Clean Code

While I wait for this function I just added to my map editor to finish I'll drop in here. Over the weekend I cleaned up all the code so this site is valid XHTML, and got mostly finished with the templates for the new AnacondaSoftware site. Just need to do some images for that design, and decide what content I want to use, and I can launch that. Might do that this weekend, might not until next week.

It really is very liberating to do website design these days, as opposed to back when I last did it regularly. Now that I can safely simply ignore IE6, my CSS doesn't have to be filled with hacks, my pictures can be nice PNGs instead of severely limited GIFs, and things will look the way I want them to. It was such a pain in the past, and I don't miss those days at all. Hooray for the rise of Firefox, and the internet moving forward into the age we have now.

It was the very beginning of 2006 when I last did major website developent work, employed for a short time for a small company here. At the time (rather, going off of 2005's year numbers since it was literally the beginning of 2006), which was before IE7 was released and just barely after the release of Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer browser market share was 87%. Now, year to date put it at 67%, with Firefox a solid 22%, and Safari sitting at 8%. IE's still the dominant force, of course, because it comes installed with Windows, but the actual amount of that number that is IE6 is now only 18%.

As XP machines get rotated out with Vista (which includes IE7) and 7 (which includes IE8), and as education about alternative browsers grows, that will soon further vanish. The biggest hurdle still is corporate use, which has been slow to switch to Vista, but with upgrade cycles coming up and 7 looking a lot more favorable than Vista (because of Vista's bad press), and Mozilla's just announced upcoming project to allow corporations to deploy custom Firefox builds, that last hurdle should soon be passed.