On June 24th 2010 the IE 9 developers’ team has released another update for the new browser following up on the promise given at the MIX10 conference.

The IE9 Platform Preview can be downloaded from IE9 TestDrive web site.

The new version provides for HTML5 tags like audio, video and canvas (with hardware acceleration), support of Web Open Front Format (WOFF), a number of performance enhancements and bug fixes.

There are many new demo samples:

118 new tests have been added to the Testing Center + 1309 tests for ES5.

A score of 83/100 has been reached for ACID3. WebKit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark shows an improvement in JavaScript handling speed.

A lot of new video footage has been released on Channel 9 to support the release:

• Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3: A Look at the New Demos
• Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3: A Look at ECMAscript 5
• Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3: A Look at Canvas
• Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3: A Look at HTML5 Video Support
• Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3: A Look at Canvas and Amazon.com

There’s also a new post in the IE development team blog.

IE9 Platform Preview has been downloaded more than 2 million times since the release date.

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Currently Adobe Flash is the leader in Internet multimedia.  It’s been used to create a number of RIA (Rich Internet Application), web sites, games.  Flash is used for the majority of banners and presentations.  The number of possibilities grew when Action Script 3.0 came out and especially so with the release of Adobe Flash Player 10.  The technology now provides for more powerful and feature-rich applications for the Internet.  The number of games and all kinds of services ranging from upload managers to graphics editors almost as powerful as Photoshop is snowballing.

With Flash being so popular, there are a number of specialists out there and the market requires them to possess in-depth knowledge of the technology for better efficiency.

I’ve been working with flash for years and have learned a number of tricks to utilize Flash and hardware resources more efficiently.  This document is not to be an optimization manual but rather a demonstration of some data types’ behavior on large computations, which is most often the case in Flash games.  The goal was to explore such behavior and to present the results.  What to do with these results is entirely up to you.

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First, what the article is about. The Internet is full of articles on layouts and programming. Many authors choose to include code snippets on top of text and images. The code in those snippets is formatted one way or another. To make their life easier the authors use various tools like Source Code Highlighter or alike. Everything seems good – the syntax is highlighted, the tabulation is in place, lines are numbered. Yet all such utilities have one bid disadvantage that makes life difficult: tabulation replaces all symbols in the code with spaces. And since most layout editors and programmers use tabs for indentation – copying the snippet into the source code requires additional effort to fix the code hierarchy.

Noting the above, the topic of this article can be rephrased: how to format code in such a manner that copy-pasting it would keep the tab-ed indentation that most people are used to.

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Anyone can write CSS these days, there’s even software that can do it for you. But how good will this CSS code come out to be? Here are five bits of advice to make your CSS code better.

1. Reset

Reset the settings in one way or the other. You can adopt existing solutions ( Eric Meyer, YUI), or you can create your own. The choice is yours.

The methods include simple removal of all fields and tabulations in all elements:

html, body, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, ul, ol, dl, li, dt, dd, p, blockquote,
pre, form, fieldset, table, th, td { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

The aforementioned existing solutions are impressive, but in some opinion seem excessive. I can imagine you resetting all the settings of all elements only to set them again later. If you do choose to use on of the existing solutions, don’t copy the complete CSS file. Instead, shape it to best fit your project.

And please, don’t do the following:

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