intertwingly

After some testing with IE6, IE7, IE8, Chrome, Safari (Windows and Mac), Opera, and Firefox, I came to the following conclusion: much less accommodation is required to reasonably support IE8 than its predecessors.  For my site, this now reduces to four things: HTML vs XHTML, declaring HTML elements that will be used via javascript, don’t use self closing tags in SVG, and use jQuery instead of direct DOM access.  Additionally, this site makes use of two features that aren’t supported by IE: rounded corners via CSS, and SVG.

Based on this, I decided that I’d do my small part to encourage people who wish to remain with IE to upgrade to IE8 by applying those techniques consistently across my site, starting this morning with the main page.  Other pages will follow over the next few days.

Meanwhile, I suspect that Rails may be coming to cornerhost soon...  Michal’s post also highlights an interesting trend... once upon a time the standard was LAMP: namely Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.  MySQL is being eaten from below by SQLite3, and the time may be ripe for getting eaten from above.  Over time PHP became “PHP, Perl, Python, and sometimes Ruby”.  But the more interesting trend is that the language choice itself is no longer as primary as it once was, the real choices are increasingly drupal, django, and rails, with the language being a consequence of that choice.