In the Cloud(s)

Last week we came back down to earth. We have been enjoying a crescendo of busyness including site designs, some more tricky Drupal development, the completion of www.mednous.com and plenty of learning. All of this peaked when we attended DrupalCon DC at the start of the month but last week was very different.

Last week our heads left the clouds and we returned to earth with a great big Microsoft 'thud'. Gratefully, we took on a new batch of projects that came with very tight turnaround schedules and the need for our code to support older Microsoft clients - both web and email.

With the design work approved (and very well accepted), we set to the task of creating the code. We have done a lot of this over the years, so it's not that we were in for any surprises but I think I am getting more and more sensitive to the time I have to spend checking super high quality code for compatibility in super low quality browsers. Browsers that a lot of people still choose or don't choose to use.

The culprits were the usual duo - Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and Microsoft Outlook 2007. I can't quite decide which of these two I dislike the most but if pushed, then I choose Outlook 2007. With that one Microsoft really did show how little they cared about us developers, the hard work of standards movements and their end users.

My very first round of browser checks proved a 100% success rate for my code in ALL browsers except Outlook 2007. Sure, I was implementing a design that was a little more ambitious than the ordinary email template but nothing that didn't rely solidly on html code that's been around for years.

What an irony that I spent hours doing browser checks and browser tweaks in the week that Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 was released. In terms of Microsoft hype the release was a bit of a non-event, which I think could prove to be a real shame and a lost opportunity. By all accounts Microsoft have worked hard to make this the most standards compliant browser that they have ever made and time spent working with it will prove how well they have moved forward in support for web standards.

I for one really do hope that this browser is an enormous success both in terms of standards compliance support and user adoption. Listening to Buzz Out Loud this morning, I heard that early adoption stats show a slow take up of IE8. There are a number of reasons why this isn't too surprising at this time but I really do hope that IE8 will be rapidly and widely adopted. If it is then we can hope that IE6 will be pushed off the stats for good and we can finally start getting back the time wasted on pointless browser hacks!

All that said there is then still the Microsoft Outlook issue...