Aarron Walter

Microsoft has announced on their IE blog that Internet Explorer 7 will be released before the end of the month, which means if you have not yet tested your sites in the new browser you’d better make a point of it soon. If you have been using CSS hacks, such as child selectors, to feed standards compliant browsers different style rules than IE6, IE7 will now understand those hacks and may cause improper rendering of your pages. The best way to handle CSS specific to IE is with conditional comments, not with the various hacks anymore.

A word of caution, installing IE7 will over-write your IE6 installation unless you install IE7 in standalone mode as is described here.

A List Apart has posted a really wonderful list of essential resources for web desgin newbies, a task that I have been trying to tackle here to help guide my students. This list is really top quality and addresses many of the same topics I was discussing recently.

I have compiled a small collection of scripts that I have written or modified from other sources. There are lots of useful things like a working PHP shopping cart, a mailing list sign up widget that connects to Mail Chimp or your own database using Ajax, a PHP contact form with server-side validation, an RSS parsing script, a Scriptaculous photo slideshow tool perfect for showing screen shots of your work, and a few others as well. All of these things have been useful to me, and I hope they do others some good as well. If you modify or make use of any of these tools I’d love it if you would shoot me an email with a URL so I can see what you have done.

While you are checking out the code examples in the resources section, you may also want to check out my list of design tools, recommended books for interactive designers, and links to various interactive design resources.