Today’s comic features Justin McDowell (web designer and founder of Ignite Lincoln) and the Squirrel dealing with the decidedly first world problem of a slow broadband connection while discussing Chilean miners. In short, it’s all about tubes.

I’m claustrophobic to an incredible degree, a trait I attribute to my lifelong battle with asthma and my general impression that smaller spaces contain less air. I cannot fathom what spending over two months trapped a half-mile underground in a collapsed mine must be like. It’s amazing that the men involved have held together as well as they have, and almost as incredible is everything that’s been delivered safely to them through a four-inch wide, half-mile long tube. Sandwiches, drinks, videos, clothing, books.

The fact that they’re about to be winched upwards to the surface world says something about how humans can come together in such trying times to accomplish something so incredibly difficult.

It’s entirely trite to compare such a feat to broadband Internet access. But I’m going there, because I’m a classy guy. Both my home connection and that of my workplace go through Comcast. Over the past week, both locations have had service levels I could compare to my 1995 dial-up connection when I’d log in to play Ultima Online or spend fifteen minutes downloading one naughty photo. What I’m trying to say is that hand-delivering the packets of information would result in a faster speed than what I’m currently experiencing.

What drives me crazy about such things is that for all extents and purposes, this is exactly what Comcast promises. Any of their service packages guarantee up to a maximum level of service, but not a minimum.

I’d like to repeat that. I pay them good money to guarantee that they won’t exceed a level of service, but they can fall as short of that as they please. I wonder how well that would work for other business models. Buy up to a whole hamburger… but maybe you’ll get just the bun. Buy up to a whole website… but maybe you’ll just get a half-finished splash page.

It’s a classic old gem at this point, but I think Penny Arcade’s treatment of the topic goes straight to the point of how I’d prefer to pay such a variable service.

The overall poor quality of American broadband access in comparison to other first-world nations is something I could rant about for hours. Instead I’ll get over myself, link you this hilarious hat picture of Justin I found while getting reference photos of him for the comic, and wish the miners all the best luck in the final hours of their ordeal. ¡Vive Chile!

An Event Apart: DC is running at this very moment. I am not there, sadly, but I am living the experience vicariously through A Feed Apart (which is awesome and you should check it out now) Via that very feed, I learned of applause, as unlikely as it sounds, that Dan Cederholm led the crowd in for IE9. Today’s comic memorializes that event, and also includes Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, the two dudes without whom this awesome conference would not exist. (It turns out they’re also very awesome in person. Really. They don’t bite or anything.)

Seriously, if you ever can get to an AEA event, I implore you to go. It’s an awesome experience being surrounded by like-minded web geeks getting leading edge advice and techniques for that thing we do with making the web.

Look, let’s drop the issue of tribe for the moment: IE9 is a better browser than IE8, period. I won’t make it my steady gal, but it’s helping push the web in the right direction by getting Microsoft’s behemoth back on track with everyone else. I’m glad someone at AEA decided to lead the crowd in acknowledging that fact.

Today’s comic features the woodland creatures side of CSSquirrel, with the Opera Moose, Naepalm (the animal version of Mindfly Studio’s very own Janae) and none other than IE9 himself.

I’m actually shocked by the IE9 beta that was released today. It’s got a slick, minimal interface that is such a radical departure from what I’m accustomed to from Internet Explorer that I’m left speechless. It’s also fast. Surprisingly so.

These two facts are just a small portion of what IE9 brings to the table. Improved CSS3 support. HTML5 elements are now supported, including beautiful elements like <video>, <audio> and and the sexy girl on the block: <canvas>.

I could wax eloquent, but I prefer to direct your attention to smarter people saying the same thing with better word choices, like Rey Bango. Go check his blog post on the topic right now.

One beef people are pulling out to disparage the new release with is IE9′s lack of support on XP. I get the gist of where they’re coming from: the less operating systems IE9 is supported on, the harder it’ll get to make hardliners upgrade off IE6 or 7. But the fact is, XP is old. Really old. You don’t see people complaining because Safari 5 isn’t supported on Mac OS X 10.4, do you? I’m sure the reason Apple didn’t do backwards support is the reason Microsoft did what they’re doing. Both are in the habit of selling OSes. And if you’re not calling Apple down for that behavior, it’s more than a little hypocritical to do the same to Microsoft.

(Frankly, If you’re using a beast of an old OS, I suggest you go to other vendors like Mozilla and Opera for your modern web experience. Or upgrade your OS. Which path you pick is probably based on your pocketbook.)

Speaking of which, I’m not an IE user. It’s catching up, but it hasn’t surpassed my experience with other browsers like Firefox or Chrome (although FF is getting chunky in a way that alarms me, but I believe version 4 is going to correct that). But it’s improving by leaps and bounds, and I think we should acknowledge the effort Microsoft is putting into burying the mistakes of their past.

If you’d like to check IE9 out, you can download the beta here.

I’m going to get flak for this one.

Today’s comic features Stephanie Sullivan, Faruk Ateş and the Squirrel embroiled in a classic conflict of tribe in a setting that might be a bit familiar for Apple fans with some history under their belt.

Let’s lay it out on the table: On September 1, Apple announced some devices so small you could swallow them whole. I think they also promised to re-release a book about a duckling, although I might have lost some critical details there. Apple was so jazzed about this event that they made sure to provide a live video stream for their millions of fans to watch, “based on open standards”.

Excited people enjoyed the quality of this stream; some, including Faruk, made sure to rub this in with comments like: “Hey Flash people! I’m live streaming HD video at 30 fps and my CPU is at 10-15%. TAKE NOTICE.”

It’s clear how much a fan Faruk isn’t of Flash with later tweets like: “@dstorey  That’s why I disagree: I think there’s plenty of people advocating HTML5 because of its Open Web technology aspect, Flash be damned.” (Edit: I’ve learned that I completely misconstrued what Faruk meant here, which was HTML5 rocking for it’s own sake, irregardless of Flash. My apologies.)

I bet that video stream was great. I also didn’t see it, and not for a lack of interest. The reason I didn’t is that viewing it required you to be watching on an Apple device, complete with Quicktime, an Apple plugin, using HTTP Live Streaming which is an Apple streaming protocol that may someday grow up to be an open standard but is far, far away from that.

Firefox on my PC was politely told to go jump in a lake when I tried to view said stream.

Let’s make this clear: vendor-specific device, vendor-specific plugin, vendor-specific streaming protocol. What, exactly, is “open standards” about this stream?

I understand the concept of tribe. Apple makes good products, and it’s worth celebrating their successes if you’re a fan. But in this modern, Internet-centric world, I abhor the concept of walled gardens. The Open Web we all celebrate, that many of us castigate Flash for apparently opposing, it doesn’t belong to any single company, including Apple. It doesn’t matter how slick their products are, how good their intentions, we can’t rely on any single vendor.

Stephanie’s (sarcastic) comment on Twitter sums up the problem the celebration of this streaming video represents: “Hey, not only have we created the most awesome walled garden, but now we want to push you to a single browser—ours!”

Is that the open web we want?

I don’t want to go back to ten years ago where I’d have to load up a specific browser, or worse yet, use a specific brand of computer, in order to access or use the content of the Internet. Heck, I don’t want to have to load a specific plugin (Flash, Quicktime, Silverlight, take your pick), especially in an ecosystem where vendors are creating devices that aren’t compatible with each other’s plugins. It doesn’t matter if the devices are in a slick glass case or blueberry-colored. I just want my web to work, regardless of who made the website, without a single vendor controlling the pipe.

Today’s comic expresses my love affair with cheesecake, which is perhaps the most inappropriately named desert ever. It is not a cake, my friends. It is pie. Cheesepie, if you will… although that sounds like some sort of cheddar-filled crust with that title. The comic also features Pete LePage as a Microsoft stand-in, being subjected to the horror that is Quirks Mode.

I know we’re up to IE8 now, and IE9 is deliciously around the corner somewhere, waiting to pounce upon us. We’ve reached a point in our lives where many of us web designers can now tell IE6 support to bugger off… and actually get away with it. But IE7 still has an unfortunate market share, and in Mindfly Studio‘s case it’s something we still actively support for clients because they have enough users of that variety to make it a worry.

Most of the time, this isn’t an issue. We are, dare I say, good at what we do. But there are times where we’re required to use certain antiquated CMSes for a client that can’t switch out of that environment… and the problems begin to kick in. Code you can’t completely control is bound to be code that is going to repeatedly kick you in the nuts.

Gentlemen, I like my nuts.

Last week I spent almost two full days having the boys repeatedly booted by a hotel reservation CMS’s code that was making my best attempts at goods practice CSS and HTML look instead like what happens when you stuff a stick of dynamite in a sock packed with rancid meat. No matter how I tried to wrestle things around, IE7 was determined to kick into Quirks Mode, doing the most unexpected, unusual things to my layout.

I eventually got better, but I’d very much like to email a shovel to either the CMS’s manufacturer or Microsoft with a note explaining where to shove said farm implement.

To those of you trapped on corporate intranets forever, let me say how badly I feel for you. I can only imagine that this is your daily toil, your repentance for some unspoken crimes. But for the rest of us, let me say how glad I am that we can see an end date out there for Quirks Mode and it’s foul, reprehensible style-mangling.

P.S.: Wouldn’t Pete make a great representation of mild-mannered Bruce Banner? (Cue Lonely Man)