stephenwoods.net

So, there is an election going on. As a public service to my fellow webdevs, I decided to look at the candidates and judge them based on the only metric that matters: the quality of their frontend code.Because tomorrow will (maybe) decide which democrat will be the nominee, I will wait for part 2 and make this post the McCain post.

So, if you search for McCain in google and click through you are redirected to a landing page (only in Google, not any other search engine, more on this below). Actually, thats not true. FIRST you actually have to load a bunch of crap on johnmccain.com, because this is not a 301 redirect, its a JAVASCRIPT redirect, called in a script tag some ways down the page:
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After reading the article on ala about IE8 I have to say I think that despite their insistence that the  IE=edge flag should not generally be used I think it is the solution for most developers. If you code to the standard you shouldn’t cripple your site by targeting an obsolete browser. The whole point of web standards is that a new browser, if it follows the standard, will not break your layout.

However, I don’t think the meta tag is a necessarily bad idea. I think most developers working on consumer-facing apps should avoid it. But there is a good reason to use it: intranets and other custom web applications. These are apps that are business critical, but delivered in an environment where IT can make requirements so that users can access internal apps. Providing a way of targeting a specific browser version makes sure that those apps don’t break when users upgrade their browsers.

I would hope that this will actually encourage more IT departments to speed deployment of IE8 if they can be sure it won’t break access to mission critical internal tools. This is great for us, the developers of the consumer web, because we can target our apps to the standard without fear of users stuck in ancient browsers just so they can use Peoplesoft. 

So I made a new style sheet for this blog, so now it doesn’t look like every other wordpress blog on earth. Enjoy!

Julien, who is a super genius, has a write up building apps with ant, including the all important concatenation of js and css files. In my experience a shocking number of people working on web apps have no build process beyond “copy the files to the server”. Tools like ant make it easy to deploy.

Wait…what if I think java is the devil and prefer PHP? You are in luck, because Phing is the same thing but for PHP. Even better, it includes phpunit testing tools.

Alex writes up the state of the art from microsoft. The word “sucktastic” comes to mind.

Amazon.com has redesigned. It looks pretty, but I am a little disappointed they didn’t modernize a little. I am sure they had their reasons, but I think there is no excuse for using tables for layout anymore. Also they really could improve performance, the signed in home page takes around 6 seconds to load. Its understandable with so many images and somewhat uncachable custom page that performance is difficult. But they could at least try concatenating som js and css files. And I would bet getting rid of tables would reduce the file size.

These guys have come up with a sort of “firebug-lite” css-inspector bookmarklet they call xray. Not as good as firebug of course…except it works in IE 6, which is basically awesome.