Microsoft has released a beta version of Internet Explorer 8.

You can download it from the Internet Explorer 8 website.

Release notes are also available.

Today I unveil the new WebCards Website design. I hope you like it.

The site should be easier to navigate and the HTML is much more lightweight. The XHTML validates (mostly) to the XHTML Strict specification. Please let me know if you have any problems with the new design or experience any errors. Leave your ffedback over at the forums.

I came across an Article via Slashdot entitled Why Linux Doesn’t Spread - the Curse of Being Free. It is a very good read and tries to explain some of the reasons that Linux hasn’t taken off big time. Although my opinion is that Windows is dominant simply because every PC you buy comes installed with it, the main focus of the article is the fact that Linux is free.

He sums is up very well with this paragraph:

We don’t value things we can get easily. Yet we’d climb mountains, cross rivers and travel across deserts just to reach something we can’t easily get our hands on.

When you think about it, humans do tend to equate price with quality. More expensive must mean better quality. True in a lot of cases, yes, but not all the time.

My own experience however, is that I just prefer Windows. Sure it has many, many problems but I know how to use it and I am comfortable with it. I have tried using different versions of Linux in the past but I become frustrated with using it. I know with some persistence I will get the hang of it but I really don’t have the patience. And if I, an experienced computer user, can’t get the hang of it, how is the average inexperienced user going to get to grips with it.

I just wanted to let people know about the latest feature coming in the next version of WebCards: bulk upload.

You simply upload all your chosen images to a specified folder (”import”) and refresh the page. All the images in the folder will be listed. You can choose which ones to upload and choose and name an category for each one. Thumbnails are automatically generated. There is no messing about with advanced options and it is a very quick way to add a lot of images.

The screnshot on the left shows what the bulk uploader looks like in the admin centre. As you can see, you don’t have to import all the images and you can choose which ones to upload.

I am keen to know what you think of this feature and anything you think needs adding or changing with it. Please post any suggestions you have on the forums.

French Internet traffic analysis company XiTi has released data showing that Firefox is slowly increasing its market share over Internet Explorer. Their results are based on compiled data from 2007.
XiTi Monitor reports a worldwide browser share of 66.1% for Internet Explorer and 28% for Firefox. Opera has a 3.3% share and Safari 2%. Firefox usage is as high as 45.4% in Finland. You can take a look at the full statistics over on Wired’s blog.

But are these statistics any more useful than any other statistics. Opera says no.
Interestingly, XiTi’s map misses out several European countries where Opera claim their browser is popular.
From Opera’s blog:

People may not be aware of this, but Opera is doing pretty well in Russia. In fact, some Russian stats suggest that Opera may have more users than Firefox… Whether this is the case or not is not that important (and as we know, browser stats are highly unreliable), but it is rather interesting that this particular country is left out, as if it wasn’t part of Europe at all!

The important thing to realise about browser statistics is where they come from. XiTi’s data can only come from a small set of websites that use their services. Most statistical data will be skewed in some direction or another.

Take this website for example. In 2007 32.7% of visitors used Firefox. But this is a website for webmasters. They tend to be more tech savvy and so I would expect this site to have a higher proportion of Firefox users than, say Google.

So whenever you are relying on web browser statistics, bear in mind that the data you are using is probably (as Opera says) “crappy.”

As I hadn’t been to the cinema in such a long time I decided to take my wife and see the first move that was on when we got there. It was Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

If you don’t know, it’s based on a Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim. I hadn’t seen any trailers for this movie and I was taken aback when I realised that the movie was a musical too. However, the content is not what you would expect to see in a musical. You don’t often see a film’s genre listed as horror/musical. It is rated 18 in the UK and R in the US. And it is very,very gory.

Johnny Depp stars as Todd, a man scorned by the local judge, played by Alan Rickman. Todd’s “business partner” is Mrs Lovett, played by Helena Bonham Carter. I must says how strikingly similar they are to the puppets that they voice in another Tim Burton film, Corpse Bride. There is also a great appearance by Sacha Baron Cohen.
Mrs Lovett runs a meat pie shop and Todd, being the Demon Barber, slaughters his customers and provides her with the “meat.”

As a musical I thought it worked quite well. Initially it took some getting used to and at first I struggled to hear the words over the epic musical score. As I got used to it I really began to enjoy it. There is definitely more music in the first half of the film though.

It has an inevitable ending. But there is a little bit of romance to finish with too, which makes us think that all the throat slashing is worth it.

Don’t be turned off by this film just because it’s a musical. It is a great film. Some positive points to end on? Well, Nightmare Before Christmas had songs in it. And if that’s not enough of a positive? Cloverfield is out next week.

Introducing the latest WebCards feature: the search cloud. OK, it ’s not a major new feature but I just want to let people know that latest WebCards development news.

If you don’t know what a search cloud is, it is a list of recent search terms with more emphasis given to terms that are searched for more frequently. More popular search terms are shown with a bigger font and less popular terms with a smaller font. They are popular on a lot of the social networking sites, such as last.fm and technorati.

The search cloud can be “dropped in” anywhere you like but I currently have it on the advanced search page.
You can take a look at the latest WebCard feature on the demonstration page. Although the demo is not particularly useable at the monet, you can still use the search feature and you can see how the search cloud changes.

Let me know what you think of it over on the forums.

The W3C has released their working draft of HTML 5.

It is still very much a work in progress but there are some interesting new tags in there, such as the audio and video tags. They have also published an article detaling the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5.

From a post on Webmaster World.

Businesses are being warned that on 12 February, Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) will automatically update Internet Explorer to version 7, unless they act to prevent the update.

Since October, Windows Genuine Advantage validation has not been required to upgrade to IE7 anS Microsoft announced back then that the automatic update will happen next month.
System administrators who have set WSUS to auto approve Update Rollup packages must disable the auto update feature before 12 February. After then, they must update the package and then switch the auto approve feature back on.

You can read the whole InfoWorld article here.

But what does that mean to us as Webmasters? Good news, that’s what. The sooner Internet Explorer 6 is gone the better. More browsers to support is always bad news, as I made clear on the CSS subject. IE6 was put together in such a way that it had to support standards but also support the hacked-up, non-standard CSS that developers were forced to use to make a page work in IE5. Microsoft couldn’t just release a browser that was fully standardS compliant because many pages had to be written in a non-standard way. It was hard for them to break the cycle, despite them introducing quirks mode into IE.

But IE7 is more standards compliant, and IE8 is even more standards compliant and even passes the Acid2 test. The time will soon come when there will be such thing as “compliant,” not just “IE compliant” or “Firefox compliant.”

However, there is a twist in the story. Microsoft wants us to use a meta tag to trigger proper rendering in IE8:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />

To me this is a bad idea. They are in a catch 22 situation. IE used to render in quirks mode if it did not detect a valid DOCTYPE. Now pages are being hacked together due to IE6’s flaws but they do contain a valid DOCTYPE. So they don’t render properly in IE7. Or, more specifically, they render how they should render, but not how they did in IE6. They must break this cycle. If they introduce this meta tag now they will never be able to drop it. (You can read about the decision-making process in an article on A List Apart by Aaron Gustafson, who is a member of the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force )

Perhaps an op-out meta tag would work, I don’t know. But Microsft must not implement this meta tag. It will be a big mistake if they do and they will never be able to drop it. So when IE9 is released these meta tags must be updated. Or should webmasters just sort out their web pages and CSS for one last time and be happy that all the browsers are standards compliant? I doubt that.

The following chart, created with the superb Google Charts API shows the Internet Explorer browser versions on the WebCards website from October 2006 to January 2008.

They have almost a 50-50 share and I expect IE7 to be the most popular browser by next month.

You can read a lot more about this on the post from the IE blog entitled Compatibility and IE8.

The CSS3 working group are looking for feedback on what people want implemented in CSS3.

From the blog post:

The CSSWG plans to discuss its charter at our next face-to-face meeting in March. If groups like CSS3.info, the CSS Eleven, and the WaSP and/or individuals like Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer could organize a collectively-written list of priorities and submit it to us before then, we could take that into account when writing our charter for 2008+.

I have to say that there are two main things I want from CSS3. The first is CSS columns (although I believe this is currently in the draft). The idea of table-less layout is excellent. The problem is it is too darned complicated to make it work. Web developers simply don’t have time to mess about with positioning of divs and spans. Then of course you have to test it out and implement different versions off CSS on each web browsers. But I digress…

The second thing I want is for it to work on ALL web browsers. Each web browsers must implement CSS in an identical way. No hacks, no complicated ways of hiding CSS from one browser or another. No more “this is needed because IE renders this differently” in the comments. None of this. As a member has posted on Webmaster World:

Come to think about it - if they kept CSS3 the same as CSS2 but got it supported - that would be a really brilliant thing.

The CSS working group is not without its critics, however. Take a look at this blog post before you post your ideas. It seems the CSS Working Group is a bit on the slow side when it comes to getting things done.

You can take a look at css3.info for more information.