Congratulations, IE8 team!

You've released a browser which puts you on a level of functionality similar to Firefox 1 in terms of rendering things correctly and quickly.

This certainly fixes a few of the biggest pain points which had us at work pushing firefox - like the horrible table layout rendering code which has obviously been revamped.

I won't use it day to day, but at least I'll have some comfort in knowing I won't have to make hacky workarounds and suffer a painful testing experience.

Hell, I'll even suggest the update to my customers.

The Hardest to Use Site of the Day

Harvey Norman doesn't understand the web.

What's got my goat:

• Typing harveynorman.com.au doesn't resolve the site.


• There is no search functionality, so I cannot buy a roomba from them
  


• The site is a giant, unusable, junk mail website.


• Everything I click on appears to be a popup window with a flash movie in it about a product that is featured. I don't care about an action movie featuring a digital camera, I just want to know about the product.


• There is no Contact Us link of any kind, so I can't even ring someone to answer my questions, or email them in.


• I do believe I can see a MARQUE tag, filled with text. I don't care about moving text, it just gives me a headache.
  


• The catalog section is a flash feature of their current junk mail catalog. I can download it as a PDF, too. Best of all, the detailed text is too small and blurry for me to actually read.

Thank you, Harvey Norman, for giving me a way to experience junk mail on the web like I never have before.



If you don't get what the web is about, stay off of it! You'd never open a brick and mortar store; then provide no staff; have all of your information available only in crappy unreadable catalogs; and plaster advertising all over it.

Javascript Charting, and Canvas

This javascript charting library looks fairly decent.

I'm going to wait until it's got a bit more documentation available first, though.

Adobe Apollo

So much hype and excitement, and so little to show for it.

No Apollo for Linux, and I just happen to be doing a dist-upgrade to fiesty... So no trying for about 12 hours.

So off I go to read all about it, and what do I find?

<mx:TabNavigator
id="ContentNavigator"
width="860" height="540"
x="10" y="10" paddingTop="5" paddingRight="5" paddingBottom="5" paddingLeft="5">

<mx:VBox label="Articles"
  width="100%" height="100%"
  verticalGap="0" paddingTop="10" paddingRight="10" paddingBottom="10" paddingLeft="10">
  <mx:Box width="100%" height="33"
     backgroundColor="#B8AF9C" cornerRadius="15" paddingBottom="5" paddingLeft="10" paddingRight="5" paddingTop="5">
     <mx:Button label="Fetch RSS" click="RssService.send();RssLoader.height=30"/>
  </mx:Box>
  <mx:Box id="RssLoader"
     width="100%" height="0"
     backgroundColor="#B8AF9C" paddingTop="6" paddingRight="10" paddingBottom="5" paddingLeft="10">
     <mx:ProgressBar id="rssProgress"
        indeterminate="true"
        barColor="#B8AF9C"
        width="100%"
        labelPlacement="center"
        label="loading feed"/>
  </mx:Box>           
  <mx:TileList id="FeedDisplay"
     width="100%" height="100%"
     maxColumns="1"
     rowHeight="120" columnWidth="810"
     itemRenderer="ItemRenderer"
     dataProvider="{rssFeedData}"/>
</mx:VBox>

</mx:TabNavigator>

That looks suspiciously like far too much presentation logic in there. We've had CSS forever, why is there a mix of css-like attributes, javascript-like attributes and {funky templating}?
I'm beginning to think waiting for firefox 3 is a much better option, seeing as they already delivered offline cache support; while apollo doesn't even have it yet.

The Web in 5 Minutes

Watch a video by Michael Wench about the state of the web in 5 minutes or less.

Compare it to hyperland, and it's not that different! :)

Nialls newest undertaking

... is a jewelery site. He pestered me for advice as it's his first decent website job interview thing. 'Cause I'm so.. wise in the ways of the world, he obviously got the job. Or something. Well, at least he can have some pagerank :)

Fire in Ice... tasty stuff.

Technorati Tags: Jewelery, Marriage, Fire, Ice, Web Design.