TimGilbreath.com

Just a quick plug here people, anyone looking for quality Cold Fusion hosting (or any web hosting for that matter), take a look at Crystal Tech.  These are guys I’ve used for myself and my clients for years, and have never had a reason to be dissappointed.  They are an Adobe partner for the Cold Fusion server product, which is impressive, as the list of those that Adobe trust with this title is EXTREMELY short.  Their support is top notch, and they are a U.S. based company.  In addition, they have their own internal merchant component, providing you directly with SSL and e-commerce services without going through a 3rd party provider.

Head over to www.crystaltech.com and check out the packages they offer.

Having created a Cold Fusion-based RSS feed via XML before, I figured my most recent project needing this functionality would be a copy and paste job with some variable edits…wrong.

I’ve spent 2 days trying to figure out why the exact same code for a feed works differently on two identical Cold Fusion 8 servers.  The only difference was the database outputting the data, different database and different table.

After remembering that ALL good developers validate EVERYTHING they do before they start complaining of broken applications, I headed over to a RSS Validator and saw immediately that my file wasn’t valid in the first place.  My lovely Cold Fusion XML output functions have somehow put in 96 lines of blank space in the top of my code (this didn’t happen on the other server, mind you).

For future reference, encasing the ENTIRE set of code in processing tags like below and tightening up the code so that no blank spaces are present fix the problem:

<cfprocessingdirective suppresswhitespace=”yes”></cfprocessingdirective>

Along with the inevitable release of the full, public version of Internet Explorer 8, we as web developers will experience a simultaneous groan as our clients call about how their sites either display incorrectly or simply don’t work in the newest version of Microsoft’s browser.  We’ve started early in our testing, but the numerous hacks and workarounds needed still don’t produce the results we’re looking for.

Not to fear…IE 8 has the ability to render pages in Compatibility Mode, which emulates the rules of IE 7.  We can tell IE 8 to enter this mode by one, simple line of code within the header of our sites:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

Save your files (or header include if you’re using include files) after putting in this line, and IE 8 will display your pages correctly.  Obviously, this only applies to problems that are a result of IE 8’s horrible rendering standards; if you screwed up a tag somewhere, you’ll still see the problem there.

Just a quick rant…on the intricacies of the available web browsers of today. After a hair-raising experience with IE 6 yesterday, it dawned on me just how bad of a deal it is for web developers every time someone gets the idea to create and release the newest and greatest browser. Chrome by Google…bad. Independent browsers? Bad. Not just for us developers, but for users as well. Wouldn’t it be nice if ONE company had ONE be-all-end-all browser, that did everything we needed it to, had extension support, and was loved by the W3C?

I know…..that’s called a monopoly. Well, if internet browsers were about the users, and not about money, that’d be ok in this situation.

Gotta run…….I have 7 browsers, 4 screen resolutions, and 3 platforms to test this new site on.