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March 18, 2008
Random News Items
I've been pretty hectic between travel and SxSW the last couple weeks, but a few cool items of note may have slipped past. Catching up now...
- Kuler just got an update today, with a feature I've been drooling over since I heard about it a few weeks back- color extraction! You can now upload an image, and have Kuler extract the dominant color theme from it. Simply awesome feature- saves me from my old "Posterize > sample colors to a swatch" workflow in Photoshop. Make sure and give the Kuler team your feedback, too.
- The Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced at SxSW last week that the Dreamweaver Task Force is being renamed and expanded to the Adobe Task Force, covering a wider range of our products. Don't fear, though- our historical cooperation with WaSP from the Dreamweaver team is alive and kicking as always, and will continue into the foreseeable future. I love those guys for keeping us honest over the years!
- Chris Charlton has been working overtime again and sneaked a peek at his upcoming DW extension for Drupal developers - the Dreamweaver Themer's Kit extension for Drupal. I swear that guy never sleeps, if you've been following his developer site xtnd.us you know exactly what I'm talking about. You can also check the Adobe Technologies group he manages out over at groups.drupal.org. Get some rest, Chris- we need you for the 4th quarter, man!
Anyway, since I didn't feel like posting yet another dissection of what went wrong in Sarah Lacy's interview of Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg last week (although I missed the beginning of the interview, I was drawn to the trainwreck ending like a moth to a flame), or general 'wish you were here' posts from SXSW, so I hope these tidbits are a little lighter on the fluff. If you want the blow-by-blow from last week in Austin, you can rewind my Twitter stream, after all.
Posted by sfegette at 04:35 PM | Comments (5)
March 04, 2008
Pros and Cons of Unobtrusive JavaScript?
Web developer Steve Stringer contacted me last week, and was interested in a point-counterpoint discussion on the merits of unobtrusive JavaScript (or lack thereof), and both myself and author Dave McFarland (Dreamweaver MX - The Missing Manual) took him up on it. You can read the results at Steve's StringFoo blog here - and by all means please jump into the comments if you have strong opinions one way or the other. (I'll refrain from further commentary here, as I pretty much summed my opinions up in the article, and would prefer to channel followup conversation to the article itself, too.)
Thanks for the opportunity, Steve!
Update: Sorry for the broken link, folks- fixed now. Thanks for the heads-up!Posted by sfegette at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2008
2 Bits of Browser News
First - and probably most surprising - the Internet Explorer 8 team just announced the reversal of the year. Instead of IE8 rendering in IE7 compatibility mode by default (and requiring a meta tag/header to 'turn on' IE8 compliance), the IE team just announced that IE8 will interpret web content in the most forward-looking, standards-compliant way that it can. The community has been very vocal about this, so it's great to see the IE team not just listen, but respond directly to the negative feedback. To be clear, there was definitely a split in the standards community on the subject, but at the end of the day I can't help but feel that having IE render more closely to standards by default is the right thing to do.
Secondly, the Web Standards Project (aka WaSP) just announced that the Acid3 browser test is now available, providing yet another benchmark for compliance for the browser vendors as a whole to refer to. IE8, for the record, recently passed the Acid2 test, but Drew hints that 'work is already underway based on the Acid3 previews', which is heartening to hear as well. Let's hope all the browser vendors take Acid3 to heart, as a world with far less cross-browser rendering headaches is a world I'd really like to live in.
Posted by sfegette at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)