StandardPixel.com

It’s 5:51 pm (PST) and I am in the PHX Airport waiting for my connecting flight home. The last 6 days have taken a lot out of me and I am frankly tired of not being in Los Angeles right now. Odd though, I can’t wait to hop on a plane and head to SXSW next year. I had a heavy set of expectations and I think the SXSW Interactive Festival delivered beyond my expectations.

It all started a year ago while I was in a period of high-stress and low-inspiration. In a desperate effort to be inspired, I was listening to a harrowing amount of web related podcasts, favoring The Rissington podcast and Boagworld. This was in addition to my eye-numbing list of RSS feeds in Google Reader. Over a weekend I followed the progress of some of the most influential bloggers and podcasters through SXSW 2008, and wished I was there in the panels and parties. The conversations that came out of that week in Austin seemed to generate a year of inspiration for me and I vowed that I would not be a spectator in 2009.

In the following months I convinced myself that this was something that I needed to sell to my employer. I knew the company would benefit as much as I would; but I was just not sure I could sell a 6 day conference in a time when we were, as a company, considering layoffs for the first time in many years. I am glad that I was willing to, and did, pay my own way. I then proceeded to convince my girlfriend (a fellow geek), that since we would be traveling together we would be saving a fortune. In fact, we can’t afford NOT to go. I am assuming by the easy sell that she really wanted to go herself but I sort of like to let myself think that she was fooled by my clever sales tactic. So it was decided; in the summer of 2008, we made arrangements to go.

Before arriving in Austin, I had decided that the price of the ticket would be justified if I could meet and make contact with some clever and cool people in the industry and feel inspired to pick up at least one skill that I did not have when I arrived. We set out from Burbank last Thursday, and embarked on one of the most irritating Southwest Airlines experiences of my life. The trip to Austin could be a post in itself so I will just wait to embellish on that here in the future or over a drink (you’re buying).

On my first day, I missed most of the sessions and wandered into a book reading that really didn’t hit home. At about 6:00 pm, I figured I should at least salvage the party part of the day and get a head start into the line for the Tap Room party. On arrival in the line I immediately made friends. The people there were excited to engage in conversations about things I rarely get to talk about in a party atmosphere. In most cases, you can hang with geeks or you can go out to a club and have some fun. SXSW is a rare place where the two merge and it was a lot of fun.

We drank and talked shop as well as a few almost religious debates about the cloud and Agile before we decided to leave and get some Pizza. That is where I ran into Andy Budd and Remy Sharp. These are indeed well known people to me though there was an silly moment where I asked Andy if he would be attending the Great British Booze up, not yet recognizing who he was. He responded with “I am the Great British Booze up” which I think was the best possible answer to be honest.

Later in the week, I attended a panel where ARIA was explained with detail and passion by Becky Gibson from IBM and Dojo. Before this I had not completely understood what ARIA was, though Becky really brought it to life. I did some more reading and realized that ARIA can be described as CSS for the visually impaired. This perspective on the subject of ARIA really made the subject interesting to me. You will continue to write semantic markup in the same way. ARIA is simply a layer that will be added to your markup, much like your CSS style-sheet. This is a simple way to enable everybody to use your site to its fullest. I am positive that I will bring this back to my team and challenge them to work this into our framework.

Over the next few days I attended some amazing interviews, panels, parties, and learned the right way to give a presentation. I also met Paul Boag, John Resig, and had an conversation with Daniel Burka about Agile. As our conversation progressed, he challenged a lot of career limitations that I did not even know that I had. Yes I am completely exhausted and eager to go home but it is with a year of inspiration and new friends that I go. See you next year SXSW!

SXSW begins tomorrow and my calendar is full. I spent 2 hours going through the events and deciding which ones I will attend and there are a lot. I feel like the next 5 days are going to be intense. Exciting!

I have had my hands on the release candidate of IE8 for a couple weeks. One thing that will become obvious is that their are three distinct modes for rendering. Like other modern browsers there is a Quirks and Standards mode. Microsoft also added a compatibility mode which is intended to emulate the IE7 engine. Since IE7 is a lot more like IE6, I.T. departments will be a bit more likely to upgrade their clients. These I.T. Departments are the strongest force holding back the deprecation of IE6 since a lot of them are using internal web apps that were not coded with standards in mind and will break on a modern browser. A developer of a website can add a meta tag to their page that will instruct IE8 to run in compatibility mode for the version that a page was designed. Since it may not be practical to update every site to have this meta tag in the head, a configuration is available in the IE8 browser to enable compatibility mode on all web sites or on site specifically added to a list in the preferences. All of these are commendable steps that Microsoft has taken to move their browser and users to the world of open standards without breaking the IE6 hold-out-internet.

Here is where the headaches begin: Microsoft has even gone as far as letting users opt in to compatibility mode during the install process of the IE8 browser. The choice is presented to the end user and is worded in such a way that the user would feel scared to not choose compatibility mode. Since this choice is presented as a simple radio option, there is no opportunity to restrict compatibility mode to a list of domains, like in the preferences. The compatibility mode will be used for all pages. This means that potentially most of those that go through the upgrade process from IE 6 or 7 to 8 will end up rendering in an IE7-like state, and unless your browser checks the user agent string for the mode, your hacks for IE7 will not exist. I am not proud to say that I have a few IE7 hacks though I have restricted them to IE7, so that any other browser will use a standards compliant default CSS set.

I have discovered one work-around. Microsoft does provide a meta tag that will instruct IE to always render in the latest standards mode. Using this should force your browser to behave. It would also be smart to ensure all hacks for IE6 and 7 are restricted to the intended version only with selector specific hacks or conditional comments. I do this by writing the user agent version as a class in the body tag and writing my selectors against that. Also remember to check your page using the IE8 developer tools, as they will show you if your site is rendering in the proper mode.