Ars Technica published an article about how Microsoft intends to further it’s standard compliance in their next browser version, Internet Exlporer 8. Since IE5.5, MS has been trying to implement some sort of web standard compliance into their browser - they’ve regularly come up short or just bungled the process altogether. Web developers already know what a mess version 5.5 was and how version 6 tried to fix the mess with a doctype switching mechanism that allowed developers to design around both versions. Unfortunately this resulted in a lot of hacks and workarounds to get sites working across other browsers and MS’s own.

When version 7 was released MS furthered their standard compliance which further broke even more web sites which made businesses and users reluctant to upgrade. MS apparently will be forcing everyone to use IE7 very soon.

With IE8, MS intends yet further their standards compliance to the level of FireFox, Safari and Opera. This is great news for designers and developers alike - but in true MS style, the implementation is crappy and just plain weird. First off, a third rendering mode will be implemented to take advantage of the new standards - this is for backward compatibility. To invoke this new rendering mode, MS is using a <meta> tag that IE8 will look for. This is really a poor idea and yet forces web developers/designers to keep having to consider IE separately - even if it renders the same in FF/Safari/Opera…Just as strange is apparently MS worked closely with WaSP to develop this new tag. How weird, the Web Standards Project group developing a non-standard procedure! While I’m looking forward to the easier web development and design I just don’t get this silly procedure.

Read the whole article.

Technorati Tags: IE8, Microsoft, development, web browser

It’s the age old problem… I have at least 50 user accounts on different web sites; del.icio.us, gmail, digg, etc… All of them with similar usernames and passwords. How nice would it be to have a single login that I can use to identify myself uniquely to any site or service. Enter the “new” OpenID standard and yet another great idea by the folks at SixApart. I know it sounds like microsoft passport but this is different because you can control every aspect of it, you can even run your own openid server.

With OpenID you’re user name becomes your website or blog url (if you have one). If you don’t have a blog or want one you can sign up with an openid provider.  So if you see a comment on your blog from “3.rdrail.net” you can be sure we added it. If you see comments by “3.rdrail.net.somespammer.com”, it should be obvious that we didn’t.

Again, our OpenID is 3.rdrail.net, if you goto our site and look in the head tag you’ll see the following:

<link rel="openid.server"
        href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
  <link rel="openid.delegate"
        href="http://tjake.myopenid.com/” />
  <meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location”
        content=”http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=tjake.myopenid.com” />

This redirects a OpenID enabled service to my OpenID provider.

So if I use a openid enabled service, I enter my domain which proxies to my openid provider. Once I login to my OpenID provider and an openid persona (registration details) are sent along to that service.

This is under my control, I can deny services from accessing my persona, change my OpenID provider at anytime or run my own OpenID service. Thats why it rocks. It’s simple for newbies but experts have complete control over their own service.

You can be sure that our next project will include OpenID integration (We’ll try to add it to junkdepot.com too!)