All of you still clutching your old Spazz3D licenses and looking about for something newer can finally breath deeply and relax: Flux Studio has just been released. Best of all, it's free for personal use. Surf on over to Media Machines and grab your copy, and have a look around, the Media Machine folks are doing seriously good things for Web3D.

Flux Studio is the third generation of Spazz3D, so it looks and acts in a very familiar way. It still does all the things it used to (though the buttons are in different places), plus a lot of the newer X3D functions (shadows, shading, multitexturing, and similar).

Flux Studio builds on the great legacy of Spazz3D and VizX3d (an intermediate build). The familiar GUI is still in use, so the learning curve is virtually instant. The newer buttons and functions have to do with X3D and the latest Blaxxun- and BitManagement-inspired additions to Web3D. Having an IDE for multitextures and movietextures is wonderful beyond wonderful - no more hand edits.

Update (September 29, 2006):

Microsoft has released the RC1 (Public Beta) for general public use. This version is far more stable than the previous Beta versions, and is supposed to be very similar to the final version - which is unfortunate.

Microsoft appears to have gone ahead (as rumored several years ago) and actually taken steps backward  on its CSS compliance. In addition, IE7 also now sometimes ignores colored scrollbars. The exact circumstances appear to have something to do with how much other javascripting (JS) is on the page, but it's very difficult to force the failure, it just pops up, though it appears permanent once spotted. The odd and horrible part is that IE invented colored scrollbars.

If you're using your IE inside of Firefox, be sure to keep IETab current (as well as IE itself). After all, why have an embedded, on-call IE that isn't current?

Update (April 19, 2006):

Be sure to check Windows Updates, as there is already an important security patch for IE7. It's listed as Optional Software, so go there in person (no Automatic download) and use the Custom button.

Update (April 17, 2006):

The new Beta 2 for IE7 has been officially released, this time directly through Microsoft. It's a true Beta, so ignore it for now unless you can handle the quirks, though it does go side-by-side if you follow the directions at IE Beta Community. Most of the Pacoima Ranch developers have all three (IE 6, IE 7B1, and IE 7B2) installed, with B1 and B2 in side-by-side mode.

One of the most glaring bugs in B2 is that Favorites no longer work nicely, in most cases at all. ADD doesn't work, and ORGANIZE doesn't, it merely adds bizarre links to the different tabs within Favorites. Clicking on the drop downs does NOT take you to your bookmarked URL's, the drop down just disappears leaving you where you where. A workaround is to slowly click the Favorite Center (circle star) three times. The first time, the button goes in; the second time the URL in the navbar is highlighted; the third time, the dropdown appears. Select the tab you want by righclicking on it and go down to the second tier and choose OPEN. You now have access your favorites in a remote-control manner.

Another truly wonderful addon for Firefox and Internet Explorer, IE-Tab, is also available and it's very popular. It allows a surfer to instantly switch between IE and Firefox without loading IE. You start out with Firefox, then use any of the buttons the special addon places into your menus and bars, and the page reloads using the IE rendering engine. Incredibly handy for designers, developers, or anyone who prefers Firefox and suddenly finds themselves dealing with a form or a site that prefers IE. The development team has yet to find an inconsistency between the Firefox/IE renderings and the just IRE renderings.

One thing to watch out for when using IE-Tab - it isn't consistent about ActiveX, so don't assume you're protected because it's happening in a Firefox shell.

Original story (January 5, 2006):

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 is around all over for download now. Just run a Google on IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.rar. You can also visit the IE Beta Community. They've tons of tips on locating, installation, and how to do the extra tricky install on Windows 2003. Technically, IE 7 is for XP and Vista (Long Horn) only, but it apparently can be and does install on lots of other Windows flavors.

This being a Microsoft beta, where'd we be without bugs? They're there, and sort of funny (in a way). Obviously, you may experience slightly different bugs. The various newsgroups can detail all of them for you. To make things simpler, missing or inoperative features are treated as bugs in the short list noticed by the Pacoima Ranch webdevelopers.

The most annoying bug is that windows state is not remembered from session to session, sometimes not even from window to window, meaning you get to resize most windows - they start out too small. Nothing permanently fixes it. Similarly annoying, it's not currently possible to fix the navbar exactly as you'd like. You get to righclick the navbar and order up Standard Buttons every time you close all the IE windows. Every time. No matter how you play with it, the refresh and kill button (now unified, ala Firefox and Opera) are next to the addressbar, on a separate small pane. And no, you can't crunch the two small navbars into a single sleek navbar. The end result produces something that looks almost the same as current versions of Firefox and Opera. That's it for new bugs, which is very good for a Beta 1 release.

The new features are quite spectacular. If you'd like, you can use multiple tabs and have all your "windows" tab cascade in a single window. Or not, but some people like tabbed browsing. The new anti-phishing is beyond good. Ever wondered if a site is really safe? The little blue shield will check, then issue an audible and visual warning if the site is trying to grab info off your cookies (it doesn't need), install something ugly (via JS or ActiveX). Nice features that propel IE 7 to the forefront of safe surfing.

After surviving months of subDoS, the spammers have apparently decided to change tactics and continue on in a new way. Unlike previously, where they attempted to hijack e.mail panels via scripting weaknesses (or server flaws), the new tactic is to spam guestbooks, forums, blogs and similar. While this doesn't bog down the servers, it does make guestbooks and forums look awful, all full of non relevant and off-topic entries about Russian mailorder brides, Canadian and Mexican mailorder drugs, and Hong Kong sex clubs.

The easiest way of keeping the spammers and their spambots at bay (for the guestbook spam and similar) is to use an Artificial Intelligence (AI) gateway. This is one of the reasons that surfers now see those little panels extorting them to "copy the text in the graphic" into a textarea panel. A scripting inspired AI compares the known answer against the one entered and if correct, allows the surfer to go to the next page (or phase). The scripting can become quite complex when needed.

Because there have been reports of AI in spambots (horror!!!) and that these smart spambots can read and decipher from graphics to text, ever more complicated AI's can be used as gateways. The current spambot breaker is to have a question and answer gateway. A clever question with a (human) common-knowledge response seems to always stump the smart spambot.

Update (October 1, 2006):

Having banged around with several of the newer XHTML capable editors, a few are starting to stand out. As anticipated, Dreamweaver rocks IF you don't know how to code, otherwise it's awful. Homesite 5.5+ is still the best, though long-in-the-tooth. A newer contestant, First Page 2006, is also VERY nice.

First Page 2006 reminded the test team of the really old Homesite 3.5 in many ways. Still a little rough around the edges and you can't make it do everything exactly how you'd like, but all-in-all, a very good XHTML editor.

Update (April 22, 2006):

As the development teams roam through the pages of the site making the conversion to XHTML 1.0 from HTML 4.01, certain things become obvious. The most certain of these is that the current version of Homesite (5.5+) will probably begin to fail over the next few years. Neither Macromedia (what's left of it) nor Adobe will comment about Homesite. Pointed questions get brushed aside or ignored. Homesite is the text editor of choice for developers who prefer to handcode.

The developers went looking and found many new text editors, all of which reminded them of Homesite in how they reacted and helped when needed. One was very expensive, but is included anyway, most are free or very cheap. Look for these reviews in this spot.

Update (October 4, 2005):

Naturally, not all of the changes are easy. While securing all of the newly revealed mailscript security holes, a lot of very old pages in The Archives got to get redone from HTML 3.2 (old tags) to XHTML 1.0 code. Suffice to say that only the original words of the stories actually survived. Amazing to look at old code and see all those hundreds of FONT tags on every page.

Update (September 16, 2005):

The design team has actually been amazed at how fast and easy the conversion from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0 is. Because of a script weakness in one of the older Perl scripts, it became necessary to quickly redo about four dozen pages. They just slid into XHTML in moments.

Original story (August 3, 2005):

Like many large sites, Pacoima Ranch is starting to make the switch to XHTML 1.0 from HTML 4.01 code. XHTML allows for better database integration, better XML integration, has many almost ASP-like qualities, and is the new preferred HTML standard. Because XHTML was built for pretty-printing, there are less whitespace errors, even in tables. Do a View Source  on this page to see even the tables are pretty-printed. Pretty-printing a table or form elements introduced whitespace errors in HTML 4.01 pages

You may need to toss in a few align="absbottom" (or similar) to force Internet Explorer to behave, but other browsers don't need them. ABSBOTTOM (absolute bottom), ABSTOP (absolute top), and ABSMIDDLE (absolute middle) are proprietary tags for Internet Explorer that force it to act more like other browsers. Though technically bad coding, they may be needed if you want most people to see your pages correctly.

Since HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 are nearly identical and use the same browsers, the switch will take place slowly, as pages need updating. As there are no SGML nor XML browsers on the horizon, there's little pressure to finish it all now. A quick run through most validators makes the few needed tag changes and updates the header. The XHTML 1.0 validator in HomeSite 5.5 is truly wonderful. HomeSite has long been the favorite handcoder for webdevelopers. Its popularity approaches cult status. Any validator based on Tidy HTML should also do the trick.

The headers of the two types are vastly dissimilar. In HTML 4.01, the top of the header looks something like this:



In XHTML 1.0, it looks quite different:



There are many other differences, mostly small and easy to spot with a good validator. The break tag <br> becomes <br />. This is an example of an empty tag (self closing). In XHTML, most tags need a closing tag OR a self-closing space slash. If you're used to HTML 4.01 (or 4.02), writing good code as usual, then running it through a good correcting validator should bring you up to warp speed in no time.

Once again, bad health on the part of the Senior Editor caused publishing nightmares during the second and third quarters. All should return to normal shortly. There were no E.Mail versions during this time.

Curious about the history of The News Letter? The purpose of the Archives is to methodically store older stories and articles. Current contents include important headlines, columns, features, and site reviews. Listings are by the month of retirement for a headline, feature or article.