TechMedia

Aren’t you getting sick of toting about that bag full of gadgets? Can’t decide whether you want to shoot still or movie? Well with today’s technology, you don’t have to carry heavy equipment to get fantastic results.

The evidence is compelling – check out this 1080p video shot at 6400 ASA (some scenes were shot at 3200 ASA) with a Canon 1D MKIV. No flash, no outside lighting – only available light. Prepare to be amazed by the quality (of the resolution, the actual plot doesn’t make much sense).

All this quality comes at a price – a $5,000+ price, but as the 1D MKIV is inevitably replaced by the next-best-thing, its cost will drop.

Both the Canon and Nikon’s D3S can shoot at ISO speeds of up to ISO 102,400 – less lighting = lighter camera bag.

D3S’s built-in microphone for monaural sound, or use an optional external microphone for stereo recording.

As well, the D3S allows videographers to attach an external microphone, which is important for getting good sound (viewers are more likely to forgive poor picture quality than poor sound quality).

These cameras are fantastic for on the move travel light photographer-videographers – a growing category in this jack-of-all-trades multi-media world.

Internet Explorer has its own unique and dysfunctional way of interpreting the CSS box model of website layout. It is frustrating for web designers to find that a site, which looks so pretty in Firefox and Safari, has burst at the seams in IE.

One way you can minimize the pain of coding for IE is to structure the head of your HTML in a way that forces IE to run in standards mode, as opposed to quirks mode.

Quirks mode is triggered:

• when the doc type declaration is missing/incomplete
• if it’s HTML 3 or earlier, or if a system identifier is missing
• when a comment or other content appears before doc type
• when there are errors anywhere in the document
• in IE6 – when there is an XML declaration before a doc type declaration

A tutorial by Bill Weinman on lynda.com gives some sample code for the top of your HTML file that will force IE into standards mode:

If you still trigger quirks mode, check for errors in your HTML using the w3 validator.

Now you should have an error-free, standards triggering page that will render correctly in IE.

But to eliminate any nasty surprises at launch, always check your page. If you are on a Mac, IE NetRenderer is a useful resource, though it doesn’t seem to work for all sites. If IE NetRenderer comes up blank, try browsershots. It’s slow to render, but always gives results.

But for “Internet Explorer Testing Done Right,” try Parallels, which allows you to run Windows from OS X without rebooting.

Using these tools, you can be certain that all is running well in Internet Explorer land.