Internet Explorer 8 is coming soon; we're expecting that the beta will be available in a few weeks.
The MS development team originally had planned to make their new standards mode, which is much more standards-compliant than IE7's, something that you would have to specifically tell your pages to use. By default, IE8 would render unspecified pages the same way that IE7 did.

Why would they do this? Remember how horrible everything suddenly looked when all of the pages designed for IE6 were viewed with IE7? A lot changed, and some things broke. The 'opt-in' approach with IE8's standards mode would ensure that anything designed for IE6/7 would continue to look the same in the new browser, and that anything designed for IE8 could enable the new standards mode and look good in IE8/Firefox/Opera in the future.

While this does make sense from that point of view, and they developed this plan in conjuntion with members of the community and technical advisors, there were a lot of very vocal people that didn't like the plan - the argument was that in order for the 'web to move forward and become better, standards compliance should be the default. Well, the IE development team announced today that they've changed their position, and will now make the full standards compliance mode the default in IE8.

What does this mean for us, as web developers and designers?
It means that, unless we specify on our pages that the browser should use the IE7 rendering mode, IE8 is by default going to render pages using it's new standards interpretations. So, anything designed to look good in IE6 or IE7 may end up looking odd or breaking when using IE8.
On the plus side, once IE8 is widely adopted, it should be a lot easier to design sites that will look good and consistent between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Hopefully it won't be too long before that happens.

Further reading:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080303-sanity-prevails-ie8-will-default-to-standard-compliant-mode.html

Recession: Shelter from the storm
Kara Aaserud
From the March 2008 issue of PROFIT magazine

Thriving in a U.S. recession entails investing in product development for Lewis Media, a Kitchener, Ont.-based developer of website-management software. Because president Joseph Fung expects demand from U.S. end-users to drop, the firm has earmarked 25% of its R&D budget to increasing the multilingual capabilities of its software. Because of the expected downturn, "We're looking to expand into a European or Canadian market, and so will our U.S. distributors," says Fung. (Lewis Media's distributors are not restricted to specific geographical territories.) "This was our way of making sure they choose us when they're ready to do that."

Read the whole article at

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/entrepreneur/managing/article.jsp?content=20080206_198701_198701

Jumping on the google bandwagon a little more, I discovered google groups yesterday. I've joined a few interaction design/web design groups and got some pretty good stuff in my inbox this morning.

This is a discussion about SEO - how to use CSS for best SEO and kind of turns into a discussion about how people use search engines. A good read if you're interested. The first few posts are a little like walking into a conversation in the middle, but it starts to come together the further you read

http://groups.google.com/group/ixda/browse_thread/thread/ddb65aaae888d15b?hl=en

Here's a good article from A List Apart focusing on communication in virtual space. Although we have an office space and mostly communicate face to face, we have run into issues communicating with clients and have learned a lot on how to deal with different client demands based on their communication preferences.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/rulesofdigitalengagement

On CNN as of 7am This morning, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo...

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Friday said offered to buy Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) for $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, in a mix of cash and stock.

The offer represents a 62% premium on the $19.18 closing price of Yahoo on Thursday.