Dan Rooke’s Blog

After four years of studying towards my BSc (Hons) Computing Science at the University of Huddersfield, I have now graduated!

The graduation ceremony was held in Huddersfield Town Hall on Tuesday 14th November. It was great to see everybody from my course and to find out what they are doing now. We’ve all got jobs of varying sorts which is always good news! Unfortunately we didn’t get Patrick Stewart, in his capacity as the Chancellor of the University, which I think the person with the Patrick Stewart Star Trek tie on was a bit disappointed about

Just a quick post to let you know that we now have the official photos of our wedding and that they are available on the wedding gallery for your viewing pleasure!

If you would like any prints arranging, get in touch and we’ll be able to give you the high resolution version of the photo(s) you’d like to print.

Last weekend we had a long weekend away staying in Studley Castle just south of Birmingham. The Castle was something quite different and we really enjoyed our stay.

We visited my Auntie and Uncle, Norma and Alan, and my two cousins Rob and Pete, Pete’s girlfriend Sadie and daughter Mollie. We had a great time catching up, eating copious amounts of Chinese take away food and lots of alcohol was drunk! It was a really good evening and went on into the small hours.

On Saturday, we visited Stratford Upon Avon where we had a walk around and managed to get a sizeable chunk of our Christmas shopping done. We then visited Rugby where we used to live in Bilton and the town centre itself. It was surprising how quickly things change! In the evening we met up with Adam and another friend from College, Matt, who have just moved into a flat together in Dunchurch. Adam and Matt are currently working on a business idea of their’s so we got up to speed on their plans while having an excellent meal at the Dun Cow pub.

On the Sunday morning, we headed back up north to sunny Huddersfield. To our surprise though, the clocks had changed in the night and we had forgotten! So we were robbed of our extra hour lie in! We had a great weekend though, we’ll have to do it more often!

As you may, or may not, be aware both Mozilla and Microsoft have launched new versions of the popular web browser Firefox and Internet Explorer late in October. As a web developer, this has quite an important impact on how I develop web applications.

I personally use Mozilla’s Firefox for my browsing and primary development needs. It better conforms to web standards than its rival Internet Explorer. But the majority of web users stay with Internet Explorer, for the most part because it is conveniently installed on a PC running a Microsoft Windows operating system by default. Internet Explorer however is known to have lower levels of conformance to web standards than Firefox and does have a reputation of particularly fussy. Internet Explorer 7, the latest version of the browser, does go some way to better conforming to web standards however it does still trails its competition.

As a web developer, having various levels of conformance to standards in browsers and particular requirements for each browser causes a plethora of problems and complicates the development process massively. To combat this, I feel that standards should be taken to the next level. I believe that all web browsers should use, here comes the technical bit, a common rendering engine. The rendering engine takes the code and converts it into a human friendly interface known as a web page. Having a common rendering engine will greatly reduce the complexity of supporting different browsers for us web developers. It will encourage better standards conformance which in the end will help the web site/application user. It should also, in theory, reduce development costs of web browsers.

By all means have different web browsers providing different features and functionality, but have a common rendering engine at the core of each. This idea is not meant to discourage competition, merely make the web a better place for us all.