Despite the doubts in stability of the American economy in 2012, the research has showed that American companies are going to expand their IT staff. Analytics have found out what IT professions will be called for. The results of the annual research organized by Computerworld showed that 29% out of 353 IT-executive managers are planning to increase the number of their departments by the summer 2012.

‘The demand for IT-specialists in companies of all types and sizes is constantly growing’, says Mike McBrierty, the executive director of one of the biggest recruiting agencies the Eliassen Group. Moreover, according to his own words, the companies are planning to update the infrastructure and restart the realization of the projects postponed for the last 3 years.

As Computerworld claims, in 2012 the directors of IT departments have set teeth for implementing innovations and that’s why the most relevant for future employees will be the following nine main skills.

•    web and mobile application development skills
•    project management skills
•    technical support and maintenance skills
•    network technologies skills
•    business analysis skills
•    Web 2.0 technologies skills – more and more companies are planning to implement these technologies and the demand for php/java/.net software developers won’t decrease in 2012. Also there will be a big demand for Ajax GWT professional web developers as well as the specialists in .Net, PHP, HTML, XML, CSS, Flash and Javascript.

1. Use DOCTYPE Declarations
It is always better to indicate doctype in the header of each html page:
<! DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “- / / W3C / / DTD HTML 4.01 / / EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>

For XHTML:
<! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “- / / W3C / / DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict / / EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

Don’t write any other characters before doctype (no gaps, no line breaks). Otherwise you will get strange fields in body and html tags.

2. Set “position: relative”
Using this hack you can cure the vast number of problems with IE6 (for example, invisible or weird positioned blocks).

3. Use “display: inline” for floating blocks
Floating elements with margin can cause a well known bug in IE6, we mean double margin.
For example, indicating the left margin as 5px we get 10px as a result. “Display: inline” fixes this problem and your CSS becomes valid.

4. Set “hasLayout” in properties
Many rendering bugs in IE6 (and also in IE7) can be corrected by “hasLayout”. This is an internal feature of IE, which indicates how content must be aligned and positioned (relatively to other elements). This feature can be also used when you need to transform line item (e.g., <a>) into block or when transparency effects are needed.
The easiest way to indicate this property is to set height or width (zoom can also be used, but it’s not a standard CSS). It is recommended to specify the actual size of your block, and if it’s not possible (dynamically changing height or width), you can do this: “height: 1px”.

5. Fixing the repeated characters bug
This bag appears in lists and duplicates the last 1-3 signs of the last item in the list. There are some ways to fix it:

• Use “display: inline” for floating elements;
• Set “margin-right:-3px” for the last item in the list;
• Use conditional comments;
• Add an empty div in the last item of the list (sometimes, you must set “width: 90%” or other appropriate width).

6. Use advanced CSS selectors for other browsers and standard selectors without percentage values for IE
Or you can just use “!important”.

Example #1:

# element (
min-height: 40em;
height: 40em;
)
/ * Ignored by IE6 * /
# element [id] (
height: auto;
)

Example #2:

body (
margin: 4% 0! important;
margin: 40px 0; / * IE6 only * /
)

If you consider these tips strange or too complicated – don’t hesitate to drop us a line. Web development professionals from Oxagile software development company are at your service on 24/7 basis.

Today we continue our list of 14 the most relevant technologies for software developers adding some Web-oriented technologies to it:

#4. Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
No matter you can love RIA or hate it, today developers use Flash not only for cartoons about politicians who sing silly songs, but also for more serious things. Flash has rich functionality to create applications using technologies such as Flex and AIR. Companies that develop Flash analogues, for example JavaFx and Silverlight, also improve similar features and increase productivity.

HTML5 soon will combine the full functionality of RIA, including connection to the databases and putting the official seal of W3C on AJAX technology.

It means that in the near future, the differences between RIA platforms will be decreased.

#5. Web Development
Web development won’t sink into oblivion in the near future. Many Web developers ignore, or at least only familiar with the basics, providing frameworks. However, companies want more and more people who able to work with these technologies. So, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML will be still successful even in 2014.

#6. Web Services
JSON or XML? REST or SOAP? This choice depends on the project, and work complexity increases without Web services technologies. Even those areas, where developers used ODBC, COM, or RPC, are gradually moving towards Web services.

to be continued…