It was wonderful to see that Microsoft have finally realized that the lack of standards compliance in their web browser is actually holding back the internet. Regrettably, they still seem to have a long way to go.

In the Microsoft Developer Network Blog Chris Wilson, an IE Platform Architect, writes that IE 8 will have an extra mode where it actually complies with the World Wide Web Consortium standards.

Unfortunately, the IE8 team have decided that the best way to comply with web standards is for all authors to add their own non-standard meta tag to indicate that the content is compliant, otherwise they intend the product to render content in their own irregular way.

Full marks to Microsoft for finally realizing that standards are essential, but probably the solution to backward compatibility deserves a D-.

A better solution would have been to render pages that are served to IE8 in the new “super standards” mode, and to render broken, or IE5, IE6, or IE7 specific pages in a compatibility mode, whilst displaying a message warning users that the page is flawed. This would encourage web developers to comply with web standards and would reduce the risks from malware that relies on quirks in rendering of malformed HTML.

In Java, it is necessary to put a letter “L” after a numeric constant when it of type long.
Although Java permits a lower case “L” it is better to consistently use an upper case “L”, as the lowercase “L” can be easily confused with a numeric 1, when reading code.
For example, both variables x and y, are assigned the same value here, but can easily be read as having different values.

long x=10l; //watch out, this has a lower case "L" not a numeric 1 at the end.
long y=10L;