The Inter­net Explor­er team have announced the (first?) release can­di­date of IE8 (down­load it here). I used it briefly last night and it seems per­fect­ly sta­ble; I doubt it will change much (if at all) before the final version.

If you know any­one who uses IE as their pri­ma­ry brows­er, encour­age them to update as soon as pos­si­ble; we need to get every­one onto stan­dards-com­pli­ant browsers so we can stop wast­ing time pan­der­ing to IE6.

I’m hav­ing a bit of a love affair with jQuery, the Javascript library, at the moment. I know my way around JS but am far from an expert, so jQuery’s sim­ple syn­tax is a god­send for me, and pro­vides huge sav­ings in my devel­op­ment time.

One quick tech­nique I used yes­ter­day was to make three ele­ments of equal height; it’s very sim­ple and won’t cope with dynam­ic con­tent, but is per­fect­ly suit­able for sim­ple page layouts.

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Web Direc­tions have post­ed the results of their 2008 sur­vey today; full results and select­ed high­lights are avail­able. The most shock­ing result to me is that 10% of respon­dents still use tables for layout.

I don’t think I’ll be going out on a limb if I pre­dict that the hot top­ic of 2009 will be HTML5, the pro­posed update to the markup lan­guage which acts as the foun­da­tion to every­thing we (web mon­keys) do.

This week saw the pub­li­ca­tion of a few arti­cles on the sub­ject writ­ten by respect­ed mem­bers of our indus­try. While a lot has been writ­ten already about the poten­tial of the new lan­guage, these are notable for their more prac­ti­cal approach.

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