They were troubled times--times of strife and turmoil, man against man, browser against browser. Into this chaos of lawlessness, brutality and disregard for web standards, stepped a new contender. Sleek and powerful in a case of shining armor, the champion strode onto the field of battle bearing a new and mighty weapon that made strong Windows men quake and PC women swoon. Parallel, he called it, and fascinated, the people flocked to him... After over 10 years of staunchly defending the ruling party, I am switching sides. Yes, that's right. I'm going over to the macrebels. Don't bother to try to talk me out of it. It's no use. Call me a traitor. Tell me I've been seduced by a handsome case and dubious technology. I've heard it all. My mind's made up. I've put in my order.

The inevitable has happened. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 late last week. This is the final step before Microsoft pushes IE7 on an unsuspecting public... I mean, makes IE7 publicly available. No other release candidates are planned.

One of the handiest "tricks" I've come across is having a layout template library at your fingertips. It's taken me a while to build mine, but now I have a tried-and-true layout for most of the common designs. It makes life a lot easier if you can grab a layout "skeleton," knowing that it will work for the design and won't present you with nasty little surprises halfway through.

Yes, that's right. Applause. And yes, that crunching sound is me, eating my own words.

I downloaded IE7 Beta this week and, cringing inwardly, viewed a new CSS template from my current project on it. Holy cow and by George!, it actually rendered my design correctly. You could have knocked me down with a feather. (I believe this will be a Cliche Day for me.)

I've been scouring the web lately, looking for good resources on designing university and college web sites. I'm surprised at how little I've been able to dig up. If you know of any others, please share them here—sites, lists, blogs, books, articles, etc.. Thanks to the University Web Developers' list for pointing me in the direction of some of these.