Tag Archives: Microsoft

The Pack Rat

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OldSoftwareIt’s amazing what you find when you start going through old boxes that you’ve moved with over the years. You know the boxes – They have labels from two or three moving companies but you’ve never opened the box since move #1.

So opening one of those old ones and finding a complete set of diskettes for Word 6.0 was quite astonishing.

Word 6.0 was released in 1993 (16 years ago!) when most computers still ran DOS, although something called Windows 3.0 was available at the time. It was clunky by today’s standards, but state of the art back then – And the whole thing with spell-checkers and printer drivers fit on seven 720K floppies!

What cost $500 back then has absolutely no value today. Few computers still have floppy drives. And it’s hard to get sentimental about a bunch of diskettes so I tossed them – Not even my friend, the Pack Rat, wanted them.

Surprise! IE8′s here!

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ie8In about an hour, Microsoft will release Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to the public, and while no one expects a Firefox 3.0-like release that brought down their servers, I expect several million will grab and install a copy.

Here’s the rub – Beta copies of IE8 have been available for a while, and it turns out one of my websites uses directives that aren’t properly understood by IE8. Essentially, the pull-down menus don’t work – And a website without navigation is pretty useless.

The reason websites break has to do with standards – And standards evolve – So a website that worked under one standard may or may not under a new standard. I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But from what I understand from CNET blogger Mary Jo Foley, there are at least 2,400 webmasters just like me …

I read the trade rags and (mis)understood that IE8 would be released with Windows 7, officially sometime in 3Q09. OK, lots of time to update the website. Ah, well, someone pulled the IE8 schedule in to today and I’m not prepared.

Fortunately, I can force IE8 to act like IE7 by including a couple lines in each (!) html file of the website. So guess what I was doing early today? Here’s the code that goes right after the <HEAD> tag if any one else needs it:

<!– This header mimics Internet Explorer 7 and uses
<!DOCTYPE> to determine how to display the Web page –>
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

Problem avoided. Don’t you just love technology?