During the course of the week one of my colleagues sent me a text to say that Microsoft had seen the ‘light’ and decided to reverse its decision to make IE8 behave like IE7 unless specifically requested. I had so put all things web related out of mind that it took me a while to tune into what he was saying. Unbelievable! In Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 on the IEBlog, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch says:

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 need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

Microsoft actually listening to the developer community! Now that’s something you don’t see very often. Dean Hachamovitch goes on to say that:

Long term, we believe this is the right thing for the web. Shorter term, leading up not just to IE8’s release but broader IE8 adoption, this choice creates a clear call to action to site developers to make sure their web content works well in IE.

I’m still pinching myself and just hope that this is a picture of things to come. Don’t let us down now Microsoft. Time for that ‘e-bore’ test again…

How does it work?

Shops and retailers are prepared to offer a percentage of their sales (a commission) to other websites which direct shoppers to them, as a way of saying ‘thank you’.

They have built a rather clever website that allows users to select a charity, then find a shop and make a purchase, thus directing that commission back through SurfGiver to the charity they selected. Simple.

There are many more features on SurfGiver.com designed to help charities promote themselves to users and to develop communities of supporters on the website. Charities can display ‘description’ information, website links and their logo (all fully editable at any time by the charity itself) and supply keywords for other users to ‘discover’ them through SurfGiver.com with their “Charity Search” tool.

It’s more than likely been published on a few well-known websites so no doubt I’m not the first but I still think it’s worth flagging this article up again as it highlights some important pitfalls.

Anyway, here are the problems mentioned in the article:

1. Hidden log-in link
2. Pop-ups for content presentation
3. Dragging instead of vertical navigation
4. Invisible links
5. Visual noise
6. Dead end
7. Content blocks layering upon each other
8. Dynamic navigation
9. Drop-Down Menus
10. Blinking images

Here are a few more problems that are common and make many websites harder and more annoying to use than they have to be:

• Low contrast text
• Small text that can’t be resized
• Small text that can be resized, but doing so causes content to disappear
• Preventing or breaking normal browser functionality like mouse-wheel scrolling, printing, and bookmarking
• Over-designed forms

This list certainly isn’t exhaustive so by all means please add to this post.

More significantly though is the news (from the same source): internal builds of IE 8 now pass the Acid2 test. I guess to most people this doesn’t sound like anything special - what after all is the significance of the Acid2 test? What this means is IE 8 will support display:table and generated content, among other things, which is a significant improvement.

I confess I have done my fair share of complaining about IE. I feel justified though as I have spent countless (frustrating) hours working around bugs in IE. This is good news however and probably more than I expected. I look forward to seeing it in action.