Two things we’d add to this article:

1. Our own experience using Wave as a small digital company was also very mixed. With developers and programmers able to commit the time required in getting to grips with the system’s many benefits, it was the project management team that were perhaps not fully able to deploy Wave in the way it was meant to be used. As outlined in the article, I’d also attribute this to lack of time.

2. How amazing must it be to be able to work for a company who are so wealthy that they are able to hold a general philosophy of being quite happy to fail, so long as they’ve tried. Just imagine how comforting that must be…

Read the Techcrunch article here: http://tcrn.ch/axvV9A

Sarah-Jane Wood (or SJ) has joined Score as an Account Manager having worked on numerous web projects over the last few year, including a stint at mobile start-up Mobyko where she covered the full digital/web/mobile product spectrum.

SJ will be working on a number of client accounts and will also be responsible for pushing Score’s Search Marketing Division forward.

We are also joined by Derek Kirk who is the newest Web Developer at Score. Previously at web agency Mint Twist, Derek will work on the full lifecycle of web builds at Score where he will work with Creative Director, Greg Woods on graphic layouts and then assist the programming team in turning the design into reality.

We welcome both SJ & Derek into the Score Team.

background:url(’../images/feature-top-right.png’) no-repeat top right !important;
background:url(’../images/feature-top-right.gif’) no-repeat top right;

This was used to circumvent the fact that IE6 doen’t display alpha transparencies in .pngs, but instead chooses a relatively arbitrary colour, which usually isn’t the same as the background it’s set in. IE6 can, however, deal with the simple transparency in .gifs, so this is a good alternative. The result of this little hack is that most browsers show the .png with anti-aliasing on the image, whereas IE6 shows a similar image which doesn’t have anti-aliasing. This does means that the edges are more jagged in IE6, but you still get the same effect as more modern browsers, in this case rounded corners on boxes. Incidentally, this can also be achieved through CSS3, but as this is less supported it’s sometimes easier to go down a different route, though I’ll be contradict myself later, so read on.

The main problems with the above method is that it’s messy, bloats already sizeable css files and throws standards out the window. You generally have to either add more properties into a rule in order to deal with the various quirks, such as adding “display:inline-block;” to help fix the extra padding bug in IE6, or add duplicate lines which are then interpreted by the various browsers differently, which just leads to frustrations when trying to review code and work out what it’s meant to do.

The above example gives the same line twice, with a slight alteration. Modern browsers get to the first line, reads that it should show the .png, that it’s important and ignore the second line. IE6, however, reads both lines and then uses the last line to show the .gif rather than the .png. However, a much more tidy way of doing this would be to separate out the various hacks, tricks and fiddles into a separate CSS files, or a section of the CSS as this would require less calls to the server, and only allow certain browsers access to certain sections of the CSS. This is precisely what an article in the August (despite it being the start of July) .net magazine details.

In the article, a method of capturing a visitors browser using $_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’] is suggested which is used to add a class to the body which can then help filter which bits of CSS are provided to the various browsers out there. This method seems to provide a more superior way of filtering and allows targeting of lines of CSS for a specific browser allowing beautifully crafted CSS to remain intact whilst also allowing a beautiful design to be shown across a variety of browsers consistently.

Unfortunately it doesn’t get rid of having to do cross-browser testing or anything of that nature, but it does allow unsightly hacks to be separated out, kept together and hidden away in a dark corner until needed. It also means that those trendy new CSS3 techniques that have been floating around for a while can be safely utilised without fear of them only being seen by a handful of visitors and breaking the layout for others.

This handy set of tables gives a good overview of what can and can’t be used with the latest browsers. Among the new CSS3 properties is FontFace, which opens up the world of typography in a better way than other methods available (eg. cufón, sIFR), which thankfully is supported by almost all browsers, old and new, though FireFox 3 lets the side down.

In conclusion, it’s good to have a clean and tidy way of separating out the various differences in the CSS required for each browser, until such time that coding practises and standards are taken up by all browsers, everyone upgrades to the latest version and hell freezes over.

We’ve already posted a couple of entries on Google Wave, what it is, how it works etc… This video shows in glorious colour exactly what the system is about, how it can integrate various mediums and channels and connect everything together under one central theme.

...oh, and it’s pretty funny too.