Today I got an email from Google because I use their Google Apps, and I was surprised, but kind of happy to read the email they sent.  Below is it's contents in entirety. 

NOTE: I have highlighted the interesting parts, or at least some.

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

I hope someone else finds this interesting.  If not, no worries, but if you did and have comments, please feel free to post.

Most of you reading this article are probably saying, “Ya we know DOCTYPE is the first thing you add.”   I mean man it is on the top of the page.

Well anyway just a couple days ago, I had a friend of whom I generally trust his markup skills come to me with a center align issue in IE7.

I took about 5 minutes and combed through the site via Firebug and the Developer Toolbar (kind of like Firebug for IE)  I couldn’t  see any good reason that his main container div should not be centered.

The CSS and markup was right and the parent container element looked like it wasn’t causing any interference.  I have to admit for a minute I was stumped.

Well my last step was to pull out the source markup and check for unclosed div elements.  (I was getting desperate).  In doing this I saw he had no DOCTYPE!  This was making IE7 run in quirks mode.  When my friend added the DOCTYPE his page magically worked the way it was supposed to.

So that you guys and gals don’t make the same mistake, I included below what I should have done in this situation.  (I use the excuse that my friend normally wouldn’t make this mistake, and that’s why I didn’t follow the below steps.)

Okay I should have looked at the markup first and made sure there was a DOCTYPE.  Secondly I should have run the site through validation.

There ya have it.  A small post on the importance of a DOCTYPE.  I hope it has helped.  I also have a couple links below to good DOCTYPE information.

• A List Apart article on DOCTYPEs
• An article on Quirks mode
• One more article on Quirks mode with some links of it’s own.