Lost in the past few years of IE6 based stagnation (and ensuing developer angst) is the fact that the Internet Explorer team have come up with some pretty cool enhancements to the way we build web sites over the past ten plus years.

So, while we're cheering on Firefox's growing market share, hesitantly eying IE8 and waiting for the ugly stepchild of the browser landscape, IE6, to finally die a painful (and hopefully immediate) death, I thought I'd lay out some of the innovations introduced by Internet Explorer to remind us of relatively positive days gone by*.

As a fun exercise, while you're reading this, compare these innovations to the black hole left in the web development world by the long and terrible reign of IE6. It's an interesting juxtaposition of help vs. harm. Here's hoping future versions of the browser continue to trend closer to the "help" line as IE7 has and IE8 appears to be doing**
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Dave Shea says:

"Did you know that you can nest your divs so deep that Firebug stops working properly? I do now."

From:

mezzoblue § Design Rants

Personally, I'm surprised because I've seen some savagely nested divs produced by systems like Drupal and while it was a singularly awful environment to work in, it didn't actually cause Firebug to choke. Also, looking through his code, I see nothing that screams to me as being exceptionally deeply nested. I put a comment in. I'll update with more info…

Answer: When it's a unique identifier.

Check out this class attribute generate by my beloved Wordpress' upload feature:

class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4590"

See anything suspicious? I sure do. wp-image-4590 is a unique identifier being passed off as a class. Why? I actually have no clue as I'm not privy to the thought process behind that particular piece of code What I do know is pretty much demands to be an ID. When I teach this stuff to people, I say "If it's unique, meaning there will ever only be one of them, make it an ID. If there's more than one or it's a general descriptor, make it a class." So I look at that code block every time I upload an image and I frown. Then I blow away the whole class attribute away, since I use none of them.

This is just splitting hairs, I know. Using a class like that is basically harmless. But, truth be told, splitting hairs helps me solidify my ideas about the way these things should work. That, in turn helps me improve the way my crew and I do our thing. So? Hairs I split and everyone is happier.

I'm just doing my small part to make the web a better place one nitpicky, semantic post at a time.

For real! I ran through all of the primordial webmonkey tutorials* when I was starting out building sites (10-11 years ago now!) and if the newly relaunched site is half as helpful it will be a great boon to the community. Great info and a friendly, funny attitude made it the place for me to learn about the web thing back in the last century. Honestly, I owe a lot to the usefulness of those early tutorials. Looking back on it I realize that Webmonkey, coupled with the community that sprang up around Dreamweaver at the time**, was a great forge upon which to build up my web chops.

We're Back! Webmonkey Relaunches, Rejoins Wired

The original web developer's resource has returned. Webmonkey has been completely redesigned, and we're ready to rock once more. Also, our entire content library is now hosted on a wiki, so every tutorial, reference page and code example is open for editing. Come on in and show us what you've got!

Webmonkey: the Web Developers Resource

*Some still exist: like Thau's JavaScript Tutorial, which is over ten years old now.

**I've been a Dreamweaver user since Version 1.2.

Check it out.

Invesra | Invest in your Future

The company is called Invesra. It's a financial services startup with backing from Village Ventures. I did a quick site for them to get their new brand* out the door for the FinovateStartup even in San Francisco this week. They've got a great team** and an interesting product so it's been a pleasure helping them out during a crunch period. As it always does, working with a startup makes me miss those startup days myself.

Then I think back to what working for two at once was like (Boston's Weekly Dig and Advisortech) and I like the agency life just that little bit more

*Tom O'Keefe's excellent work

**My lovely and talented girlfriend is Director of User Experience