IE 8: X-UA-Lemur-Compatible

Chris — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:45:27 +0000

Katemonkey.co.uk: X-UA-Lemur-Compatible: “Lemur 11: It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had an Internet riot. Let’s go for it.”

The blue Zeldman toque is an instant internets classic.

(Via Digital Web.)

Bell.ca’s absurd home page

Chris — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:55:03 +0000

Remember those wonderful web badges that obnoxious webmasters used to put on their home pages? You know, “Optimized for Netscape 3.0″? As if people would go to the trouble of downloading and installing a web browser just to see some idiot’s latest enhancement to their web site (usually something involving the “blink” tag).

Well, I had a flashback to those days today. I visited Bell.ca, and I had the audacity to do it with a Mac and ?

Reviewed: Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

Chris — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:57:55 +0000

Summary: Dreameaver 9.0.0.3481

If you skipped Macromedia Dreamweaver 8, have an Intel Mac or Photoshop CS3, then this might be worth upgrading to. Otherwise, the ugly new icon is the most noticeable new feature. They want you to open your wallet far too wide for this upgrade, if you ask me.

Dreamweaver CS3 — The Good

Sadly, many of these fall under the catchy heading “shit that should’ve been done right in Dreamweaver MX, Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Dreamweaver 8 but wasn’t”…

Suffix Preferences — Dreamweaver finally allows the specification of a default extension (but not the default filename). So, instead of Dreamweaver 8′s “untitled.html”, I get “untitled.php”. That’s closer to “index.php”, but not close enough.
Keyboard Navigation

So far, the delete key works in the Site window.
Finally recognizing that Apple appropriated F9–F12 for Exposé is a nice touch.
Right- and left-arrow keys can now open/close folders in the Files window. Cool. Would be great to be able to open files from the keyboard, though.

Pollution — so far it looks like Dreamweaver CS3 no longer pollutes sites with dozens of suffix-free temp files… Yay!
Palettes — being able to drag palettes off into new palettes without being told, like an idiot, to do it the right way, is nice.
Style Sheets

the CSS tools are marginally improved. It’s now much easier to deal with the various places you might like to put your CSS.
The new CSS Templates look fine, but there’s nothing here that shouldn’t have been available for free download by all registered Dreamweaver 8 customers. These are not part of the application.

SpryFrameworks — yeah, whatever.

Dreamweaver CS3 — The Bad

I’ll just start by noting that I’m writing this with BBEdit 8.6.

Most of these items fall under the heading “shit that should finally have been fixed Dreamweaver CS3 but, inexplicably, wasn’t”:

Installation — what’s up with that installer? Adobe’s taken a lot of heat lately over their Adobe Reader installation process, and rightly so. Installation of Dreamweaver CS3 took forever, and it’s not an Apple installer. It wouldn’t accept my Macromedia Studio 8 serial number as a qualifying upgrade (despite copying/pasting it from my Adobe.com account), and it said it couldn’t find Dreamweaver 8 in the default location (it was in /Applications/Macromedia Dreamweaver 8/ — Adobe support resolved this issue promptly and helpfully, but it added more than 20 minutes to the installation process).
Speed (Lack Thereof) — is it actually possible that they’ve made it slower? I can’t believe how sluggish it is on my 17″ PowerBook (with 2 GB of RAM). Photoshop CS2 sings and dances, but Dreamweaver CS3′s menus lag noticeably when choosing navigating them, especially once it’s been open awhile. Kill me now.
Customization — they’ve managed to forget my customized keyboard shortcuts and workspace layouts. Apple can migrate my entire system to a new box and preserve everything, but Adobe can’t get me from Dreamweaver 8 to 9 without trashing my workspace prefs.
Keyboard — Enter/Return/Escape still don’t reliably work on dialogs. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Restarting Dreamweaver seems to fix it. Lame.
Infuriating Condescension — Dreamweaver CS3 still treats the user like a dim-witted child when deleting files. Do I really need to be asked three #^$%# times if it’s okay?? Also, if Dreamweaver’s going to put you through 3 dialogs, you think they’d let you drive them from the keyboard… but you’d be wrong.
Open With… — The contextual menu in the Files window has an Open With… command; it still can’t remember where BBEdit is. So, by “Enable BBEdit integration” they really mean “Enable half-assed BBEdit integration”…
Palettes — no CS3-style collapsable palettes. Lame. You’d think the cosmetics (short-shrift to usability professionals duly noted; my bad) would’ve made it in, at least. Then you’d have something visible, something tangible to justify the upgrade costs…

Dreamweaver CS3 — The Ugly

I’ve been after Macromedia about many of these issue for years, and I grow weary of it. I don’t like to be this negative, and both Adobe and Macromedia are companies that’ve earned a lot of goodwill from their customers — including me — over the years.

Come on, folks; Apple is releasing Final Cut Studio 2 without bumping DVD Studio Pro’s version number to 5 just for the sake of appearances… This feels shabbier than any software upgrade I’ve purchased in years [note; haven't upgraded the office PCs to Vista — likely won't, either. Dreamweaver CS3 is disappointing, not Vista-disappointing...].

Save your money — this is Dreamweaver 8.2. If you’re on an Intel Mac, or if you’ve skipped Dreamweaver 8, go for it. If SpryFrameworks are a big deal to you, then maybe Dreamweaver CS3 is worth looking into.
Note to Adobe — yes, you made it Intel-native, and it’s fair that you get to charge for that. That gets you to 8.2, or maybe even as far as 8.5 if you clear out lots of bugs; I’d go so far as to suggest that calling this Dreamweaver 9 is a cynical move on your part.]
Integration Blues — too many of the new features — Bridge/Photoshop/Illustrator integration — aren’t features at all if you don’t have Photoshop CS3 or Illustrator CS3.
Bridge 2? — it’s fine, but I didn’t buy Adobe Bridge, I bought Adobe Dreamweaver CS3: and it doesn’t address most of Dreamweaver 8′s shortcomings.
If you’re on Windows — (and I’m assuming here that Dreamweaver CS3 is essentially the same as its Mac counterpart), I hope Photoshop/Illustrator integration is something that really turns your crank, cause there’s not much else new here.

And Now, the Coda…

If your sites are mainly database-driven, or your clients don’t require Contribute compatibility (and can therefore do without Dreamweaver’s Templates, roll-backs and role-based permissions), then:

IE7 Team Post List of CSS Changes

Chris — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:15:47 +0000

This is very good news. Now if only there was a way to run IE6 & IE7 side-by-side on one box…

IEBlog: Details on our CSS changes for IE7

Joe Clark Rips WCAG-2 A New One

Chris — Wed, 24 May 2006 21:06:58 +0000

And deservedly so, if half of what he’s written at A List Apart is true…

To Hell with WCAG-2

Web Standards and IE7b1

Chris — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 18:02:28 +0000

Some welcome news regarding web standards from Chris Wilson of the Microsoft Internet Explorer team.

Macromedia Contribute 3.1 and CSS

Chris — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 13:55:44 +0000

When deploying Macromedia Contribute for a client recently, I ran into an issue with Contribute not displaying CSS in edit mode (it displays just fine in browse mode). This wasn’t a purely aesthetic problem, either, since it meant site editors would be unable to apply custom styles (anything beyond generic HTML tags) to their content.

While there are lots of people on Macromedia’s Contribute forums having related issues, they were mostly using SSI to insert their CSS into pages. I was using @import (mostly to hide styles from Netscape 4.x). The results were the same, however, which isn’t too surprising since @import is essentially an include.

In this case, we decided to not worry about the tiny percentage of Netscape 4.x users the site had logged recently, and placed links to the CSS files directly in the pages, eliminating the need for @import. Contribute now plays nicely with the site’s CSS.

Macromedia tech support was helpful, and in the end suggested making relative links to the included CSS (we had been using root-relative links). It’s still a work-around, but maybe this will help someone…

Christopher Mackay's Blog » CSS