In the spirit of Friday afternoon and lazy ideas for blog posts, here are 5 somewhat web related things that I learnt this week.
1. Internet Explorer and Google Chrome do not like images that are saved in CMYK mode.
Whilst training a client to use their new CMS this week, I came across the unusual problem of uploaded images not displaying in Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. In IE in particular, they displayed as “Red Crosses” that are usually associated with broken or missing images, whilst also confusingly appearing in all other browsers and appearing in correct folders on the server. After an hour of research and hitting multiple dead ends, I found out that the issues were being caused by the images being converted from TIF files that were saved in CMYK mode as opposed to the standard RGB mode that IE and Chrome have been built to expect. In the case of Photoshop, to overcome this problem, make sure you are working in RGB mode before saving and exporting your images for the web.
2. The future is bright, the future is HTML5.
With the imminent release of Apple’s iPad, there has been a lot of coverage across the web with regard to Flash’s future and where it will fit in now that devices are moving away from supporting it and HTML5 support is also being introduced across a lot of platforms. With announcement of version 9 of Internet Explorer last week at the annual MIX conference, it seems that the future really will be based around web standards and less around proprietary plugins such as Flash, Silverlight and their ilk. There is a whole lot going on in this space and could easily fill up months worth of blog posts, but for now feel free to check out the excellent demonstrations of HTML5 below, in particular showcasing the abilities of the new Canvas tag.
Harmony and Flame (nb: You need a fairly recent version of Firefox, Chrome or Safari to enjoy these)
3. There is such a thing as too much social media.
As you can see clearly on Chris Pirilo’s site.
Although, I am serious to an extent, it obviously works for him, but be careful before you end up going a widget too far and confusing your site visitors more than you are helping them. 
4. Top level domains are going to get silly
The camera manufacturer Canon recently announced that they are looking to introduce the new TLD, .canon. This is a result of recent relaxations in the laws around registering TLD’s and could lead to a whole heap of silliness in the domain registration space. I can foresee at some point, we’ll be registering .revium of course!
5. WordPress 3 is going to be fun to play with and great for clients too.
Whilst browsing the creator of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg‘s blog today, I came across this link to an article detailing the new custom post types that will be in WordPress 3.0. For a geek like me this is very exciting stuff and will exponentially increase the amount of cool stuff we can build with WordPress as a platform, which can benefit you as a client (you are a client of ours right?).
(Talking of silly domain names, how good is http://ma.tt? I want to register http://adri.an now, shame that I don’t have a company in the islands of Netherlands Antilles as well as a local contact person, I checked!)
That is all, I wonder what next week’s 5 things will be.
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