Okay, so I might just be one of these Caveman users who doesn't "get" tabbed browsing. If it looks like Chrome and its used like chrome then it must... anyway, I though it would be interesting to see what you wanted in IE8 since I'm really starting to wonder if we're going to get much more than "more security" and some "chrome" out of IE7. My list fairly short today:
- CSS3, hopefully.
- XLink for "suggested related content" exploration and link linage.
- XForms support in-situ. Don't get me wrong, I like InfoPath the idea, but the client... not so much.
- HTTP header tracing as a pane
- Flight path/Macro recording to an XML play-back file.
- Save/Load/Add favorites to a Web Service so they go with me freak'n everywhere.
- Define custom security zones managed by GPO.
Its not so much that I've lazy the last few days... but I've built up a pile of things I wanted to talk about:
- Rushi Desai talks about a Framework that simplifies building Service Broker Apps. Way cool, I think.
- Michael Rys talks about the updated XQuery drafts. Something I'm not sure I get quite yet about the update spec is why Isolation is a should and not a must.
- Moshe Eshel ask a good question SQL Server 2000. How do you make composite types work with VB6.
- There's a lot of feedback about Binary XML from Mark Fussell. I'm still trying to sort out exactly how I feel about that topic. There's lots of reasons to do it, I think, but yes, everybody is either going to have to support whatever comes out as a standard or its not going to be as successfull as it should.
- I think there's a a fine grain of difference between "Contract First" thinking and what Dare talks as having problems when it comes to implementations of it. I do think he's right though: when you think "Contract First" you do have to leave behind specifics of a toolkit and focus on the abstracts to be successful. That's not a bad thing.
- Anybody want to pay for me to go to Insbrook in June? Why would I want to? Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services. Now that's progress on something useful, I think.
- DonXML writes up a pretty good summary of the whole Send Messages Not Serialized Object Graphs discussion that's been going on.
- For now for something completely different: Flash and Databases in a few easy steps. Nice.
- Jeff Brand's mandatory where to go get more on Indigo posting.
- John Tobler brought up the XSD Inference Utility which is a nice alternative to XSD.EXE, especially since it offers an API for doing it.
- Dare talks about Tim Ewalds three Web Services stacks. Maybe I'm just too Joe Average, but it seems to me that 75% of the problems I need to solve I can with Plain Old Soap and the other 25% can be done with WS-*. Not sure why I choose to limit myself to a specific toolkit when I didn't need to.
- Aaron Weiker is quickly turning into one of my favorite East Coast Geeks. Why? He finds cool tools.
- All you could want to know today about WinFX
- Don't like how Reporting Services renders a report? Write your own custom rendering stuff.
- I like Phil Wolfe, even when he say crazy stuff like do do remoting.. Crazy talk, man, carzy.
- Rocky frames Indigo as n-tier client server? Not really but makes a good case for why that's a concern.
...Security isn't the only problem that needs to be addressed, ok?
Okay, so I'm relenting a bit on my rather staunch defense of IE's support for Standards a bit and hereby call on Microsoft to fix its problems with standards compliance too. I know that at a certain level, you can define a standard to mean just about whatever you want. Its easy to say “we're not going to do X that way because we don't think the prescribed method for doing X is right.” A lot of your customers just don't care about that: they do care that you don't do “X” and they either have to hack around it or have to not use a given feature.
Personnally, I could completely care less about tabbed browsing: I don't use in Firefox. IMHO, it's just chrome. I also don't care about “live links” because I don't use a brower to read RSS feeds anyway. That's like using a hammer to screw in nails. What I do care about is CSS2. IE6 has too many things that make doing certain designs way too hard and way to hard to over different browsers. And while its easy to say “hey, have one set of pages for IE and other for X” it seems like Microsoft has forgotten that its more than just two or three other browsers out there, and that for each UI schema you create, you add that more more complexity to managing and testing the apps that really isn't justified otherwise.
And please make CSS2 for printing work...
Brandon Julian -- a mere few days old -- already has a blog. That's geeky, ala Bryce Swiger.
Congrats to Co-worker Larry Steinle on the birth of his first child, Anthony David. 10 pounds and 22 at delivery.
Larry and I spent a lot of blood, sweat and tears on the new HDRInc.com web site together.