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I have some work to do.

Last week, Microsoft officially lifted the covers off of Internet Explorer 8.0 and deemed it ready for public consumption. According to a post on Neowin.net, the browser will be available via Windows Update as early as April 13th and as an Automatic Update as early as April 27th. Of course, you could also grab it right now if you wanted.

One of the key features that had developers like myself salivating was better standards compliance. Specifically with the CSS standard. The closer we can get all browsers to following standards, the easier it gets to create a website that looks right in all browsers without resorting to hacks and tricks. Unfortunately even the tried and true methods of targeting IE browsers in the past was made more difficult by a new feature, Compatibility View.

Windows Internet Explorer 8 improves browser interoperability and advances the Web by delivering a better implementation of web standards. Although this is a move in the right direction, you might encounter compatibility issues with some sites that still rely on the behavior of earlier versions of Internet Explorer. Common symptoms of site compatibility problems are out-of-place menus, images, or text.

Compatibility View resolves most site compatibility issues and makes websites that are designed for older browsers look better.
From: Release Notes for Internet Explorer 8

If you’d read only that, you’d think that Microsoft is doing the right thing. They’re helping website developers out by supporting more standards and they’re helping out “Joe the Computer User” with this Compatibility View feature. However, the devil is in the details.

Compatibilitiy View

The way Compatibility View works is like this. By default, IE8 will render in standards mode. This is good because as I said, it lets website developers code to the standards and not worry about whether or not things will work. They just do. If a consumer comes to a site that they don’t feel looks like it was intended, they can toggle Compatibility View for that site. What Compatibility View is actually doing is using a non-standards compliant rendering engine that is similar to IE7 to render the page instead. I say similar because it’s not the same as viewing a page in IE7 (yet another headache for developers). Furthermore, if a sufficient number of people use Compatibility View on a site, it will be added to an internal list on a server somewhere at Microsoft.

There are several problems with this. First of all, the fact that Compatibility View renders things almost like IE7, but not quite is a real problem. As far as I know, there is no way to query which mode the browser is in. Conditional comments targeted at IE7 won’t be picked up with Compatibility Mode.

Worse yet, a site that gets on the Compatibility View list has no way of taking themselves off the list. You are forever cast off into non-standards land for any Internet Explorer 8 user. If you update your site to fix whatever rendering issues there were formerly in IE8, there is no way to tell Microsoft that. Until Microsoft comes up with a way for site owners to have their site taken off the list, your site will be broken in IE8 (should you eventually update it).

In all likelihood, we developers have a few months before IE8 starts to gain any sort of market share. If you haven’t at least got a test box or VM with IE8 installed on it yet, then it’s time to get going. With any luck, some smart people will figure out how to deal with a lot of the mess IE8 has introduced and the web will move along. From a consumer point of view, IE8 is a welcome upgrade to IE7 touting better security and faster rendering. It’s too bad it has to make so many of us lose our hair. All the more reason to Bring Down IE6.

If you had asked me prior to this weekend if I’d planned to stay awake for 30 hours straight, I would have said, “No.” That’s exactly what I did for the F1 Web Challenge and the non-profit I worked with, Resource of the Americas. I was really impressed with the level of quality every site showed.

The Resource Center of the Americas is a non-governmental, 501 (c)(3) organization that informs, educates and organizes to promote human rights, economic justice, democratic participation, and cross cultural understanding in the context of globalization in the Americas.

Jason and Stephanie from the Resource Center joined our team for the challenge. They are the only two employees of the Resource Center and they used to have over 30. They once occupied an entire building of which now they only take up one room in the basement. I was more than happy to contribute to their new website.

The new and improved Resource Center of the Americas website

It goes without saying that time management is crucial. We fell into a pattern of regular little meetings. Everyone would give a synopsis of what they had worked on and what they were going to work on next. This worked fairly well. A lot of times other little pow-wows would break out too. It was fairly interesting just watching all the teams work. There wasn’t a whole lot of mingling and I think the final results from each team showed why. We pushed ourselves.

The Ruby.mn team was great. We spent the first 3-4 hours getting to know what Jason and Stephanie’s needs were and trying to prioritize them into things we could accomplish in 24 hours. Jason was formerly in IT, so he was familiar with things like HTML and SQL. It was immensely helpful to have another geek on the team. Stephanie was also a big help with testing and data entry.

From the word go, Nate and Kim buried their heads in a new design. Kim came up with the stylish new logo. I like that she kept the upside down globe. Nate spent most of the first half of the event putting together what you see above.

We developers had decided on Radiant CMS prior to the event and had explored a few extensions. It seemed most every nonprofit wanted some kind of blog or current events area, a calendar, a way to take donations online, and maybe a couple other specialized features. Our nonprofit holds Spanish classes and sells Spanish books. Something we didn’t expect to do was sell things. I think we came up with a solution that will work now for them and it’s something they can expand into in the future if they want to. It also happened to be the Paypal portion of the site that gave us the most pain. It momentarily took our two of our developers at about 4 in the morning.

This was the only sleep any of our 12 team members had and these guys were only down for about 15 minutes.

Listing of upcoming events were someting we identified as a priority. The Resource Center host’s a coffee hour once a week and also publicizes other community events. My role early on was bringing Flickr integration into Radiant so we could build an image gallery. In addition, they will be able to insert Flickr image into their new event listings. I ran into a bit of trouble when the first extension I chose to use simply refused to pull any images into Radiant. I gave up after a couple hours of manually executing json calls to Flickr. Luckily, I found another extension which used flickr_fu on the back end. It turns out Radiant has page caching built in, so the API hits to Flickr will be minimal.

By early evening, Nate had finished the homepage design and handed it over to me to slice and turn into HTML. He was pretty happy to have me do it as last year, I guess he was forced to do both the design and the HTML. I spent the next 5 hours between Photoshop, Firefox, Textmate, and Terminal. I barely looked up. This is where most of the time disappeared for me. I put on my headphones and just zoned in.

Heads down programming at f1webchallenge.com

I had the shell, header, and navigation done fairly quickly. The main body of the page got fairly complex especially since the backend was evolving as I worked. At about 2AM I had the sidebar area and the 3 content areas at the bottom all finished. After that, I was helping Nate integrate the sub-page templates he designed into the CMS. The tear across the middle of the page came together somewhere between 3-4AM. Andy Atkinson (@webandy), John Reilly (@johnreilly) and I attacked the drop-down menus for the navigation. We were able to come up with a CSS+JS solution that should work in all modern browsers. I was impressed with myself. John ran into some roadblocks with the CSS as I was doing some other work on the homepage and I miraculously was able to hack out the fixes in Firebug in about 10 minutes. The final hours of the challenge were spent mostly cleaning up CSS and styling pages as they were created.

The rest of our team worked on a translation to Spanish module so the whole site could be translated. The Donation system was hooked in and a store was created with integration with Paypal. We weren’t able to deliver a custom mailing list with user management to them because we simply did not have the time. It was a frantic dash at the end, but the team held together well. In the end, District 202, a haven for GLBT teens and their team Praxis won out. Dan Grigsby told me via twitter that the decision was tough, but with the features the winning site had, it would impact real lives the most. There was a private, real time, chat feature and a private Ning social network was integrated to give the members a safe place to hang out online. In the end, I think it was said 2,800 hours of service were put in amounting to roughly $300,000 of free professional quality work.

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Update: There is a group pool on Flickr containing a ton of photos from the event. My teammate Andy Atkinson also wrote a short synopsis of his experience.