open standards

I have been following David Carver's posts on Planet Eclipse about the Eclipse XSLT Tools project and today I decided to give the latest milestone a try.

Here's a quick way to obtain the number of milliseconds since January 1st 1970 of any date in XPath 2.0.

Microsoft has changed its mind : Standards mode will be the default rendering mode of Internet Explorer 8.

To generate my PDF invoices I combined a couple of open standards (XSLT 2.0 and XSL-FO 1.1) and open source tools (Saxon 9.0, FOP 0.94 and Ant 1.7 running inside Eclipse 3.3) to create my own basic document generation solution.

Commercial software packages that are based on open source components often have a hard time following the release cycles of their underlying components. Basically this means you end up using the 'previous version' without the latest fixes and enhancements.

Yesterday I was venting my frustrations about the suckiness of Internet Explorer 6. Today the blogosphere is buzzing about Microsoft's plan to introduce a completely new rendering engine in IE8 with a couple of tricks to support both the latest web standards and backwards compatibility.

After - once more - wasting too much time trying to get some CSS to work in Internet Explorer 6, I'm looking forward to February 12th when Microsoft will be pushing Internet Explorer 7 onto corporate desktops. Not a day too soon.