We all know that Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 but for most (or nearly all) web designers and developers like us, rushing to upgrade to IE 7 can be quite a problem. Their inability to run IE 6 and 7 concurrently would make it difficult for designers and developers to check their work and make sure everything runs smoothly on both IE 6 and 7. But with more and more public users starting to upgrade to IE 7, we do not have much of a choice but to find a solution which will allow us to upgrade to IE 7 and still be able to run IE 6. One solution is to install IE 7 on one test machine but if you are a web designer, you will know how painful that can be!

tredosoft.com found a nice way of running IE 7, 6, 5.5, 5, 4 and 3 together. Yes! You read that right! So to all web designers and developers out there, what are you waiting for?

NOTE: Use this software at your own risk. We are not the developer of this software, so all credit should go to tredosoft.com

For Windows Vista users, sorry… this software will not work on VISTA.

The merit of semantic markup and web standards for websites cannot be over-emphasized. While it is fairly obvious why this can vastly benefit website design, few realise that web applications can gain the most out of this potent mix.

For starters, the separation of content and presentation means that developers and designers can play well together. When the developers take effort to output XHTML code in a semantic way, giving meaning to the page content, the designers can easily take this away and apply presentation styles to format and control how each part of the pages get rendered. Gone are the days when table or list formatting need to be hard-coded or couple tightly to the application code. By strictly producing content in terms of what they signify (Is that a data table? Or is that best perceived as a list?), developers can defer presentation decisions until the designers can work on them. This also opens up possibilities for content on the page to be reused in a multitude of ways.

Another cool benefit is that different stylesheets can be developed to control how the application screens can be rendered on different media, such as on-screen or on paper. Much like the argument for websites, data and content displayed on these screens can be easily transformed or omitted depending on what’s needed on screen (such as fancy graphics and colours to demarcate areas) and the bare essentials for output destined for printing on black-and-white printers. Not to mention if access by mobile devices are also on the plate, but you get the picture.

In fact, we have been doing this for a while for our own web applications, and this has smoothen our development process where the application screens can be easily skinned to a new look or to blend with existing branding. You can get the screens rendered to a format suitable for print without too much effort (contrast with the traditional way of coding up additional “printer-friendly” scripts). All in all, this method of developing web applications has made it flexible for developers and designers to focus on what they do best and allow for clear separation of tasks. For the target users, what they benefit most is better experience that comes with smaller downloads (verbose presentation rules are left out of the content codes) and better looking screens. What’s not to love about this?

We have used a number of PHP frameworks for our PHP projects, both internally and for clients, from roll-our-own frameworks to open-source frameworks. A few years back, we fell instantly in love when we discovered Mojavi for its simplicity and solid implementation. Then the deal became even sweeter when symfony was born. To put it plainly, symfony is to PHP what Rails is to Ruby. It takes the best of Mojavi, Rails, Propel, Ajax and tons of other frameworks and best practices and rolls them into a very effective, practical and well-documented framework. Since its launch, symfony has built up quite a large following, which goes to show how good the framework really is.

We believe symfony can only get better. One of the new additions to the symfony website is a Code Snippets section, which is a code repository for fellow symfony users to post fragments of codes for popular tasks. This is definitely a great resource for users of the framework which we have not seen elsewhere before. And the developers have even released the source code to Snippets so that new users can take the code and learn how to develop such a web application on their own. That’s the spirit that really draws us in to symfony.

Since we started using symfony in a few of our projects, we have also started building up some code fragments that we will readily share with the community. For starters, here’s one on how to send batch emails through symfony.

Many frameworks have come and gone, but symfony has managed to garner a positive reputation for being practical, straightforward and fun to use. Add to that the fact that it is the most well-documented framework in the PHP landscape, symfony is definitely here to stay for a long time.