There's a good discussion on MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/26099) on the ramifications of AOL (who own Netscape) successfully suing Microsoft, and (as part of the settlement) taking IE for the next 7 years as the AOL default Windows browser.

Some good rants like "Web monkeys who only write for IE, or write to IE's buggy implementation while ignoring standards are lazy, sloppy, and/or dilettantes", and speculation that " for the foreseeable future, most people browsing the Web are going to be using IE6 or lower."

Bruce

All the way from Japan, this week's Pretty Kitties link features "CAT PRIN" the tailoring service for cats.

Enjoy!

bruce

Software giant Microsoft has agreed to pay $750m (£454m) to settle a lawsuit claiming it used its dominance to crush competition. The case involved Netscape Communications which now belongs to the AOL group. As part of the agreement, Microsoft will give a new royalty-free, seven-year licence of its browsing technology to AOL. - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2948672.stm

So no immediate possibility of breaking the dominance of IE; if AOL were to switch to Netscape or Mozilla for their 30million users, the de facto IE monopoly might be less secure.

Bruce

StrangeBanana (http://www.strangebanana.com/generator.aspx) "is a program that creates a random webpage design. The page design you are looking at has never been seen before - it was created programmatically just now. If you want, you can use this design for your own website (in that case you should save it immediately, because when you leave the page, you will never be able to get the same design again)." - uses XHTML and CSS

bruce (thanks Zeldman)

When the same image is saved in both PNG and GIF formats, in an editor with full and proper support for both formats, the PNG image is typically a smaller file size, is free from royalties, patents, and copyright restrictions that hinder the GIF format, and can use more than 256 colours - up to 48-bit colour. So why don't we use it much? Because support in Internet Explorer is terrible!

Owen Briggs has an on-line petition to Microsoft, requesting proper PNG support in IE/ Windows.

It's here http://www.petitiononline.com/msiepng/petition.html. Why not check it out and sign it?

Ian Lloyd of the Web Standards Project interviews Bruce Lawson (the newest DMXzone team member) about his role in popularising Web Standards and Accessibility at the late lamented glasshaus publishing house. It's at the Accessify site

Bruce joins DMXzone as our Premium Articles editor. He no longer wears his fake moustache.

For Deamweaver professionals looking to become  full-time designers, there's often a catch-22 situation; you need a good and varied portfolio of sites you've designed in order to to impress potential clients - but how do you get the portfolio in the first place?

At http://www.interconnection.org/ you can help a not-for-profit organisation in the developing world make a web site they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford, boost your own portfolio, and increase the level of goodness in the world a little bit. Newbie freelancers - get volunteering!

Bruce

The Centre for Democracy and Technology have an interesting report on where Spammers get your name from - find it at http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml (via WebDesign-L)

At the first MySQL user conference, the MySQL company announced that the new version (v 5.0) is available for download (in a pre-alpha build) and will support foreign keys, stored procedures and database alerts.

This is certainly good news for those who need speedy pre-compiled stored procedures etc over interpreted on-the-fly queries in an enterprise environment - and could ultimately prove a serious contender for Microsoft's SQL Server

The list of changes and pre-alpha source code (buyer beware!)  is here http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/TODO_MySQL_5.0.html

Related news: watch for an announcement this Wednesday (14th May) on our Wednesday Premium Content authors, one of whom is a Database guru and will teach you platform-neutral methods of optimising your database and performance tuning.

 

The new QuB version comes with lots of bug fixes and improvements. This release has full support for PHP 4.3 and ADOdb 2.91 while including some new features as real time refresh table and unlimited queries.

 

The new NeXTensio version comes after a long period of silence, and fixes most of the known bugs in NeXTensio 1.5.