Anthony Milner

We recently moved into a our new home (phew) and while unpacking I came across an old dusty box labelled “Wired Mags”. Way back in early days of the web, Wired was my bible. I collected them, read them and reread them and immersed myself in the truly remarkable world that was the 90’s web. The production quality of this magazine was outstanding not to mention the excellent interviews, reviews and articles.

So it was with much nostalgia and some laughter that I unpacked and paged through them. These guys made some interesting predications such as “the death of the browser”; remember push technology 0.1 in the form of PointCast. Edition 5.06 published in 1997 suggested we “Pray” for Apple (yes you iPod toting gen Yer’s, when you were in primary school Apple was facing near death). The article titled “101 ways to save Apple” boldly suggested that Apple…

- Do something with the design of the box and separate from the pack [spot on]

- Build a PDA for less than $250 that does email, tv and internet phone [oooh close]

- Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development [bingo]

-Abandon the Mac operating system and run Windows NT kernel instead [te hehe]

- Build a laptop that weighs 2 pounds [Try 1 pound]

- Invest heavily in Newton technology [hmm]

The lesson from all of this. Listen to advice, but only the good advice. Invent a time machine and install PointCast so you can stay current with all the latest news and weather 

The IE team at Microsoft are beavering away at the next version of Internet Explorer – version 8. For many years the IE team have been criticised by the wider web community for not producing standards compliant browsers. Chris Wilson the IE platform architect at Microsoft spoke at the Web Directions South Conference in September 2007. I have a great deal of respect for this guy. He stood up at a standardistas conference packed to the rafters with people who regularly use “Microsoft” and “Evil” in the same sentence and stated the case for IE and standards.

He talked about the challenges of supporting standards without breaking the web and ensuring that we maintain backwards and forwards compatibility in the real world. He also said that the next version of IE there would be a huge investment in standards compliance and we’re now seeing early evidence of this with the news that IE8 has passed the Acid2 test. Acid2 is a test page, written to help browser vendors ensure proper support for Web and related standards in their products and displays the “Hello World” smiley (pictured above) on successful implementation. Bruce Lawson, Accessibility Task Force Member at the Web Standards Project had this to say…

Blimey. Cor luvvaduck and no mistake. Just after the announcement that Opera are complaining to the European Union about Internet Explorer’s dodgy standards support, Chris Wilson reports that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test.

For more information, check out the IE blog and watch the Channel9 vid