Mark.KirstenAndMark.com

In case you didn’t see the post already, we’ve got our hands full with our new arrival, so this week will be brief. You may find something interesting in the Adobe Developer Week sessions (March 24 – March 28). I’ve registered for the following 4 sessions:

• Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex 3

• Building AIR Applications with Flash CS3

• Dreamweaver: Effective Standards-based Workflows for Ajax

• The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

I just finished watching the Mix08 Keynote with Steve Ballmer and was thinking about how IE8 will affect my web development workflow. The short answer is that it won’t significantly, but I hope the effects will be dramatic. I’ll still start building the site with TextMate and get it working in Firefox (along with the amazing Firebug) on my Mac. I’ll probably still look at the page in Safari and maybe Opera, but honestly, if it works in Firefox, it’s probably going to be just fine in both. At this point in the process, I should be about 90% done, but then I have to make things work in IE (which is where the second 90% gets added on). First, I’ll test in the version of IE I have installed on my windows machine (IE7), then test in IE8 in a virtual machine (currently I check in IE6 in a virtual machine).

The only thing different will be that I’m testing in IE8 instead of IE6 and will hopefully have a lot fewer CSS hacks and/or conditional comments in my finished product (because when IE8 ships, I’m cutting off IE6 – immediately for personal projects, and hopefully no more than a few months later at my day job). If the “Emulate IE7″ feature in IE8 works perfectly, I’ll also upgrade my (non VM) IE install to IE8 and will be able to eliminate the VM step. Assuming IE8 is really as standards compliant as it’s supposed to be, that little switch could mean cutting out that second 90% of the time it takes to make a cross-browser site. I can’t see the developer tools they’re introducing taking over what Firebug does anytime soon (though I’d love to see their tools get that good), so I don’t really see IE becoming my first-pass browser. Also, since there won’t be a Mac version, I won’t be able to run it natively in my OS of choice.

I will say that I am excited that MS seems to finally be making intelligent decisions when it comes to the web. The recent announcement that IE8 will behave like IE8 by default and their commintment to web standards are huge leaps for them. I’m hopeful that momentum continues. I’d love to stop spending half of my front-end development effort on a broken browser.

I’ve been building websites professionally since 1997, but until now I haven’t had a blog of my own. I did make a site for Kirsten and myself, but she’s done almost all of the writing there (and done a great job). I probably should write there more often, but a lot of the stuff I find myself wanting to write about wouldn’t really fit with our audience over there. So, here it is. To start, I’ve placed my recently played songs (from my last.fm profile) and my Twitter updates in the sidebar. I’ll probably be adding more such content in the future (in addition to my posts). If I don’t post here around once a week – poke me and remind me to say something.