After a number of betas and release candidates Miscrosoft quitely released IE 8 last week. As with any new browser release there will be some issues that pop-up with some of our web pages, the iCIT web team has taken a proactive approach on IE 8 and using the built-in compatiblity mode option in IE 8 to force, for now, all pages on www.uww.edu, library.uww.edu and uc.uww.edu into IE 7 compliance mode, until a time when we can ensure that these sites and pages are IE 8 compliant at which time we will unlock the sites from their compatability mode. For the official iCIT response to IE 8 see the iCIT blog. 

For the official Browser support guide, see our chart on the web team website.

September 3rd Google Officially launched it’s own forey into the browser game. It’s Browser called Chrome is a lightweight, multi-threaded, WebKit based browser. Using the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari Browser came as a surprise to me as Google has been very friendly to the Mozilla Foundation for years, the makers of Firefox, in fact Google injects a good deal of the foundation’s income through a partnership to have the default Firefox page a Google search page. These technicalities aside I think it’s clear that Chrome is not meant to be your everyday browser. You’ll still use Firefox or IE or Safari for that; what Chrome is meant to do it is provide a sand boxed environment for web applications to run in, so that if an application crashes it only takes that tab with it and not the whole browser.

I think that Google might have started to create something that will be helpful, not right now, but in the near future as companies start to roll out more SAAS applications and the need to run multiple web applications at a time is more commonplace. Currently the only real advantage to Chrome is if you use AJAX heavy web applications where Chrome’s new JavaScript parser “V8″ excels.

Will people use it this way only time will tell.

Yesterday Apple released the final patches to safari 3 to clean up a nasty vulnerability that allowed remote execution of code. All safari users should make sure they update to version 3.1.2.  Also last month Firefox 3 officially launched on June 11th. Currently we are testing both browsers against our current sites and services. Most services and sits that functioned in Firefox 2 will also work in Firefox 3. However there are large differences between safari 2 and 3 so we are leaving Firefox 3 and Safari 3 as a tier two browsers until we can officially support them. Happy browsing! and please send us an email if you find a page that doesn’t work right in FF 3 or safari 3.

Hello,
I wanted to let everyone know that Serena the company that owns our Collage CMS product has decided to stop development on the product. This means that there will be no new versions or enhancements to the product. While we still have support into the foreseeable future, we (the Web Team) believe that this is an opportunity to look at alternative solutions.

So what does this mean for you?

At this point nothing will change; we will continue to use Collage while we evaluate our future direction. In the upcoming months we will be calling on you to aid us in requirements gathering and product evaluation.
As I can only assume many of you will have questions; please post them below and I will respond to them the best I can.

Joel

With the release of IE8 beta 1 yesterday to developers/public, the web is becoming an exciting and scary place. Once released into production IE8 will round out the group of having all four of the major browsers, those being: IE8, FireFox 3, safari 3 and opera 9, being for the most part standards compliant and all passing the Acid2 CSS test. Which should allow web designers and developers to provide better consistency across all updated browsers.

This however still brings the question of old browsers and legacy/third party web applications that require older and for the most part specific versions of a browser and can we fully support web standards and at the same time ensure that these older and out of date browsers can still use the website in a acceptable manner that is the challenge that we face as web designers.

We’re proud to announce the release of the new version of the UW-W homepage to a public beta. The new site is a culmination of months of planning and development. We hope you like the fresh new look and find it easy to use and navigate. You can view the site here: http://beta.uww.edu. Please let us know what you think of the site and take a while to get accustomed to the new site, so that when we launch it into production you know where things are.

So as you might have notice we’ve moved a little. Sorry about that. However, as you might see (maybe not) we’ve moved to Wordpress(WP) MU, and I’ve managed to keep the same look and all old posts and comments, thanks to the ease of WP themes and our server admins. I’m thinking of adding some plugins but we’ll see. Have any ideas post a comment. I’ll be posting a WP theme tutorial soon, well as soon as I write it.

an interesting article on relative CSS font sizing was posted on A List Apart today. they did some research into cross browser font sizing. The results are quite surprising.

Check out the full story: http://alistapart.com/articles/howtosizetextincss.

As i discussed in my last article on search engine optimization (SEO) there are many factors that figure into where you rank on a search engine. There are basically 3 keys. Of which I’ll touch on in this 3 part series.

The first key is properly using meta tags. Meta tags can be a big help to your search ranking, but if used improperly can actually hurt your rankings. There are two tags to work with here, three if you count the title tag, which for all intensive purposes I will include because it’s in the same place.

Getting started
Lets take look at what these tags do and then see how to use them to our advantage.

Read more…

Much has been said over the years about how writing for the web is different than writing for print. While that may be true one thing is certain the look of your website is equal to the quality of the content this is on your site. Too many times we create pretty websites that have little or no quality content just because we think we have to have a website for this. Well this week’s issue of A List Apart, a web magazine, has two very interesting articles on writing for the web. I encourage you to check them out. http://alistapart.com/issues/242. The better the content we have on our Web sites the greater the effectiveness that site has.