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Blogs ยป Archive for March 20th, 2006
Updated IE7 Beta 2 Preview
While the “official” Beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 7 still awaits the upcoming Windows Vista Beta 2, Microsoft has publicly announced an updated build of its “Beta 2 Preview”.
Although official word on the changes in this new build have not been forthcoming (an ongoing problem in the IE7 preview process), this updated preview is said to be “layout complete”; that is, none of the changes to be made between now and the final release of Internet Explorer 7 should affect page layout. I wouldn’t bet on that, but I would certainly recommend this release as a solid basis on which to begin compatibility work on your own sites.
This release coincides with the opening of Microsoft’s three-day MIX 06 conference in Las Vegas, the web site for which, incredibly, does not display correctly in Firefox (the title image, “A 72-hour conversation:” is cropped so as to make it unreadable).
WS-DeadParrot
It’s rant time again (apologies – move along unless you’re feeling fiesty). It’s that REST vs. SOAP thing. There’s another round of debate traversing various blogs. This time it seems to be SOAP’s final death throes. If SOAP and all that makes little sense, know that you’re not alone and that you can happily ignore it and focus on smarter options.
Anyway, David summarizes from a distance while Tim Bray nailed the detail nicely a few weeks back in WS-Angst, which began with this post (which boils down to: “show me your data structures” vs. “show me your apis“) and finally ends up in this;
If you have Microsoft saying “well, the best approach is to make this elaborate infrastructure we’ve spent billions of dollars building out optional”, then the debate is over.
And make no mistake – it’s truly over. Forget whatever bizarre use cases WS-* support; when the real world starts doing this it’s time to move on. You want message routing? Try this…
< ?php
$in = ‘http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService’.
‘/V1/webSearch?appid=YahooDemo&results=10&output=php’.
‘&query=SOAP’;
$data = unserialize(file_get_contents($in));
file_put_contents(’/dev/null’,serialize($data));
?>
WS-Headless
On the one hand this is all forgivable …
