Microsoft

If you haven't heard yet, Microsoft and Yahoo! have inked a 10 year deal to partner on search and advertising.  You can learn more about the details of the deal, which I won't go into here.  If the deal is approved by regulators, we could see changes in Yahoo and Bing search and advertising early next year, from the sound of it.

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Kathryn Ryan of Radio NZ interviewed Don Christie, president of the NZ Open Source Society and Kevin Ackhurst, managing director of Microsoft NZ on Microsoft's failure to renew their multi-million dollar contract with the NZ government.  The interviews and Kathryn's questions are intense and very interesting as Don Christie defends the government's choice to break out of a reliance on Microsoft's products, and Kevin Ackhurst tries to defend Microsoft's position, touting it as a success.

Highlights for me were Kevin Ackhursts rehearsed tape-recorder responses that avoid answering Kathryn's questions, and Kathryn's obvious frustration with his failure to state things as they are.  It's clear that Microsoft wants to paint this as a success story, but is failing pretty badly.

I love Don Christie's "Microsoft software is like a virus..." which reminds me of Microsoft's "linux is a cancer" statements.

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The NZ SSC has rejected Microsoft's offers for a new licensing contract. This is a big loss for Microsoft (Though I'm sure MS would have you believe otherwise and try to paint the picture back to front) and big win for NZ Government and NZ's IT industry.

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Microsoft announced in January that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) would be standards-compliant, but only if you included a special meta tag or http header indicating that the page should be rendered in standards compliance mode. The uproar from the standards community led Microsoft to change the default behavior of IE8. Now IE8 will render all pages in standards mode by default, unless you specify otherwise with the X-UA-Compatible meta tag or http header. Interestingly, the Microsoft followers did not seem to feel short-changed as the standards advocates had.

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It seems there is a clean standards-solution that doesn't succumb to the X-UA-Compatible mess Microsoft has dumped on us, yet let's you author html in standards mode in IE8:

"John Resig points out something that I think a lot of the mainstream chatter around IE8 has missed - if you send it a currently unused DOCTYPE (like HTML 5,) it will not cower in IE7 mode. "John examines this feature of IE8 in this post: http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/ .

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A List Apart's Issue 253 continues discussing and debating the controversial IE version targeting that ALA announced a month ago. CivicActions blogged about this topic then too. Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Zeldman provide very realistic and down-to-earth points of view and arguments both for and against version targeting. Although they each reach different conclusions, neither tries to persuade the reader one way or the other. Rather they leave you more enlightened so that you can make your own decision. 'They Shoot Browsers' by Jeremy Keith was better written in my opinion and has more convincing arguments, including this gem;

"The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of “breaking the web” in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches."

I'm still not 100% decided, but I'm pretty heavily swaying to the side against version targeting. Having said that, I can understand how and why Microsoft, even with mostly good intentions, came to this solution. I can see and appreciate the short term benefits, however I don't believe that Microsoft can pull this off in the long term. As web developers, we have no reason to believe that Microsoft is capable or even intends to follow through with it's promises

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I would never use a drupal module or javascript to fix IE6 suckiness with transparency in 24-bit PNGs. After battling IE6 and image transparency on many sites I always do one of three things when tackling this issue:

1. Firstly, if only binary transparency is required, I use an 8-bit PNG file. Binary transparency means that each pixel is either transparent xor colored (but not both, hence 'xor' for the eXclusive-or. When can we add 'xor' to the English dictionary?). The pixels in a 24-bit PNG can be both colored and transparent, and have 'alpha' transparency as opposed to binary transparency.
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Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 is an A List Apart article that was Slashdotted. It explains a new convention/standard designed by the Web Standards Project and Microsoft that aims to improve the support for old websites when new versions of websites come out. It introduces a new meta tag and http header that specifies what versions of each browser the page is compatible with. Such a convention would, in theory, ease the pain when IE8 is released and avoid the frantic chaos that occurred when IE7 was released.

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ChangeTheMargins.com is a small campaign for small change that collectively could have a big impact.  The idea is to get people, manufacturers and even software companies to change the margins on the printed page.  Seems pretty simple right?!  We all forgo the generous standard 1.5 inch margin for a more economical .75 inch margin (i would say lets go to .6!).

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Looks like it is Microsoft day here on the CA blog. Just heard that Microsoft did not get ISO certification for Office file formats. This is great news for OpenOffice.org and other free and open source "office" applications. From the Market Place story above: Microsoft has suffered an embarrassing rebuff. The company has tried for two years to win the prized "ISO" label for its Office file format.

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