Colleague in web crime, delic8genius, has crafted 3 fine 3 minute videos for web developers:
Screencast: IE8 WebSlices in 3 mniutes
Screencast: IE8 Accelerators in 3 minutes
Screencast: IE8 Visual Search Providers with suggestions in 3 minutes
Go have a squiz. It will only take 9 minutes.
Fellow Australian DPE-ers, Chris Bright, Michael Kordahi and Greg Willis have been busy working on a micro- mega- project.
For the last 30 years, Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian community has paraded down Oxford Street. The Sydney Morning Herald has a library of images from the parade: and has used the Deep Zoom feature of Silverlight to display these images.
Michael Kordahi created the front-end (Silverlight) and Greg Willis architected the back-end (Azure)
Well done guys.
Testing only. If you are reading this, please ensure you are using Internet Explorer 8
Webslices are new consumer feature in Internet Explorer 8. You can embed simple HTML within a WebSlice that is a portion of a pre-existing page. To get IFRAMES and OBJECT to work there is a little tweaking required. Then you get Silverlight and/or Flash.
The IFRAME/OBJECT content is stripped (for security reasons) by the RSS engine in IE8. However, when displaying a unique page – things can get way more interesting.
In the example WebSlice below, I use an alternate display source. This alternate display is used as the content for the slice. This also permits smart styling in your slice; as used on http://istartedsomething.com/‘s Webslice. The xxxx.html below is the page with the Webslice content.
<a rel="entry-content" href="xxxx.html" style="display:none;"></a>
iFrame
Image
Object Embed
Thanks to Michael Kordahi, Chris Bright and Greg Willis for the push to check this out.
In the category of “why didn’t I think of this†comes liveslices.com. Go have a look (obviously after installing IE8RC)
Webslices is one of the new end-user features of IE8. It is easy to implement on your website: I added it to http://www.nickhodge.com/ within minutes. Some microformat wrapping around changing content, and it is active.
WebSlices will mainstream web-site alerts where RSS has struggled.
Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 has been released. The night before a big PR thing in Melbourne (Premier of Victoria, etc) and I decided to install it on my demo laptop. Brave, yet safe move.
What about this website?
Not so good. Something is broken somewhere. In the week before TechEd 2008 I don’t have time to completely diagnose and fix the wordpress template. So, sort of like welding it together for a few weeks until things die down – it is time for a simple fix.
How can you tell? See the “broken document†icon on the right of the URL: this indicates that the site has been designed for older browsers.
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There are two potential fixes. One is to click on the broken icon, and Internet Explorer will revert to Internet Explorer 7 mode.
A smarter fix for this web site is a one-line change to my template (in my case, header.php for this template)
<meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” content=“IE=EmulateIE7” />
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Refreshing the site, and magically it renders correctly, and there is no “broken†document icon.
