zahnster

When I started at Zenbe, I was pretty excited, because I knew it meant that I would be getting my hands dirty with some complex development issues. My history in web development has been mostly creating smaller, marketing-oriented websites, where you don’t really have to worry about frequent code evolution or long-term maintenance. Once you create the site, it’s up, and maybe there will be text changes here or there, but for the most part the code base (especially things like the css) are left alone.

But what do you do when your product is a complex web application? How do you best maintain your stylesheets when your app is constantly growing and evolving? It’s a lot more challenging than you might think, but there are several things you can do to keep your code optimized and maintainable.

In order to organize my thoughts, and perhaps throw some inspiration on the subject, I’m starting a series of posts each featuring a different thing you can do to best optimize and organize your css to face the challenges of a frequently evolving web application.

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Ok this is totally a controversial post, but it’s a very important issue for our nation, so I’m going to take a stab at expressing my views about the problems with gay marriage.

In this issue we have two sides, deeply divided. On the one side, we have gays and their supporters, who want to be able to marry who they choose, as free, right-minded citizens. On the other side you have the ‘religious zealots’ who are prepared to fight to the death to protect what they call the sanctity of marriage, as defined in the bible.

At it’s core, the issue with gay marriage seems to stem from two things: the origins of word marriage itself, and a fundamental flaw which the US government made when it decreed marriage to be a legal process.

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Ahh, Internet Explorer. For many years now, this browser has been the main cause of stress-related injuries among the web community. Supporting this browser has proven to be one of the biggest challenges for any web designer / developer who has ever had to write one line of html/css/javascript. For many years, IE didn’t really care what the web community thought of it’s product, but since version 7 hit the scene, Microsoft has been devoted towards getting IE to be a solid, standards-aware browser deserving of it’s massive market share.

The big news with IE right now is it’s upcoming release, IE8. Slated to come out “4th quater 2008″ (so… any day now, right?), IE8 is supposed to have a lot going for it from a web developer standpoint. In fact, on paper it almost looks dreamy – the IE team has decided to include a full Firebug-esque debugger console, IE7 emulation, and more. When I was at the Ajax experience last week, the IE team showed off these features briefly in their presentation. From that, I was actually pretty excited about it all, and I couldn’t wait to get back to Zenbe to install it on our PC system and try it out. Even if there were bugs, I thought, it would be okay, because of this IE7 compatibility mode.

Right? Not a chance. It’s IE, after all.

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