I hope to see you soon then!

Kathy,

Thanks! I hope you had some nice holidays too!

Even though we joked about Norwegians and Swedes, all said and done, Scandinavian people rock. It’s as simple and straightforward as that.

I hope you have a great new year in ‘07 and look forward to taking up on your offer someday if I (or my family) is anywhere near your neighborhood someday.

RobertDM,

Thanks. I’m almost well now, but probably as confused as usual.
I hear you about IE 6, but I just wish that they would’ve held out six months, or hell, a year. Compare that to having three different versions alone of IE with varying support to cater to.

Happy New Year!

Arjan,

Keep on going, knowledge is a beautiful thing!

Jeroen,

Thanks, man! Also, thanks for the tip about Xbox Media Center.

You know you should always be in my lists of people to mention. Thanks for your support and friendship throughout the year!

Dave,

Ah, it wasn’t too bad!
A great 2007 to you too!

“Henry”,

Ah, clever! But you misspelled Fuglesang’s name and linked your name to another web site than the one of Henry Rollin’s.

Nathan,

I cannot exactly recall what it was, but something on the line with web standards vs. a more pragmatic approach where making things work under tough circumstances is priority number one (but yeah, I missed Kathy’s talk too, which also seemed interesting…). However, I’m not sure you liked it as much as I found it interesting when you told me about it!

Carl,

My love to your wonderful family! Next time I hope to see you in Sweden, or at the very least, Europe!

Robert Stewart,

When it comes to web developing and the myriads of web browsers, platform and devices we have out there, we need some kind of standards to develop accordingly by; it is virtually impossible to test in everything that can access the web.

Such guidelines exist and are referred to as web standards (they are, in reality, web recommendations), and there is an organization which all the major web companies in the world work with (yes, including Microsoft) called W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), who publish these.

The problem with Microsoft and their Internet Explorer is that they are amongst the web browsers on the market with the poorest support for these. Granted, IE 7 is a lot better than its predecessors, but still far after its competitors (Firefox, Opera, Safari etc).

For me working professionally with web development, I can almost exclusively develop a web site according to web standards (covering HTML, CSS etc) and it will work just off the bat in nearly all web browsers, but Internet Explorer then needs a number of workarounds to cover up for its flaws.

More information about web standards and why they are important can be read in my The web standards war is far from over post.

For a list of of bugs in Internet Explorer, please see Explorer Exposed! , and for my thoughts on the timing of the IE 7 release, please read IE 7 - is catching up good enough?.

Other good reading for learning how to develop with web standards are:

Developing With Web Standards

Using Web Standards in your Web Pages

Web standards checklist

When it comes to scripting in web pages, basically every web browser out there supports something called DOM (Document Object Model) methods (and Internet Explorer has done so too, ever since version 5), so for everything (but handling events), you can write the same code for all web browsers. Please read W3C DOM -Introduction to learn more about the DOM.

For more information about event handling, please read my Event handling in JavaScript - an alternative addEvent solution post.

Conclusively, I hope all this information helps you to discover the world of web standards and how it makes web developing much easier and more fun!

Sometime later a had a professional designer creat a new web template for me with great drop down menus, using really simple code. Again, could not display in FireFox, so when I went back to the desiger he had to replace it with much more complicated code that is much harder for me to maintain.

So, for me, I wish everyone used IE and compared to FireFox I find it is much better.

I know that your post was about IE and not FireFox, but I’m really struggling to understand why people complain about IE when it has so many advantages over the leading competition.

Oddly enough, I cannot remember which panel you’re referring to. I’m sure it was good, but forget which one it was! If I had to guess, it was probably the one by Kathy Sierra.

As for your 2007 prediction related to Apple’s competitor to Windows Media Center — if you do not need to record shows from TV and just want a smaller and more convenient extension of your digital media on your computer network to your TV, then I seriously recommend looking into the open-source Xbox Media Center. I highly doubt Windows Media Center, Apple’s iTV or anyone else’s will come even near its greatness.

Take care in 2007!

Een voorspoedig, gezond én gelukkig 2007

2006 got me my first usable mac…a powermac g4 (secondhand), and it’s convinced me to make the switch in the furture. Altough it’s 6 years old, it still runs studio 8 and CS 2 like a charm.

where IE6 and IE7 are concerned: I think the big issue in getting rid of IE6 asap will be convincing companies to make the switch on the company computers. That’s where IE6 will linger the longest.

Happy New Year to you and your family!!