When I first read Jesse James Garrett's article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications my reactions were "What a silly name", and "Not really new, is it?" Although both points of critique have been repeatedly and heatedly mentioned in the ensuing discussion, the concept seems to be taking the Web development community by storm. This can mean one of two things: either it's a promise or it's a hype. To decide the case, I offer an annotated link dump.

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In an interesting post in the IE Blog, lead program manager Chris Wilson explains the current state of affairs in the touchy realm of "IE and standards support". It's an interesting read, and he makes a few cogent points. He also calls for specific requests about standards IE should support, and I'm happy to oblige.

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Being cut off from the news hurts. I nearly missed the spectacular discovery that overflow: auto | hidden helps stretching up a container block to accomodate floating elements, something that until now could only be done through adding an HTML element.

I added a page about this technique, to record it for posterity and to emphasize that the technique works best with overflow: hidden because of an Explorer Mac problem, and also needs a defined width or height. This last point wasn't clearly mentioned in any article I read.

Right now I have a large writing job (not a book, unfortunately), and it takes rather more time that I thought it would. Since I'm working on it almost every waking hour, I'm getting a bit tired of writing. That's the reason I'm not posting any blog items right now, and I'm afraid this situation will continue throughout March.

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