Pop Art Blog

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... Read More...

Previously on Web 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. “If IE8 acts like IE8 by default, then IE8 might break... Read More...

The good people at Rose City SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) and OGI had me back to talk about Accessibility. I thought the whole thing was going to be cancelled - we had a tornado in the area that night. Unlike the midwest, I learned that tornado in Portland are very rare. Almost as rare as snow we had on Christmas...that hasn't happened since the 30's. Thanks to all those that braved an ugly evening to come talk about accessibility and mobile applications. Slides: http://www... Read More...

In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind. This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards in email clients. The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email... Read More...

Pop Art is currently hiring for several positions , including an account director , a .NET web developer , and most important to me, a front-end web developer . If you're interested in any of those positions, feel free to apply. Now, allow me to wax poetic about the front-end developer position for a moment. If you've read my manifesto of a web producer , then you know that I feel that production work is a separate specialization from design and programming. Here at Pop Art, I've been... Read More...

"You’ll sometimes hear people joke that good programmers are 'lazy', and what this means is simply that good programmers tend to see duplicated work as a bug, and try to fix it." -- James Bennett, discussing CSS frameworks Read More...

With no success I spent several hours a couple weeks ago attempting to get PHP 5.2.4 on a Windows Apache web server to talk to an MS SQL 2005 Server that was installed as an instance on a server running an older version of MS SQL. I was able to connect to the default instance of MS SQL server running on the machine, but nothing I did would allow it to connect to the named instance running 2005. Returning to this project today with fresh eyes I found the two key bits of information that I had previously... Read More...

"I’d rather answer a few dumb questions than put up with a few dumb assumptions." -- Aaron Cannon , in reply to a question about whether he tires of people asking him about his blindness Read More...

“I was a baker. You can’t just turn up the oven and expect to take the bread out sooner.” – Eric Danielson, NorthTemple.com QA lead, commenting on the futility of trying to rush some kinds of development . Read More...

Update 11/27/2007 We do quite a bit of Flash video integrated into ASP.NET web applications. For video library application, the best solution from a usability perspective is to use JavaScript to control the flash player. There are some issues that keep popping up with the Flash Player, SwfObject, ExternalInterface, and ASP.NET that we needed to document for the good of the world. Hopefully, we'll save someone the hours that our team took to figure this stuff out. First, we begin with some background... Read More...