specific page. There are no log entries for CSS files, JS files, and so on, because IE doesn’t support the XHTML MIME type, and therefore doesn’t parse the page and pull these resources. This is what I’m seeing in my web log for these log entries.

These two log entries also reflect the new Office Live functionality, just released. The Office Live functionality could impact on what’s picked up from a page–hard to say, because I don’t have any Office Live accesses for my sites that aren’t strict XHTML. However, if these log entries do reflect access of the post directly with IE8, based on the fact that none of the CSS or image files were also pulled, and based on the pattern of access of pages at this site by previous versions of IE, IE8 does not support the XHTML mime type.

To repeat what I said in the last post, this statement isn’t based on a confirmation from the company. It’s a guess based on current web log entries reflecting the new user agent string for IE8, an IP address that resolves to inside Microsoft, and matching a pattern I’ve seen with previous IE versions that cannot access this site because of the MIME type I use. With the continued silence from the IE team and Microsoft, guesswork is all I have to go on. I sincerely hope I’m proven wrong.

Categories
Copyright Web Writing

Something for nothing

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I like Andrew Orlowski, though he offered me a writing job once and then yanked it. I don’t always agree with him, and I don’t always agree with how he phrases some of his material, but he typically has a good point.

Take the recent Nine Inch Nails album release. Several songs for free, and the rest of the album costs $5.00. What happens? It’s immediately dumped on Pirate Bay. Bandwidth issues aside, as Radiohead found out, people won’t pay.

The anti-copyright crowd kicked at the music business, because it was complacent, wasteful and reactionary, and no digital download services were available. Then they kicked at DRM-locked music, because DRM was there. Then DRM died, and they’d indiscriminately kick at the music business – indie or major – simply because there was a middleman. But now, with no middleman, they just kick the creator directly. They can’t stop kicking. These zombies are unstoppable. Are they incurable, too?

This goes beyond copyright. Too many people expect immediate access to anything on the Net, or anything that could possibly be put on the Net. They want something for nothing. This isn’t free speech, this isn’t Free the Mouse, this isn’t anything to do with not stifling creativity: people assume a privilege for themselves they, frankly, don’t deserve. Their cry is, “gimme gimme gimme”, existing in a state of selfishness to bring down the band. And by their selfishness, they’ll probably screw things up for the rest of us. After all, DRM doesn’t exist so you can’t copy a song on to your iPod.

Excuse me, while I go put my DRM locked movie into the DVD player.

Categories
XHTML/HTML

IE8: Standards mode by default

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Others might talk about Microsoft’s move to the clouds, but one decision MS made shows its feet are firmly planted on solid ground: IE8 will be standards mode by default.

This was a good decision, but it’s also an ominous decision. Not a word on support for the XHTML mime type. With no clear idea of exactly what MS has planned for this release, I am forced to hold my huzzahs until we see what IE8 actually delivers. According to the ieblog report, IE8 will be one of the topics covered at MIX08. Perhaps we’ll see the first beta release of IE8 this week.

To put this in perspective, Microsoft has just agreed to deliver what Opera, Firefox, and Safari have always delivered.

update One interesting thing about this announcement–the IE program manager announced the move on the ieblog, and Ray Ozzie announced it in the press release. Where’s Chris Wilson?

second update Jeffrey Zeldman sounds like a man who put himself on a line that just disappeared.

third update I just sent an email off asking the opinion of someone who knows this stuff better than me what he thinks, but from web log entries for this site, based on the new MSIE 8.0 user agent string, IE8 does not support the XHTML mime type. I repeat: IE8 does not support pages served up with application/xhtml+xml.

Again, this statement isn’t based on a confirmation from the company. It’s a guess based on current web log entries reflecting the new user agent string for IE8, and matching a pattern I’ve seen with previous IE versions that cannot access this site because of the MIME type I use. I sincerely hope I’m proven wrong.

Categories
Programming Languages

Learning something new in PHP

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I didn’t know the ?> closing tag was optional with PHP code only files, either. I did know about white space following the end tag. Probably every PHP developer knows about the white space following the end tag problem.

What header? What ******** header!?

Other useful stuff on PHP best practices at the Drupal site, with more detail on omitting the end tag.

Question to those who know Drupal: how is it on supporting XHTML? Both published and consumed via comments?