With all the posts
starting to pop up about IE7 being layout complete and waving the
starting flag that it’s okay to start testing, I downloaded it from
MSDN yesterday and took it for a spin. I found some good instructions
for how to run IE7 on the same machine as IE6. I can’t run them at the
same time since when IE7 is loaded, it uses a registry entry which
causes IE6 to open URL’s in my default browser, which is Firefox. The
instructions include a batch file for creating and cleaning this up
when you run IE7.
I went to a handful of sites and assuming you
have a standards-based site using CSS for presentation, I think the
biggest problem most of you are going to face is with clearing floats.
At least it will for me. I’ve made a lot of use of the easy clearing
method and this won’t work in a lot of cases for IE7. Maybe if I wait
long enough it will get updated so I can keep using it. I haven’t yet
tried this update to that method yet.
My initial efforts
I just finished fixing up the first site I think I ever did without using tables. The Bailey Foundation
site had some issues with a few floats in IE7. I added a few empty
markup elements and a couple of “zoom:1;” attributes to the CSS in a
few places to make IE7 happy. I then had to deal with some things that
broke in IE6, which then broke things in Firefox. I seem to have gotten
it all balanced out though. After that I checked things out in Safari
and it seemed good, too.
On my own site, the main two issues I
found where that the nav area wasn’t clearing the floated elements in
the nav bar and I had the same problem on my portfolio page with the
body. Adding a few
empty tags to the markup fixed both issues, but I consider it just a quick fix since I don’t like to add the extra markup.
What did I learn?
For
sites I do from here on out and most likely with others I fix, I think
the safest route will be to use IE’s conditional comments to load in
browser specific css files like this:
SXSW was awesome and I can’t imagine it being any better, which exceptions noted below…
I didn’t bother with day-to-day updates. There are plenty of those to go around. While I do have some pics, you’ll find a whole lot of those on Flickr.
For
me, it was about getting the chance to meet and hang out with a lot of
people I’ve followed for a while online and have a great deal of
admiration for. If you are in web design or web development at all, you
should attempt to make it next year.
The key to having the best
time at SXSW is to be social. While there are a few great panels, most
could be better. It’s at the parties and social events and bars where
you’ll get the most out of the entire experience.
Later
today, I’ll be headed down for SXSW Interactive. From what I hear I
expect it to be a blast. I hope to see a lot of people, learn a lot of
things, drink a lot of beer and mostly have fun.
I’m just beginning to dive into this,
but it’s got me excited. They’ve got two versions of each source file,
a build one with all the comments and a src which is already compressed
for you.
Having worked for a while with Prototype and Script.aculo.us
I’m curious to see how they compare. Seems like Script.aculo.us
provides a lot of whiz bang effects the Yahoo library doesn’t have, but
you do have all of these:
animation
calendar (not sure if there’s a dropdown version)
connection (ajax stuff)
dom
dragdrop
event
slider
treeview (particularly cool)
My biggest issue about it so far is that you’d have to type the namespace of YAHOO about a zillion times. Typing
