Tomorrow, the annual period of disconnectedness starts. First, we are heading for a two-week trip to La Douce (France), where we rented a small gîte at the end of a road, hopefully in the middle of nowhere except for a pré and a forêt. We'll have some locals coming over to pay us a visit - looking forward already to that. After that, we intend to do a week of home cleaning and rearrangement, while the oldest kid is on boy-scout camp. We'll finish our holidays with a week of home-sitting in one of the more fashionable cities of our region, with a large garden and quiet streets for our kids to ride bike.
I switched off comments on this blog for entries older than today, so hopefully that'll already reduce the spam deluge I'm expecting upon my return. I might throw in a spamassassin upgrade as well, but I'll see where I get to during the few hours that are left today.
After I return refreshed and replenished, there's the Cocoon GetTogether (11-12 Oct 2004) that needs my attention, an upcoming first Daisy release, a server move, and some more stuff to keep me busy for the time to come. If you are going on holiday as well, enjoy, and see you back in a couple of weeks.

Zo heel af en toe zou ne mens een dozeke ClueTrain-boeken willen hebben om er wat bedrijvekes mee rond de oren te slaan... (zie verder)

After Rik's advice, I bought an HP PhotoSmart 2510 a while ago. Featuring a scanner and a copy function, Wifi sweetness and a nice form factor, I was very happy with it, until I tried printing photos with it. Not simply colorful pictures, but 10x15 edge-bleeding photos. So much for the joy. I took ages to find printer settings which appeared somehow tasteful, and for all the RendezVous-embedded coolness in the package, the printer featured network disconnects and total blockage. During the last terminal days of his lifespan, it also featured physically blocked cartridges, inky fingers, and much more manual joy. The printer went dead before we started to really use it. Luckily, I have bought a Carepaq with it so tomorrow it goes off to HP until they find out how to make this a better citizen.
In the meantime, I spent (mess than?) half the amount on a replacement printer (the other one goes on sale after its repair), being an Epson Stylus Photo R300. No Wifi sweetness, just plain old USB. Just 10 minutes of install time (on 2 operating systems). My first 10x15 print: pressed two buttons. Flawless. Spot on. I never buy HP photo printers anymore.

How I feel the pain of a poor web designer trying to come up with some nice design while maintaining cross-browser rendition compatibility. It was one of my personal anthems I failed to push through in the dotcom bubble company I used to work for a couple of years ago, where all developers received a company car as part of their comps package. The few folks without a car in that company were graphic designers, who fought daily with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, HTML, JavaScript and CSS to bring the eye candy to our projects. They deserved one: rather than being able to build on stone or other useful foundations, they had to build on sand.
These days, with a few days left before holidays start, I started working on a new design for our company website. When building software on the Java platform, one can more or less safely assume how the system is going to react upon certain instructions. With decent programming skills, you should be able to write several screens of code before being tempted to compile and execute your code - to see if it works. In web design land however, alt-tab and shift-refresh are your friends: every line you add to your css file requires you to proof your changes in not one, but four different browsers, across three different platforms. Still, people feel this is a normal thing, and web designers should be required to do this.
After several days of fooling myself in doing a decent job, alas only checking on Safari and Mozilla/Firefox on Mac OS, I went to check in IE6 under Windows. Needless to say, what once was an acclaimed standard-supporting browser, failed to render my simple XHTML+CSS combo. Instead of some expected pixel-shifting, entire white areas started to appear in strange places, images flew underneath text titles and other fun phenomena were happening. Google, come to my rescue! Soon, I found out about box model, tan and other hacks, hacks exploiting browser bugs, platform differences between identical browser versions, and I started realizing real-world web design is more a lottery than a craft. Tweak this, tweak that - refresh. Add some, delete some - refresh. Completely restructure your XHTML, modify your CSS - refresh. Ah! Success! Oh no - wait!
So, what about the title of this post then? Whether we want to see this or not, IE still has - by far - the largest share of web browsers, so one typically must ensure IE compatibility. However, IE can hardly be considered a reference platform, since it implements a totally random selection of the (X)HTML/CSS specs, and adds some more, hardly-ever used stuff on top of it. I can't simply read the spec and code my page, confident that it will appear identically across browsers. I'm sure Redmond knows about this. If Safari/WebKit/KHTML can do a fine job, if the peeps from Mozilla are able to implement them, if Opera does a nice deal of them (quite a bit less than the former two, but still more than IE), how on earth can the largest software company in the world live with such a shitty browser. Ignorance, or arrogance?