The Library of Congress has a Flickr account. Check out the 1930s-40s In Color set. It will blow you away.

I installed the IE 8 beta in my Windows XP virtual machine today and now have an environment for testing IE 8, IE 7, IE 6 and IE 5.5. If you want to download the beta, here are some things to keep in mind…

• The IE 8 install overwrites IE 7.
• IE 8 has an Emulate IE 7 button in the toolbar.
• Switching between IE 7 and IE 8 rendering modes requires a browser quit and relaunch.
• If you use Multiple IE to run multiple stand-alone versions of IE, installing the beta may cause your stand-alone versions to ignore IE conditional comments.
• Uninstalling and reinstalling Multiple IE fixes the above issue.
• If you use the full Monte <!--[if IE]> conditional comment, IE 8 will see it and render whatever is in there.
• I haven’t notice a real difference between IE 7 and IE 8 rendering yet. I have lots of trouble getting past the hideous anti-aliasing, though.

I think I’m fully up and running with a reasonable means to test in all versions of IE. Remember, conditional comments for your various style sheets should be linked thusly (assuming you target IE 6 and 7 together in one sheet and then IE 6 by itself in another one like I do):

<!--[if lte IE 7]><link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/ie.css" type="text/css" media="all" charset="utf-8" /><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 6]><link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/ie6.css" type="text/css" media="all" charset="utf-8" /><![endif]-->

Remember to use the lte (less than or equal to) operator when targeting multiple versions of IE that are less than or equal to a certain version number. IE 8 passes Acid 2, so you shouldn’t need to serve it any special CSS.

Thank goodness!

Don’t be suckered into reading those quick fix tip articles that promise to fix everything with 10 simple steps. By making it my personal policy to not read articles and blog entries with titles such as …

Five Life Saving Tips For Buying A Home

Top-10 User Interface Design Mistakes

or simply

The Ten Commandments

… I am accomplishing more things in less time, I feel more fit, and my general outlook on life is much more positive.

@$%# bull@$%#

This has the potential to make my life pretty hard. I really hope it doesn’t.

Fluid is a webkit-powered site specific browser generator like Mozilla’s Prism.

Site specific browsers are web browsers dedicated to displaying a specific website or web application, such as Basecamp, Facebook, or Gmail. They can be quite handy if you tend to spend a lot of your time in a website or web application, and don’t want to clutter up your browser with lots of tabs. If your browser crashes, you’re also safe from loosing changes in your web app.

Fluid allows you to create an infinite number of site specific browsers on the fly, complete with their own icons. I have one for Basecamp and one for my local install of phpMyAdmin.

Go download it and give it a try. Also be sure to visit the Fluid Flickr group for all your icon needs. There’s even a phpMyAdmin icon by your’s truly,

I didn’t have time to pass this around over the holiday break, but the IE team announced a few weeks ago that they got IE8 to pass the ACID2 test!

[UPDATE] Garrett pointed out the IE team interview video linked page on the page. I thought it might be nice to link directly to it for you non-reader types.

H

The portable network graphic (PNG) is my favorite image format for the web. Its lossless compression can be beautiful for photographs with crisp details (although considerably larger than using jpeg compression), and it’s ability to pull double duty with an indexed color pallet make it super versatile. And of course there’s its ability to display graded transparency.

Its popularity has suffered for a long time, due to Microsoft’s decision to not correctly support the transparency feature in the true color versions of the format in their

In my pre-thanksgiving-lunch blitz, it completely slipped past me that Mozilla release the first public beta of Firefox 3.

Get it.