Eric Kerby: Photography, Web Design, Programming

Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

On the way home

May 25th, 2008

Yet another year at RIT has come to an end.  After an adventurous time storing furniture in Rochester and loading my car to its brim, my Dad and I are on our way back home to Virginia.  Overall, my third year at RIT was an excellent one.  Now that summer is about to begin, I am ramping up for a 10 week experience working for the FBI.  In about a week, I will be moving again to Alexandria, VA.  From there I will be able to commute to FBI headquarters in DC and the FBI Laboratory in Quantico.  I am truly looking forward to this experience working for another goverment agency, which may eventually turn into a career.

I also have quite a few personal projects planned for the summer.  I want to make a couple of my web development projects publicly accessible, do some more remote work for NASA and the RIT Honors Program, experiment with all sorts of things on my Linux servers, and better develop my photo printing skills and choice of inkjet papers.

Microsoft needs help

January 29th, 2008

A recent announcement from Microsoft's Internet Explorer Platform Architect Chris Wilson last week has set the standards-aware web community afire with discussion.  What it boils down to is that web developers will need to add a specific meta tag to their code (or change their web server configuration) for IE 8 to render their pages in a standards compliant manner.  If that tag is absent, IE 8 will render as if it were IE 7.  The goal of this is so developers can target their page to a specific version of IE that they tested against.  So, if I wanted, down the road I could make a page render like it was being run in IE 8 even though let's say IE 10 is displaying it.  That becomes a safeguard against future changes to IE's browser engine by locking the page to a specific state in the browser's version history.  If that technical speak has not scared you off, read on so I can tell you why I think this is a bad idea and how Microsoft got itself in this mess. Read the rest of this entry »