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The people over at Microsoft have been working on a new version of Internet Explorer for the last year or two. When first hearing of IE7, all of us at Plexus breathed a sigh of relief and said "Finally!." Internet Explorer has been the thorn in every CSS developer's side since the dawn of stylesheets. IE has a couple of "bugs" that prevent it from displaying rendered CSS correctly. While there are 'hacks' to fix this behavior, it's a big pain to implement them. A large chunk of our QA time is spent making sure the website looks the same on IE as it does on Firefox, Netscape, and Safari. We don't spend as much time on Opera because it's usually just as screwy as IE.

I digress. Anyway, unbeknownst to Colin, I decided to use his computer (on his day off) as a guinea pig and install IE 7 beta 2. I have to say, the new version looks a LOT better and they've added a lot of the features that make Firefox so great. The performance, however, doesn't seem to have changed much since the last version. Within three minutes of browsing it had already crashed. Way to go Microsoft. I realize that it's still in beta, but I've started setting my expectations very low for Microsoft products. The other negative is that the rendering seems to be even more broken in IE 7 than it is in 5.5 and 6. I'm really hoping that in the next few months as we near the official release date Microsoft does a LOT of work to rectify the state of Internet Explorer.

For anyone who still uses IE as their principle web browser, do yourself a favor: get Firefox. I promise you, you will not regret it.

Check out this cool site that renders CSS and markup as you type it. Great place if you're learning CSS or just like instant gratification.

If you've been to one of our project detail pages or to a news story that has a picture, you may have noticed a cool little trick when you clicked on the picture. That nice effect is accomplished using Lightbox JS v2.0. It's an open-source script that can easily overlay images within a website. Although it's very easy to accomplish, I had to hack the code a bit thanks to Shawn's liberal use of AJAX(not a bad thing). To see exactly what I had to do to get the code to work, you can check out my other blog.

Notice the cool drop shadow effect on some of the boxes and images? That is done completely background-image-free using CSS. Thanks to this article from A List Apart, it was pretty painless to add this cool little effect and still use a minimum amount of images in the layout.