the 200ok weblog

BarCampSydney is coming up again! BarCampSydney3 will be on 5th and 6th April (Saturday and Sunday) at the Roundhouse at UNSW Kensington.

If you haven't BarCamped before, it's a freeform conference. The agenda, speaker list etc is all decided on the fly by the people who are there on the day. It's inspiring, it's fun, it can be a pretty intense day of ideas and discussion. In short, it's geek heaven.

It has nothing to do with bars, although it does usually end up in the pub.

If you're planning to go, head on over to the BarCampSydney3 signup page. Note that the wiki password is at the bottom of the login page, if you get prompted.

It's rare that I'm amazed at Microsoft* in a good way. It's more or less unheard of when web standards are involved.

A little while ago, we reached a milestone at NDM - the Australian IT homepage passed a W3C validation check, advertisements and all. For the uninitiated, that might not sound like much. But for anyone who's worked on a big site with third party code, you can probably guess that it wasn't a quick and easy accomplishment.

I talk about this further in an interview with Maxine, just published over at the Web Directions South site: Web Directions South | Validation: coming soon to a web site near you.

The longer I think about X-UA-Compatible, the more I think it's not really about "not breaking the web". I think it's about "not breaking big bad web apps".

While it's possible that Microsoft wants to be friends with standardistas, or at least make us shut up, they really don't want to be enemies with a much larger group - large web application vendors and administrators.

If you are in Sydney, Melbourne or Perth there's stuff coming up you should go to:

• Web Standards Group - February meeting (Sydney) - Thursday 21 February. Come and see me and Damian Hickey speak...
• Max Design - standards based web design, development and training » An evening with Molly Holzschlag (Melbourne) - Wednesday 6 February. Go and see Molly speak...
• Ideas4 — Australian Web Industry Association (Perth) - Wednesday 30 January. Go and see Lisa Herrod and Rachel Cook speak...

Update: let's add to the list... Web Directions has just announced Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra dates. No details precisely what the two new events will be, though. Anyway, details at Web Directions South: 2008.

So. There's been an idea. IE8 is going to pretend to be IE7 unless you explicitly ask it to be IE8. Sure, that makes... absolutely no sense.

[Or, When Minutiae Attack!]

There's a perennial question that pops up on email lists and from other developers. The question goes something like this:

"This page works fine in everything except Firefox and I can't tell why... it's showing an HTML comment as raw code..."