SkeyMedia

Hell must have frozen over sometime in the past month or so. With the newest rendition of the Microsoft.com Home Page, the markup actually passes W3 validation for HTML 4.01 transitional. Further noteworthy, is that there are accessibility features in place, such as «Skip to main content» links for CSS disabled browsers.

Unfortunately, there are still a couple dozen CSS errors and there are still a bunch of IE-only filter tags present. Not to mention, the javascript-required flyout menus and hidden div's that appear onmouseover, or the in-line style attributes. Then, there's the image maps, the iframes, the inconsistancy of single and double quotes around attributes, camel-case classes and id's, nested tables, nested tables holding divs that hold lists that don't even need to be in a table or div at all, and.......

I think you get the point.

While it's great to see the anti-w3 gods themselves actually produce valid HTML, there's a still a lot of poorly written code that needs to be addressed. Perhaps the markup was the first step. We shall only wait and see what the next rendition produces.

This gets me thinking though: Perhaps they viewed their site with their new IE7 beta and realized that their site needed to be fixed in order to not fall apart in their new software offering. Or, are we seeing a new side of the company?

This is quite possibly one of the biggest debates in the pre-sale sections of both official sites, vBulletin.com and invisionboard.com. Before choosing a software, potential customers want to hear from people who use it. The biggest problem is asking which one is better on the respective sites, is like asking the CEO of Coca Cola if he thinks Pepsi is better than Coke.

I have been a long-time IPB user, hosting over 4 large and successful forums on the software. For my latest endevor, I decided to give vBulletin a try. With that site nearly all set up and nearly ready for its June 1st launch, it's time for a no holds-barred head to head opinion of the two softwares. This compairson is my point of view after using both latest software releases as of this writing: 2.1.5 for IPB, and 3.5.4 for vB.

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There aren't many tutorials on the web for Classic ASP and AJAX interfaces. Classic ASP is just about fazed out at most companies, but there are still plenty of legacy applications that use it. There is a lot of confusion about AJAX and what it is. Mainly, it is a client-side application that sends data to a back end parser, and thus the back-end processor can be written is anything from asp to cfm to php to old-school perl cgi's.

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