Microsoft

While I was catching up on the development of IE8 I found this over at the IE blog: In IE8 Beta 1 we also increased our per-server connection limit from 2 to 6. What this means is that in IE7 and below pages could only download 2 elements from a given server at any one time. Increasing that limit to 6 allows sites to download 3 times as much content in parallel, which should translate into faster page download times when bandwidth is available....

Dear Microsoft, when updating to Office 2008 SP1 for Mac I am asked to download a 180 Mb update file. While I appreciate you continuous improvement of software through the release of service packs, I must object to the poor implementation of the automatic update handler. I have a 24 Mbit broadband connection but it will still take some time to download 180 Mb. If I close the lid on my laptop or loose the connection for a short while the download will restart from scratch....

My son has the dubious pleasure of being the primary beta tester of T-shirt messages. This time it is the first draft of the model that will be called “Ballmer”. Turned out pretty OK…

First, some people bash Microsoft for not implementing DIS 29500 (OOXML) in Office 2007. Then, someone discovers that OpenOffice 2.4 does not create proper ODF. (Update: The test procedure was wrong). And then, Microsoft announce that a coming Office service pack will add native ODF support to Microsoft Office ahead of OOXML support. And, South Africa appelas OOXML adoption. Will Microsoft Office 2007 become the first Office suite to support ODF?...

Opening a particular Word 2007 document in Word 2008 can yield this error: Seriously? Can’t Microsoft get their own implementations to cooperate better? And this has just been approved as an ISO standard?

I own the domain name standards-schmandards.com which I use for my accessibility blogging. Recent events have made me wonder if I shouldn’t use it to cover recent events regarding IE8 instead. Or, as Mark Pilgrim elegantly writes: Said the monk: If you give me non-standard markup, I will render it according to standards. If you give me standard markup, I will not render it according to standards. What do you do?...

Sweden is represented in the ISO through the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS). This means that our country has one of the 100 or so votes. The member countries have had six months to consider if the Office Open XML (OOXML) format should become an ISO standard. In Sweden, SIS arranged a working group that have looked through the material. As you may know the OOXML format has been heavily criticized (by many e....