Contrary to Mark Pilgrim, I agree with Joel Spolsky that Microsoft is facing a dilemma. They’re damned if they do make Internet Explorer 8 significantly more standards-compliant by default — because it will break thousands of websites, particularly on the often-overlooked niche of company intranets — ; they’re damned if they don’t, because that would further confirm everyone’s impression that Microsoft is deliberately slowing down progress on the Web at large.

Denis, then, makes the amusing suggestion of giving Internet Explorer a new name. In doing so, they would have plenty of justification for ThisNewBrowser to have a significantly changed (or wholly replaced) engine, with different behaviors; it would, effectively, give Microsoft some breathing room and a fresh start at establishing their browser as one that complies with standards and moves everyone forward.

Stop laughing.

This isn’t quite as absurd as it may come across at first. Not only is it not the first time for Microsoft to use a different engine: Tasman, back in 2000, was well ahead of its time, being the first to ship complete CSS 1.0 support. It also isn’t the first time they drop one Web-related app in its name, brand and face, replacing it with a superior substitute: Expression Web is a refreshing change from years of FrontPage, and Microsoft alleges its engine is “the most accurate rendering engine available today”. Denis’s suggestion may not seem quite so unthinkable now.

Of course, it still isn’t very likely. Microsoft has already made the first beta of IE 8 available, and luckily for us, they had previously rolled back on their initial decision to make IE 7-style rendering the default. Still, they don’t seem very confident about this: why develop multiple mutually competing engines in-house, other than one not fulfilling the requirements of the other? Had it been in any way feasible, I’m sure they would have preferred to ship Expression Web with Trident, their IE engine, and still call it “the most accurate”. But it wasn’t, and everyone knows that, so they had to impress us by creating a new engine, and creating it well.

How well do they stack up to that goal?

To me, the first part of giving a good impression on that would be to make the product page validate, or at least come close to that. getfirefox.com validates, as does opera.com; however, neither microsoft.com/ie (173 errors) nor apple.com/safari (7 errors) do. So, does Expression Web’s page? No, sir; 72 errors.

In fact, the errors start with the incorrect claim that the page is XHTML 1.1. It’s delivered as text/html, presumably to make it compatible with Internet Explorer, a compatibility mode that isn’t allowed in XHTML 1.1. Among the more glaring problems in the hard-to-read markup are a duplicate head element as well as the odd decision not to close li elements. I say ‘glaring’ exactly because they would seem so simple to fix.

To be fair, their claims focus largely on CSS, and the page fares a lot better in that regard; in fact, most of the errors from the CSS validator are due to pre-CSS 3 feature Microsoft makes use of.

Still, I question the value of their “support for XHTML” when their very own browser still fails to properly¹ support it.

But perhaps the engine itself is better than the promotional website.

Well, I’d be happy to tell you the current Expression Web 2 beta comes close to passing Acid2, if only that were true.

This result is hardly any better than those of Internet Explorer 6 or 7, and doesn’t quite constitute “most accurate”. One can argue that some of the mistakes stem from the fact that Expression Web is an editor, not a browser, and thus deliberately positions things slightly differently (such as by providing rulers and visual guidelines), but that wouldn’t explain some of the crass rendering errors.

Expression Web is not a bad app. It’s quite a leap from Front Page, provides nice autocomplete functionality and, in 2.0, even integrates a lot of PHP functionality — despite Microsoft having its own, also-supported alternative in ASP.NET. But it falls very short of the marketing claims regarding its engine. I cannot find a single objective piece of information on the Web on how it is better at all, much less in any way, and it certainly does not deserve a superlative. A shipping version of Safari (with WebKit) passed Acid2 over two years ago; multiple browsers did in 2006. Given that IE 8 will pass Acid2, it seems as if the Expression Web team should simply move back to the Trident engine and work to improve that even faster, if they haven’t already.

Meanwhile, WebKit is at 95/100 for Acid3
. I’d feel a lot more sorry for the conundrum faced by Microsoft’s engine developers if only they could show that they’re trying as hard as they can to solve it.

1. Where by properly, I mean served as application/xhtml+xml. ↩

Call social networks overhyped, or call them part of the giant buzzword bubble that is Web 2.0; I think they have their uses, and I also can’t imagine them going away, short of being replaced by a superior concept. So, instead of waiting for this bubble to burst, let’s separate cream from crop.

Arguably, relationships are the core aspect of your personal network. Facebook calls them “friends”, as do MySpace and similar sites. LinkedIn, in an attempt to come off as more professional, calls them “connections”. And Twitter? The URL says “friends”, but the concept is largely presented as “following” someone.

And “following” is indeed what it is: when they shower, leave for a trip or have thoughts while doing somestufforother. From the mundane to the intriguing, plenty of information is constantly pushed to the site, then pulled by clients and distributed to many a user.

Some “tweets” are amusing, including the occasional nerd humor; others provide in-depth insight. E.g., despite the common misperception that Apple employees are barred from publicly participating on the Internet¹, people like Deric Horn or Bill Bumgarner have happily done exactly that².

But our hours per day are limited. We could just follow everyone, thus minimizing the risk of missing out on something worthwhile, but would that be practical? Bizarrely enough, some seem to think so. Others pride themselves on a seemingly absurd number of followees, such as nearly twenty-five hundred, or close to seven times the monkeysphere. Apparently in response to me having BarackObama, “he” (presumably a staff worker or bot of his) added me back — but so did “BeatMcCain” as well as, uh, “RudyGiuliani32″. I’m hardly alone in my bewilderment of this apparent desire to follow such complete strangers in person as well as personality. Says Matt Gemmell:³

Why do such random people follow my tweets? “Married mom of 3 toddlers who’s loving real estate”, welcome to… Cocoa development?

I still pile on to my list of “friends”, “connections” and “followees”. But I also occasionally carefully pull some out from the bottom. Instead of the entire stack falling apart, it actually ends up more stable.

This may seem too much of a business approach, but I find that if I don’t build my network carefully, choosing whom to include as well as whom not to include, the concept doesn’t benefit me. Following fifty people on Twitter, give or take a few, works for me.

When people add me on top of hundreds of others, are they really interested in me? Inspired by me? Do they learn from me? Uli Kusterer is, of course, right:

Well, if they don’t have anything better to do, let them

…but my puzzlement remains.

1. As found, for example, in this article’s assertion of “Forget corporate blogs — Apple doesn’t seem to like anyone blogging about the company.” (which, unsurprisingly, isn’t backed up at all by any references). ↩
2. Consider Deric’s enthusiastic fielding of questions after the iPhone SDK press event, such as here. ↩
3. Update: turns out she’s a Mac user. ↩

Resulting from a top secret collaboration between Cyan and Sanrio, the second season of Uru Live has made great strides in visual quality, ease of use and child compliance.

Existing locations have been modified to address a larger audience. Here, we see a part of the new Eder Kemo.

Evidently, much effort has been put into added fluff.

And here, the all-new restored Kahlo Pub.

Early surveys indicate many consider moving on from World of Warcraft.

Stay tuned for more.

Okay, seriously, I got nothing. Alahmnat has a few posts on the matter: “Let it go”, “Massively Multiplayer Online Storytelling”, “Mindspace” and “In the Beginning…”. Not much to add, really.

Can’t please everyone.

I recently joined LinkedIn. It seems I’m always late to such parties; not because I haven’t heard of them, or because signing up takes much effort, or because I worry much about privacy. There has to be some other reason I have yet to figure out.

As with Facebook, the network is rather short on German members. When searching by name, I actually found the profile of an exec at my company, but aside from that, not a single German I know appears to be on LinkedIn. (Conversely, I’ve found dozens of profiles for Americans I know.)

It’s ironic, then, that the site proudly tells me “14 co-workers are using LinkedIn” when we don’t even have that employees currently. By searching their names, it becomes apparent why LinkedIn guesses they would be coworkers (the company name, suffix aside, is identical), but that’s no excuse. It doesn’t even say they might be coworkers, after all.

In short: LinkedIn needs unique idenfiers for companies. That there’s an employer of the same name (just ending with “Magazine”, not “AG”) in Ottawa and even one in the Cologne Area in Germany doesn’t mean they have anything to do with us, and it’s a shame LinkedIn doesn’t even say that there’s merely a likelihood the two companies are related.