Today the mass sojourn begins. Geeks from all over the world head to a little town known as Austin for a web conference by the name of South by Southwest Interactive. This year the travel didn’t go so smooth for most of us. Several flights in and out of Dallas were delayed due to snow out of all things. For those of us flying directly into Austin from Denver, Vegas, and other locations travel isn’t so bad. There’s already been several large herds of people going to dinner and then to drinks off 6th street. I myself have been busy hammering away the details on my presentation for Saturday only to take a break for a midnight dinner at the notorious Magnolia Cafe were geek ideas for the next killer apps are discussed and new companies are formed seemingly overnight. Tonight there were few from the web industry at the cafe, my guess is because most of them are still stuck in Dallas. Tomorrow should be pretty exciting and we are hoping for a more insightful blog post summary that goes beyond the weather and travel.

Hot on the heels of their announcement to support standards-mode rendering as the default, the Microsoft IE8 team released a public beta 1 today! Give it a try! CSS smoke tests (Digital Web columnist Jonathan Snook is live-twittering his testing) should start to come in soon. I’ll try to cross-link them here. In the meantime, IE deserves a whole hell of a lot of credit for being this responsive to the web geek community, so I encourage you to comment on their IEBlog posts.

…No, I don’t mean getting yourself a date via JavaScript. You’re on your own on that one. But Digital Web is happy to have our newest contributor Lawrence O’Sullivan offer his advice on Extending The JavaScript Date Object with User Defined Methods. JavaScript’s internal date-manipulation skills are a bit underdeveloped, but Lawrence brings it all under control with some smart prototype inheritance. (Insert your own joke about dating/prototype-inheritance here.)

In other news, we’re running a contest with Beanstalk! Between now and next issue, you can win a free account on Beanstalk, a new, friendly version of the popular source control software Subversion. Beanstalk also offers collaboration tools and built-in integration with Basecamp, Campfire and the like. For more information about version/source control and backups, as well as Beanstalk’s full list of features, visit their site.

To enter the contest, simply answer the following question in the comments on this post:

Why do you need a reliable source control system the most?

Prizes:

• Business Plan (value $50/m) for a period of one year
• Two (2) Team Plans (value $25/m) for a period of one year

Digital Web staff and the folks behind Beanstalk will be following the contest entries and selecting the winning answers! We’ll post the winners with next issue’s post, so stay tuned!

Today Microsoft announced that IE8 will render standards mode by default. This is a fairly big reversal from the initial stance that web professionals would need to include a special instruction, X-UA-compatible, to render a website in standards mode, rather than the default rendering currently in IE7 (I think I got that right — I’m still working through the comments about the first announcement just a few weeks ago).

While many people might feel surprise and vindication that the IE8 team heard (and heard and heard again) our collective dismay, I think we should take the opportunity in their reversal to tone down the knee-jerk abuse heaped on IE as a whole. In fact, let’s go one-over: what if web professionals actively helped the IE8 team correct issues with the next version?

IE8 not going to be perfect out-the-door, and we’re still going to work to bring our websites in line. In fact it is likely we’ll be supporting IE6, IE7 and IE8 simultaneously, for a lot longer than we would probably like. But rather than make the IE team chase down blog posts and comments about the inevitable standardista-rankling bugs (where they’re already on the defensive due to our immature ranting, I might add), what if we put our effort into a collective bug list? Would that really be a waste of our time and effort, or would it help bring IE8 into a true collaborative position in the web community? Once that collaboration is built into both sides, it is going to be hard to drop. This is a rare chance, in my mind, and we need to think about it with a bigger perspective than one additional tag.

I should note that I got a rare chance to share a happy hour drink with the IE8 team last week, shortly after they got word about the change. They gathered their resources, swapped war stories of previous versions’ upheavals and hunkered down for very long hours to meet the new goal. While it was hardly a formal interview, the team is a very smart bunch who fully understand the web-standards perspective and are very happy to discuss it. So how about we discuss it with them?

UPDATES:
IEBlog comments rolling in with much praise
Meta-change by Eric Meyer
IE team changes its mind on IE8 default behaviour QuirksMode.org

Today Microsoft announced that IE8 will render standards mode by default. This is a fairly big reversal from the initial stance that web professionals would need to include a special instruction, X-UA-compatible, to render a website in standards mode, rather than the default rendering currently in IE7 (I think I got that right — I’m still working through the comments about the first announcement just a few weeks ago).

While many people might feel surprise and vindication that the IE8 team heard (and heard and heard again) our collective dismay, I think we should take the opportunity in their reversal to tone down the knee-jerk abuse heaped on IE as a whole. In fact, let’s go one-over: what if web professionals actively helped the IE8 team correct issues with the next version?

IE8 not going to be perfect out-the-door, and we’re still going to work to bring our websites in line. In fact it is likely we’ll be supporting IE6, IE7 and IE8 simultaneously, for a lot longer than we would probably like. But rather than make the IE team chase down blog posts and comments about the inevitable standardista-rankling bugs (where they’re already on the defensive due to our immature ranting, I might add), what if we put our effort into a collective bug list? Would that really be a waste of our time and effort, or would it help bring IE8 into a true collaborative position in the web community? Once that collaboration is built into both sides, it is going to be hard to drop. This is a rare chance, in my mind, and we need to think about it with a bigger perspective than one additional tag.

I should note that I got a rare chance to share a happy hour drink with the IE8 team last week, shortly after they got word about the change. They gathered their resources, swapped war stories of previous versions’ upheavals and hunkered down for very long hours to meet the new goal. While it was hardly a formal interview, the team is a very smart bunch who fully understand the web-standards perspective and are very happy to discuss it. So how about we discuss it with them?

UPDATES:
IEBlog comments rolling in with much praise
Meta-change by Eric Meyer
IE team changes its mind on IE8 default behaviour QuirksMode.org
Surprise of the year: IE8 will use Standards mode by default by Roger Johansson on 456 Berea Street

Today Microsoft announced that IE8 will render standards mode by default. This is a fairly big reversal from the initial stance that web professionals would need to include a special instruction, X-UA-compatible, to render a website in standards mode, rather than the default rendering currently in IE7 (I think I got that right — I’m still working through the comments about the first announcement just a few weeks ago).

While many people might feel surprise and vindication that the IE8 team heard (and heard and heard again) our collective dismay, I think we should take the opportunity in their reversal to tone down the knee-jerk abuse heaped on IE as a whole. In fact, let’s go one-over: what if web professionals actively helped the IE8 team correct issues with the next version?

IE8 not going to be perfect out-the-door, and we’re still going to work to bring our websites in line. In fact it is likely we’ll be supporting IE6, IE7 and IE8 simultaneously, for a lot longer than we would probably like. But rather than make the IE team chase down blog posts and comments about the inevitable standardista-rankling bugs (where they’re already on the defensive due to our immature ranting, I might add), what if we put our effort into a collective bug list? Would that really be a waste of our time and effort, or would it help bring IE8 into a true collaborative position in the web community? Once that collaboration is built into both sides, it is going to be hard to drop. This is a rare chance, in my mind, and we need to think about it with a bigger perspective than one additional tag.

I should note that I got a rare chance to share a happy hour drink with the IE8 team last week, shortly after they got word about the change. They gathered their resources, swapped war stories of previous versions’ upheavals and hunkered down for very long hours to meet the new goal. While it was hardly a formal interview, the team is a very smart bunch who fully understand the web-standards perspective and are very happy to discuss it. So how about we discuss it with them?

UPDATES:

• IEBlog comments
• Meta-change by Eric Meyer and a followup — Principles and Legality
• IE team changes its mind on IE8 default behaviour QuirksMode.org
• Surprise of the year: IE8 will use Standards mode by default by Roger Johansson on 456 Berea Street
• Microsoft reverses version targeting default by Jeffrey Zeldman

The emergence of the social web in the last few years has been nothing short of spectacular. Who on the web has actually been able to resist joining a network in one site or another? No doubt the the social web will be a notable event in the overall evolution of the internet. Web professionals—probably despite ourselves—are well represented in online social networks, as creators and members. But the question has been asked: what kind of traces are we leaving in all our online social activity? And can it be mapped?

To explain the latest solutions to the mapping question, Digital Web contributor Brian Suda leads us through Your Social Graph: Exploring the Google API. Brian explains the basics behind efforts like XFN and Google’s Social Graph API…and what it reveals about your online social life. Give it a read!

Digital Web is pleased to have Pelago’s John Reeve as a contributor this week, sharing strategies for making your business more environmentally friendly and sustainable in How to Build a Green Business. I like John’s article for its wider point-of-view than the pixels on which we typically focus. Web professionals are all about promoting standards, best practices and generally making the Web a better place. But surely some of that creative, corrective energy could be put into our environments and communities beyond our screens. First, start small by improving your own web use with efforts (some of my favorites) like searching with Blackle, buying a TerraPass for your car, house, flights and business and investing in EnergyStar-compliant computer equipment. Second, read John Reeve’s guide and get to work on giving your business a solid streak of green.

Can geeks change the world? Social Innovation Camp may provide an answer to that question — it aims to match up web 2.0 developers with those working to tackle social issues, and use the skills of the former to solve the problems of the latter. Call it BarCamp with a social conscience.

They’re accepting ideas at the moment, so if your web app concept has a social aspect, submit your idea and you could see it become reality. (via)