The editors of Ajaxian shared their New Year’s party chatter and it wasn’t all about using up the evening’s champagne for mimosas the next morning.  It was about possible final death of IE6 support in 2009.

Web development industry talk seems to be skewed in the direction of “IE6 use won’t end until IE6 support ends - and that should happen now”.  While I think that support of IE6 for GS is slightly premature, serious consideration will be necessary in 2009.
With IE6 usage to dip beneath 10% later this year, the extra cost to try to support it is going to increase site development costs unnecessarily.

There has been some discussion around here for how best to sunset the support for IE6.  One idea kicked around is a popup/popover/dropdown notification that “…This site is best experienced in a modern browser…” and links to multiple vendors.  Let the visitor choose, don’t deny access, just bring up the helpful warning.  And no longer kill ourselves on IE6 hacking.  Any client that has concerns for IE6 support will have to be made aware that there will be extra hours/costs to do so.

Comments?

It’s been dormant for about a year now but the maintainer intends to start making updates to his showhouse of AJAX effects.

Jeffrey Zeldman says,
“I advise every web designer who cares about typography and web standards—that’s all of you, right?—to read the minutes of this remarkable first gathering, and to keep watching the skies.”

I shared a link a while back that tried to explain color profile consistency problems along with saving out web images. This article goes into greater depth about how to set up Photoshop in order to avoid these inaccuracies. Hopefully this will help everyone get on the same page at least.

Read the Article

While this article doesn’t go into it, it probably is a good idea to set your gamma to 2.2 and D65 for your white point when designing for the Web. This is what PC/Windows defaults to and we should be designing for accuracy where the most amount of eyes will see them.

A List Apart is conducting a survey of the web making profession.

“Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.”

It comes up more and more that dynamic web page features should offer visual hints to site visitors that “this process may take a moment, please wait”.  Enter the spinning, bouncing, hypnotizing animated GIF commonly called “a throbber”.  There have been multiple sites in the past that have served as libraries for commonly used throbbers on the web.  But this one is different.  The nice thing about this one is that it can alter the background colors of the animated GIF you choose to suit the need at hand.

Bookmark this one FED’s!  Designers too - designers should be providing FED’s visually fitting “themes” for dynamic behavor, like throbbers.  This web tool should help.

As part of a coding challenge, Mathieu ‘p01′ Henri wrote a never ending animation of a Sierpiński carpet using canvas techniques (for browsers that support the tag) and Javascript.  This is not Flash.

A friend showed me this hidden develop menu that can be activated through Safari similar to that of the firefox web developer toolbar. You have to activate it through the Terminal Application. (applications ->utilities ) Enter in the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

To hide the menu again, just enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 0

Enjoy.

Read more at macosxhints.com.

“The latest browser market share data is in, and Safari has hit 6.22%, breaking 6% for the first time. Last month’s share was 5.81%, so this is a significant increase. It was only nine months ago that Safari broke 5%. Safari market share has now almost tripled from 2.14% in June 2005, when the WebKit Open Source project launched.”

http://webkit.org/blog/188/safari-hits-622-market-share/