Installing PHP 5 on IIS

I used to have PHP installed and running with IIS on my Windows 2000 workstation, but that was two hard drives and as many workstation rebuilds ago. During a brief lull earlier this week, I set out to wire up the IIS server on my WinXP box with PHP and found the following article very helpful:

Installing PHP 5 on IIS in 5 simple steps

Of course, it's unusual that this sort of thing works correctly the first time around. Even though I had IIS and PHP set up correctly, I was getting ACL permissions errors whenever I tried to display my test phpinfo.php page. It took me a bit of Googling before I found a forum posting that suggested I might need to give my anonymous web user account execute permissions for the directory where my PHP executables are stored.

And just like that, I was up and running.

Trying Firefox 3 (beta) without trashing Firefox 2

Wanting to install the latest Firefox 3 beta release but don't want to put your sweet customized, tweaked and extended Firefox 2 installation at risk? Try this:

MozBackup - Backup tool for Firefox and Thunderbird

Then, check out Team Hackaday's article on how to set up a separate profile so you can run Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 side by side.

Then, if you're really bored adventurous, go download the Internet Explorer 8 beta. Personally, I'm not feeling that bored – or lucky.

Five simple steps to designing grid systems - Part 1 : Journal : Mark Boulton

Just in case I ever get around to it...

Five simple steps to designing grid systems - Part 1 : Journal : Mark Boulton

The Highly Extensible CSS Interface ~ The Series ~ Authentic Boredom

Over at Authentic Boredom, Cameron Moll has embarked upon an interesting discussion of how to... well, the title says it all:

The Highly Extensible CSS Interface ~ The Series ~ Authentic Boredom

I say it's a “discussion” because Moll has invited readers to respond with their criticisms and enhancements as the series goes on. Part I is up now, and it looks to be a very interesting series. Check it out.

Working around Blogger

Sometime in the past few days, the Blogger team has made a change that breaks in-line JavaScript coded into a template. I first discovered this when I happened to check in on The Geek Tribune this morning and found that my layout was broken because the JavaScript-generated date text in my masthead was missing.

The reason the script stopped working is that newlines are being stripped from code such as...

<script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>
<!--
 (javascript code)
//-->
</script>

...so that it appears to the browser as...

<script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>
<!-- (javascript code)//-->
</script>

This, of course, effectively comments out the script.

One could simply delete the <!-- --> pair, but then – if you're using an XHTML 1.0 doctype, as I am – Blogger's template editor complains about the XML not being well formed.

I admit I've never liked using CDATA, mostly because I find the syntax difficult to remember, but it seemed like it might be just the thing to keep Blogger from messing with my XHTML template. I replaced the HTML-style comments with...

<script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript'>
//<![CDATA[
  (javascript code)
//]]>
</script>

...and voila! My scripts are back in business.

IE 8 on Acid2

In a move that almost certainly had nothing to do with Opera's lawsuit [cough], Microsoft has announced that an in-development version of Internet Explorer 8 has successfully rendered the Acid2 browser test.

Taking this announcement at face value (no pun intended), one might be tempted to think that Microsoft's browser development team has finally seen the error of its non-standard rendering ways. But... I've been verbally abusing Microsoft for a long time and can't just turn on a dime. I'm skeptical.

True, it seems that years of pressure and ill will over the debacle that was IE 6 have convinced Microsoft that it can't just run rough-shod over the W3C recommendations that standards based browsers follow. The IE 8 announcement makes some pleasing noises in this regard, but it seems to me that there's also quite a bit of tap dancing going on:

When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.”

Which, to me, reads a bit like – and I'm quoting my internal paraphrasing here – “We see Firefox's market share increasing and feel Safari and Opera nipping at our heels, and we admit that there's a demand for standards compliance. But we're Microsoft, dammit. We'll comply with the W3C standards where doing so is to our advantage and continue to push our own where it isn't.”

Taming min- / max-width in Internet Explorer

As most of us who care are probably well aware, Internet Explorer is too stupid (or too lazy) to recognize the min-width and max-width attributes that standards-compliant browsers support. Microsoft's answer? Allow JavaScript in CSS rules.

It's less than ideal – especially if the viewer has JavaScript turned off – but it's a tool worth knowing about. Get the details at Perishable Press.