There really ought to be an international standard for issuing RFPs. Perhaps the good folks responsible for certification can amend ISO 9000 to include a breakdown of responsible practices for issuing a RFP.

With so much on the line, RFPs often include an incredible amount of information (some useful / some not) and a multitude of seemingly incompatible or contrary requests in a confusing hodge-podgian document that aims to clarify the request. It is the proponent's job to review this mess and determine whether or not the opportunity is worth the effort. It's not uncommon for a website RFP to include 40, 50, 60, 70 pages of background, requirements, process outline and legal definitions. All that information adds an incredible amount of overhead to what started out as the expression of a simple desire, such as: how much would it cost to build a new website?

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?