Tom Mollerus' Weblog

So asks David Pogue of the New York Times, who describes the benefits of Web 2.0 as offering "a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it."

Around my office we have discussions about just what "Web 2.0" means. I usually interpret it in a more technical, feature-oriented fashion, saying that it applies to sites that have near-real-time interactivity with a web site, using AJAX to make themselves appear to work more like a desktop application than a page-request-based website. My boss thinks of Web 2.0 as meaning that a site has a user community and user-contributed content. There probably isn't just one meaning to the term, anyway. But Pogue gets the point-- it's no use talking about what Web 2.0 means. You just want to concentrate on what benefits it has to your company:

"When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, ... it [will] gain trust, goodwill and positive attention. You'll put a human face on your company. And you'll learn stuff about your customers that you wouldn't have discovered any other way."

Completely true. And here are other ways that your web site reflects the character of your company:

• The design: does this company have enough money to afford a good designer?
  
  
• The copywriting and layout: is the company smart and detail-oriented?
  
  
• The server uptime: is this company reliable?
  
  
• Graceful degradation: does the company think about its customers and their needs?
  
  
• Snazzy, cool AJAX features: does the company willing to explore new ideas?
  
  
• Splash page: is this company so into its branding and so clueless about what users really want to know that it throws a useless splash page in their way?
  
  

I want to share the news that there's now a demo available for Webmail, my ColdFusion web-based email client. Oh-- and as always, I'll make a free copy available to anyone who can make a translation file available in their language. I still need German, Portuguese, and many Oriental languages.

So you've heard about IE8 and how it implements standards mode, right? Unless you add a specific meta tag to your page that indicates to IE8 that it should render pages to its full capability (<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />), it will render them as if it were IE7 instead. And it's set the web industry abuzz with wonder and discussion. Why would you upgrade a browser with new capabilities but have them turned off by default?

Jeffrey Zeldman says that Microsoft is just guaranteeing that future versions of IE (8 and onward) will work with the existing sites of "millions of small business owners, school teachers, pastors, coaches, and so on who create websites every day, armed with crappy software and little else." That could be true, but does Microsoft really care about those millions of small-time content creators? After all, they've never seemed to care too much about all of us professionals.

But I think that Joel Spoelsky put it best in today's article, Martian Headsets (a.k.a., pragmatists versus idealists). Joel points out that it's not the web designers, professional or not, that Microsoft is worried about: it's the end user. He argues that if end users were come down to their desktop computer in the morning after it's been automagically Microsoft Updated to IE8 in the middle of the night, and if IE8 were set to standards mode by default, then most of the sites people viewed would break. And who or what would these end users blame? The creators of the web site which looked so good and worked so well just the previous day? Nope.

They'd blame IE8. And perhaps, just perhaps, IE would lose some market share.

Now I think that makes sense as a reason for Microsoft to be cautious in how IE8 renders sites. They probably don't care too much about making life easy for professional developers-- after all, we all know how to add a meta tag to a site pretty easily, and who knows, some of use will make some money off of it. Microsoft probably doesn't even care about the small business owners and coaches who-- let's face it-- wield little money and even little influense in the technology industry. But I can't blame them for not wanting to "break the web" for users.

Look at Joel's article, it's well worth a read.

Built-in charting capability is definitely one of the great conveniences of using ColdFusion over other languages (although I'd argue that Google's Chart API, which lets any developer call custom charts through a REST API, is eroding that advantage; more on that later). But sometimes there are a few flaws in cfchart that make you look at other charting solutions.

Here's a graphic showing an example of how ClearType improves the look and legibility of text:

Be sure to check out the other Windows XP PowerToys, too, especially the Alt-Tab replacement.