IE8 supports standards mode by default. Great move from Microsoft. Here are some random thoughts about IE8:

The ‘Emulate IE7′ Joke

From the IEBlog:

For the Internet Explorer 8 Beta, we’ve added an Emulate IE7 button to the command bar. It will help you with everyday browsing and with quickly checking your site as you work on it

Quickly means that you have to stop all your work and restart the browser to test a webpage in IE7 mode.

What is the need of the Emulate IE7 button? I have IE7 installed in my system.

Why should someone make a website for IE7 when IE8 is around? I can’t see any need. Make your websites to the standards. Thats it. There is no need to support any non-standard browser. It will make the already broken web worse.

Hopefully, the button will be present only in the IE8 beta.

Unstable

IE8 frequently crashed while I was using it. Having a session restore feature does not mean that you can hang my computer and lose my unsaved work.

Address Bar Woes

Microsoft has introduced many features to the address bar of IE8. But there is a problem that seriously affects my style of browsing. When I paste a URL to the address bar and change the tab (without navigating to the URL), the URL is lost. When I switch back to the tab, I see the URL of that tab, not the URL I pasted there. This happens to me a lot. It should be fixed. It is a simple improvement that I think is very much needed.

In Taking Your Users For Granted I mentioned the need of maintaining the quality of your products above that of your competitors.

There is a widespread strategy used to get around the problem. Lock-ins. Make the switching costs very high. Microsoft, Apple and IBM did that successfully. Facebook does that well. Most of the web services do that too.

But then, lock-in rarely pays in the long run.

Microsoft, Apple, IBM and Facebook can boast of great products. Lock-ins can complement a great product, but cannot make a lousy product successful.

There was small coffee shop in my place. The coffee was great and I used to go there regularly with my friends. Since the coffee was very good, many people came there to hang out with friends. The coffee business was running great.

One day they started using a cheaper coffee powder. We stopped going there.

There were other coffee shops nearby.

In the last article, I discussed the standardization of date formats. On a related note, I found that many people don’t know how to calculate leap years. It is trivial to get it right, but even experienced programmers screw it up. So how to find out whether a year is leap year or not?

Consider the year YYYY. The rules are:

• If YYYY is divisible by 400, it is a leap year
• If YYYY is divisible by 100, it is not a leap year
• If YYYY is divisible by 4, it is a leap year

This can be expressed in C, C++, Javascript or Java code as:

Some people don’t know about the rule of 100 and 400. Ask your colleagues to know how many of them know these rules; and tell them the rules so that the programs they write will work even after 4, 100 or 400 years. As we know, maintainig legacy software is a big headache for software companies. There is a chance that the software you write may survive 400 years.

Internationalization of software is always difficult. The linguistic and cultural differences around the globe adds to the problem. I think that the the simplest thing to sort out is the date representation. As with any other different countries denote dates differently.

Karl Dubost says it best in the W3C website:

The worst potential usability problems come when the date is written only with numbers as in the following example, because the date’s interpretation will be different from one country to another.

Imagine the following date: 02/04/03

Which does it mean?

1. 2nd of April 2003 (European style)
2. 4th of February 2003 (USA style)
3. 3rd of April 2002

Your answer will depend, mostly, on which country you live in.

To address these problems, the ISO defined a new international date format (ISO 8601). In this standard, the dates are formatted as: YYYY-MM-DD

For example, “3rd of April 2002″ becomes 2002-04-03 in this international format. This format also supports precise date and time, with timezone information.

The main advantage of this scheme is that it causes the least confusion. If we were to denote a date as 02/04/03, there would be confusion about whether the date is in the format DD-MM-YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY. Since the ISO standard starts with YYYY, it is pretty obvious that MM-DD follows. (Nobody uses the YYYY-DD-MM format. See the wikipedia entry)

Another major feature is that when dates in this format are ordered sequentially by the leading number, this also orders them in date order. So a simple sort of th string produces the dates also in sorted order. This was not possible using the MM-DD-YYYY or DD-MM-YYYY formats. Sorting dates needed a thinking programmer then.

Other advantages according to the ISO specification are:

• Easily readable and writeable by systems
• Easily comparable
• Language independent
• Larger units are written in front of smaller units
• For most representations the notation is short and of constant length

So use the ISO date format in your programs and web apps. It greatly enhances the usability of your applications and helps in addressing the needs of a more global community.

I hate commenting on any Blogger blogs. I never do.

The comment forms in Blogger suck. Why not make it simpler?

The main reason behind the stagnated growth of blogger is that it is not open. So it does not have a community of developers around it. If you are into serious blogging, use Wordpress.

or Movable Type or any others.

Not blogger. Not if you care about your reputation.

Here is a comment on an article at Hacker News:

The key is to hire rockstars—they produce more value in four days than a mediocre employee does given weeks. If you gave the typical person free food and time off. They’d stuff themselves until they got diabetes and spend the rest of their time watching reruns of ‘Room Raiders’ on MTV.

Jamis replies in the article Typical person? No such thing:

I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that not all of us excel at the same things, but I’m coming to believe more and more firmly that this whole “typical person” entity is a myth. I’ve never met a typical person. There are only people who are passionate about what they do, and people who aren’t. When the latter become the former, they become “atypical”, because suddenly they are self-motivated, insightful, excited, optimistic, and happy.

I have to disagree with Jamis here. There are typical persons all around.

Here is what Charlton commented on Jason’s article:

I think a more salient distinction is between people who get excited about what they do for work and people who do not.

This is a pattern I’ve noticed in myself: when I’m excited and involved and passionate about what I’m doing, I’m far more productive than when otherwise. I’ve had jobs where I was passionate and jobs where I was apathetic, and both states were a combination of internal and external factors.

The “typical person” is not excited about his job, probably for a combination of internal and external factors. Sometimes it seems as if work life and school life are designed to squash individuality, creativity, and passion. In this state, the person who is passionately involved with his job becomes atypical.

Read the rest of the comments for more thoughts on this.

There is another very strange thing that I have noted. We know that people are motivated by different things. For example great stories motivate us. Great movies motivate us. Great speeches inspires us to do things great. Great books give us bigger dreams. Then came the strange feeling to me. There are some people who never get inspired by anything. At least they do not get inspired by things by which I get inspired. Then came the real shock : Most of the people around me are like this. Typical Persons.

What is the rational in telling that everyone should get inspiration from what I derive my motivation from? Why should someone get inspired by a book, a speech, a story, a movie, a work or even a proverb? Because these things are exactly meant for that. Every single person reads a great book to get something from that. I strongly believe that this thing is inspiration - the urge to do great things. Great proverbs are meant to make people better. If you don’t feel that urge to be great when you read a great book, watch a great movie or see a great piece of work, you are a typical person. I am sorry.