Some web dev I am–thanks to google adwords I on this very site I only just noticed an advert by microsoft for downloading IE8… Not how I should have found out about it but it beats not knowing at all, I guess.

I wonder how many issues this will introduce and how complicated my life will soon become… grab it if you have to (no follow link via google)

*update* as I went over to my Microsoft Virtual PC in order to test IE8, I accidentally loaded this site in IE6 and IT WAS HORRIBLE. In particular, it failed to inherit the width of the main content div so it spilled and defaced the site each time any code got posted (affected were code, blockquote and pre tags). Sigh… apologies, reparations have been done now, I just tend to ignore IE6 even though it still amounts to almost 15% of visitors… Even though it has been fixed in part, I should perhaps think of a gentler degradation for IE6 users, one that offers them a chance to upgrade what is now an 8 years old system…

Speaking of IE6 quirks, I had to do a semantic tab system for mootools 1.11 the other day and discovered how IE6 completely messes up the display of LI elements in an ordered list when having nested elements, spilling to the whole available space on the current line instead. The only fix for this is to float the children elements as well… For example:

<li style=”float: left”><strong>this is some text</strong></li> won’t just assume the text’s width, it will span over the whole available width and will push down a line the next LI. You need to float the strong as well in order to achieve the desired effect… Pants!

Lately I have been playing with the RC1 release of IE8 and to my shock-horror, it makes a total mockery of many of the pages I administer and run. To the rescue is the so called ‘compatibility’ mode, created as a layer that allows your sites to look, feel and function exactly as they did in IE7. Allegedly, the magic code is:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

My initial testing concluded that it seemed to do the job and I let it rest, hoping to have survived yet another Microsoft blunder on the cheap… Not so. Turns out that you still get differences and issues in CSS. This is non-fatal but the fact that certain JS scrolling modules I had written now seemed to output nothing at all worried me. A google search revealed that Microsoft are managing a list of 2500+ sites, submitted by testers and reported to still have problems despite of the compatibility layer! Nice… I guess I will be submitting my own entries — and so should you… As if the Safari 4 beta was not bad enough…

Word to the wise, do not install a RC (release candidate) on a machine that you value – to be safe, download a copy of the Microsoft Virtual Machine and an XP image, then install on it.