Why are my are my anchor links not working in IE6?
As a web designer I constantly run into browser bugs and 90% of these bugs belong to either IE6 or IE7. Remarkably these two browsers don’t even consistently break the same way. What is messed up in IE6 may be completely messed up in a different way in IE7. The standards compliant WebKit and Gecko engines used by popular browsers like FireFox, Safari and Chrome rarely see many of these annoying bugs, but the masses use IE, so we as designers and developers must make them work.
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Microsoft’s second ad with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld is out today. The first one didn’t do much for me, but this one is a lot better and after seeing it the first one also makes more sense as it kind of sets the stage for future installments. I’m now really curious to see where Bill and Jerry’s journey will lead them next. By the time this series is over I have a feeling we will be more attached to these two witty characters.
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The web is buzzing with news of a Google browser. The news was launched via a 39 page comic. The browser is called Google Chrome, and at last check the site was offline but rumour has it that it will be back online tomorrow. Google has also announced on their blog that they sent out the news a bit early by accident. Personally I think they may have just been trying to generate blog sphere buzz and it has worked
This is really big news and probably really bad news for Microsoft. Google has already released Gears a browser add-on which allows Google to jump start browsers ahead into more modern standards. Chrome will use webkit, the same engine that Safari uses, but it will not use the webkit Javascript engine. It will use it’s own, which should make apps run much faster and with more features.
Could this really be Google’s entrance into the desktop market? I believe the future of applications is online. Everything is headed in that direction. More and more people are accessing their apps and data in multiple places and on multiple devices, and right now the major player in that space is Google.
Update: Google Chrome - first impressions are the most important
More info at TechCrunch:
Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer
First Images of Google Chrome
No Joke: Google Introduces The Chrome Browser With A Cartoon
Several sources this week have reported on Windows 7 and its multi-touch features. Windows 7 will be the successor to Vista and no one is sure when it will come out; Microsoft dates can be slippery. That said I am a huge geek when it comes to new technology. Multi-touch is already a reality, but several years ago it belonged to the realm of Science Fiction and there is no denying that it is very cool. Playing with the Apple iTouch/iPhone for the first time is awesome as long as it’s not in the Apple store. Those things can get pretty nasty looking with Ebola boogers smeared all over them.
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The first browser wars ended years ago and now it seems they are back for a second round. I don’t think they will ever match the Netscape vs. Internet Explorer days, and today there are many more platforms to consider. Before reading this post further, I should mention that I am a web designer / developer and I have an axe to grind with Microsoft, especially when it comes to their browser. I will actually be completely blunt and say that this browser is downright horrible and the only reason it has any market share at all is because it is included with practically every mainstream computer sold on the planet. The very fact that Firefox has gained so much ground over the past three years against such incredible odds is testament not only to how great Firefox is, but also to how horrible Internet Explorer is.
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After over a year of non-stop problems with vista I have returned to Windows XP on my home computer and plan to do so at work within the next week. I know we all complain about Microsoft, but in the case of Windows Vista it’s exceeding well earned.
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Anyone creating email newsletters on a daily basis will tell you how hard it is to get them to render properly in all email clients, but getting them to work in Outlook 2007 can be maddening as any quick Google search will show.
Today I came across a bug that left me fuming. I could not figure out why every single cell in my table heavy layout had a 1px padding around it and in some cases I was even missing my table borders. For those of you working in the sane world of web design, tables are a thing of the past, but in the world of email, tables are back with a vengeance.
As I became more and more disillusioned I started trying anything and stumbled across the fix. I knew I had to share this, so if you are experiencing any of the above, here is the fix and it’s a simple one.
Here’s an example of what a two cell table with an image and text would look like before the fix. Notice the 1px white border/padding around the table.
And here is how it’s supposed to look after the fix. No white border / padding.
And the fix?
table td {
border-collapse: collapse;
}
I don’t think I’ve ever even used this css before, but once I started grasping at straws I began to fiddle around with the CSS border attributes and tried it. I’ve never seen any browser or mail client except Outlook 2007 do this to table cells.
Here’s the full HTML from the example, and thank you Microsoft, for delivering the worst email rendering experience yet, we all thought Hotmail was bad, but you really stepped up to the plate!
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Outlook 2007 Test</title>
<style media="all" type="text/css">
table td {
border-collapse: collapse;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table width="200" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="border:solid 1px #48463b;">
<tr>
<td width="80"><img src="http://yourserver/graphic.gif" width="80" height="40" alt="graphic"></td>
<td width="120" style="background-color:#c1beb1; color:#ffffff; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align:center; font-size:11px;">Another column<br>
plain text.</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
You may also want to check out my other entries on this topic.
There’s an interesting post on the MS IEBlog about how Internet Explorer 8 will render in a standards compliant way by default. If you want IE7 rendering you will have to explicitly ask for it in the html document. A List Apart has more on this topic.
Overall I think IE7 was pretty disappointing. I still have a lot of problems getting things to work properly, and I usually get things to work in Firefox and Safari long before I get them to work in IE7, not to mention that some sites that work in IE6, break in IE7. Let’s hope 8 will be different, but now web designers and programmers will have three Internet Explorer browsers to support and deal with, at least for awhile.
Interoperability is the future with more and more clients out there. I believe that hand held browsing will become a major part of many people’s lives in the very near future as WiFi becomes more widespread and cell phone bandwidth prices drop. More and more people will be accessing pages on many different platforms, so web standards and interoperability are more important than ever. Microsoft seems to understand this and is listening to the web standards experts more and more and this is good.
OFT files are Outlook Templates, also sometimes called Outlook File Templates. You can make email templates from them, but as with most Microsoft products the quality can be quite flaky if you are not careful. I have had to create many OFT files for clients and if you go back in time and code to 1996 web standards you can get them to look pretty decent.
There’s too ways to create OFT files. One is to save the email from the Save As menu and select OFT under the Save as type: drop down. This means you already have the email in your inbox, which means mailing the html with a 3rd party program.
There’s an easier way to do this which will allow you to skip the step of sending yourself the email. The OFT process could even be handed off to the business people that need the OFT.
Top menu go to,
View / Toolbars / Web.
You should now have an input field at the top that says something like outlook:Inbox
Here you can type / paste any web address and it will load the page in Outlook. Once this is done, in the menu go to,
Actions / Send Web Page by E-mail
Now you will see the page in a new mail window. If the webpage was not to complex and created using tables, it should look okay. Pure css and more complex designs will not work at all and really shouldn’t even be considered for any email deployments. I’m a strong supporter of web standards, unfortunately some major email platforms are not.
The next step is to save the email as an OFT. Go to,
Giant windows bubble (AKA Office Button) / Save As
Select OFT, name the file and save.
You should now have an OFT file. You can test this by double clicking it which will open Outlook. You can now edit the text and send to other people. OFT files can be a cheap internal alternative to full blown email deployments. I would only recommend OFT files for small internal newsletters. OFT’s may not work properly on other email clients and are proprietary.
This announcement did not leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Right now there are really only three big search engines, with Google being the dominate one; this would narrow it down to two. Whenever Microsoft can’t get something right, they just buy someone who has done it right.
There is a very interesting discussion on Slashdot about why Yahoo is so popular. A lot of the reasons for it’s popularity are things that Microsoft has never really understood, like interoperability. How many of Microsoft’s offerings fail to work properly on anything but a MS platform?
I see the Internet moving away from propriety software solutions. For a long time Internet Explorer was king, but that is all changing, and as web usage moves more and more towards handhelds I don’t see this trend changing. We have this thing called “Web Standards”, and they work.
If this deal goes through, I just hope Yahoo doesn’t end up like Hotmail. For me, Google is king, but I like Yahoo the way it is and would hate to see it become an IE only, or even IE enhanced platform.
