15 days later

The title refers the number of days this blog last updated. Lots of things has happened in the last two weeks.

1. Swine flu is now officially an epidemic. Malaysia currently has more 90 cases of swine flu and the reaction from the Malaysian newspapers has managed to over exaggerate the severity of the swine flu. In fact, many of my friends who are going back to Malaysia for winter holiday are quite worried that they will be under home quarantine too, since few cases of swine flu in Malaysia originate from here. Go read this; Swine flu's not that bad.
2. Riot in Iran. I wonder what will happen to Iran in the next few months. Hopefully, if there is any chaos in the future, it won't lead to lots of unnecessary killing among the citizens and disrupting the petroleum production. Petrol prices has already been increasing and we don't need another riot to push up the petrol price.
3. New operators for tram and train in Melbourne. Hopefully this will improve the quality of public transport in Melbourne in the future.
   
4. Exams. I have finished two written exams and will be sitting for OSCE next week. Will write more about those written exam later.
5. Firefox has released the third Firefox 3.5 release candidate. I am patiently waiting for the next version of Firefox . Read this; Firefox 3.5 memory usage, Top 10 features in Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.0

I have been using Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 2 for few weeks now. I can proudly say that this version is faster, safer and snappier than Firefox 2.0. There are several big changes in the user interface and I think they are quite useful. They have also managed to fix the problem with memory leak. As a web designer, I am also happy to know that Firefox 3.0 has passed Acid 2 Test which test the internet browsers against the web standard.

Please note that some of the extensions are still not being updated to Firefox 3.0. Please check on your favourite extensions before you upgrade.

Last but not least, the complete version of Firefox 3.0 will be released this Tuesday, June 17th. Let us make this as a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours :). Currently, there are only 5888 people in Malaysia who have pledged to download Mozilla Firefox 3.0. Come on, we need more people to download this amazing software :)

Firefox Download Day 2008

CSS hacks for Internet Explorer

Microsoft, by not keeping Internet Explorer up to date as web development has moved into the era of open web standards, has caused web professionals all over the world a lot of grief.

Roger Johansson

True. Being a web developer myself although I'm still a beginner, it is a frustrating experience to learn how your beautiful design look ugly when Internet Explorer is the browser. Internet Explorer is far from web standard and caused major headache for anyone who are involved in designing and developing a website. One of the last step after fully developed a website is to check whether Internet Explorer ruins it again and again X(.

There are two main internet browsers in the world. First is Internet Explorer [IE] followed by Mozilla Firefox. If Firefox was not developed in the last few years, IE6 will always become dominant and Microsoft will never introduce new version of IE. Due to the popularity of Firefox, IE7 is introduced. Although IE7 is slightly better than its previous version, it is far from web standard.

There are many CSS hacks required to fix the problem in IE. Here are few links I found over the net.

Essential CSS hacks
Box Model hack

and the ultimate site for CSS bugs in all browsers... /*Position Is Everything*/

Related post: validity

validity

I'm not sure whether you have noticed it or not, but I have changed the layout of this template few days ago. The links used to be in the form of drop-down menu which is based on javascript and I changed it to the standard bullet list. The list certainly used up a lot more spaces than the previous one though.

The main reason I choose the bullet list is to get this blog validated :). Somehow if I used javascript, this blog fails the validation. Now, this blog is a valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional blogspot B). You can check the yellow icon at the footer below.

For those unfamiliar with the term, this is actually referring to how do you write up the language behind the layout and how much do you write it according to the standard set up by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). To check whether any web is valid or not, go here. There is another part of the validation service which involve CSS and for the moment, the CSS script written by Blogger caused my failure as you can see below.
Is it important to get the validation? Personally, I don't think it is not that important to get the validation but by doing this, at least you know what mistakes occur while coding the layout. The best reason not to get the validation is many major websites do not follow the standard by W3C. Even google, yahoo and microsoft failed the validation :). The second reason would be that the main internet browser, Internet Explorer, does not follow the web standard too as you can see below. This is tested against Acid 2 Test.
Compare this with Firefox 2.0
If the browser followed the web standard rigorously such as Opera 9, the picture should look something like this
p/s: Right now, I am waiting for the match between Fernando Gonzalez and Rafael Nadal. This match will be quite interesting to see :)