I have been evaluating the IE9 beta since it came out in September, and to my surprise it is actually pretty good. Microsoft has had its hands full with IE for so many years fixing bugs and supporting older standards that it is actually pretty amazing to see a product release from them that pushes forward.

When IE7 came out it was remarkable because it head been so many years  since we had seen a release from Microsoft. As developers we had suffered for so long  trying to work around IE6's many, many bugs.  So when IE7 finally came out and fixed some of those bugs we were very excited.  Unfortunately it didn't fix all of the bugs from IE6, and it introduced a few of its own. As time went on we came to realize that the uptake of this new browser was also low. Many users still clung to IE6 for whatever reason.  So now we had two squirrely browsers to test for instead of one.  

When IE8 finally came out, we found this to be a big step forward. It pretty much rendered all HTML4 and CSS2 properly. It was still well behind the other browsers which were on to HTML5 and CSS3 by this time, and it still didn't support many long standing Java Script standards, but at least it wasn't crazily buggy. Finally we had something we could work with. Unfortunately like IE7 the adoption rates were low with many users still using IE6 and IE7. Now we had three different browsers  from MS that we had to work with each of which with the potential to render a page completely differently than the others. This while competing browsers all render pages consistently year after year version after version.

If you read Bob Atkinson's Tool Tips column in Sep/Oct 2010 issue of DesignEdge Magazine you would think Flash Catalyst was the second coming for web development.

It isn't.

In my opinion, Bob has done designers and more importantly their clients a disservice by suggesting that Adobe Catalyst can replace a web dev team. Let me use the filter of the client's perspective to explain what I believe are the downsides of using Flash for web development, because we're all in the business of customer service, aren't we? 

IE bug forces a rethink

Up until now we've been quite happily using a custom CKEditor skin in its raw, unminified state. Then we received a call from a client, saying that she was getting weird errors when using the Smallbox admin interface in Internet Explorer. Turns out that she was being hit by a somewhat mind-boggling bug: IE--all versions--will only apply the first 31 stylesheets specified. When un-minified, the number of stylesheet files needed by the Smallbox CKEditor skin, combined with the number of Smallbox stylesheets, can exceed this limit.

One of the steps toward alleviating the problem is to minify (compress and obfuscate) our custom skin. However, CKEditor doesn't make it very clear how to do this, and there isn't much information out there on the topic. Which is odd, because this isn't the only reason you might want to minify a custom skin or plugin.