It’s the end of the week and for our second issue of ‘The week in links,’ we’ve got both local and global news for you.

1. lesfrontaliers.lu launched a brand new design. lesfrontaliers.lu, in the Luxembourgish web, is the destination for border workers wishing to get details on a wide range of topics—obviously related to Luxembourg and the bigger region. It’s also a community of more than 60.000 active members and a traffic ranking of 10K visits per day (source). In such a context, small changes (e.g. lower load times, higher font sizes, better color contrasts, etc.) often lead to huge increases in terms of conversion rates, traffic and so on. On the other hand, big changes (architecture, overall visual design, vocabulary, etc.), if not taken care seriously, can lead to users’ frustration and low down some important metrics—Yahoo! is some very good example of change management done carefully when it comes to its homepage. It’s hard to tell how much time will be needed to get accustomed to the new design, but it will be interesting to keep an eye on it and watch the metrics;
2. Gmail offers offline access. Last year, Google announced that their collaboration suite, Google Docs, would be available offline thanks to the Google Gears plugin. It’s now time for their award-winning webmail to get that long-awaited feature as well. Available to US and UK users right now, the feature should appear soon under the Labs tab for the rest of the world (via);
3. Luke Wroblewsky on previous and next actions. Web forms are a hell to master; defining the questions they need to ask, choosing the right type of field for the job, creating a conversational scenario, taking care of errors messages, dealing with browser inconsistencies are some of the tasks web designers need to achieve. Yet the success of these forms determines whether users will sign up to you app, buy your products, subscribe to your newsletter, find content on your website, etc.;
4. Andy Clarke proposes a solution to the hAccessibility problem. Many a web designer has fallen short of finding the right HTML element for the purpose of creating a valid, semantic and accessible equivalent to her visual designs; but there are several workarounds available in recurring situations, the most famous of which are defined as microformats. One of them, the date design pattern, has triggered wars between web designers and accessibility experts because some screen readers would read out loud machine-readable date values instead of human-readable ones: to complicate the situation, the BBC which used to be a big proponent of microformats, dropped support for it because of some usability issue. Time to move forward, indeed HTML elements and attributes are quite limited, but it’s their combination that, used correctly, can provide solutions that degrades gracefully in every situation;
5. IE8 RC1 is available! The community was waiting for it: IE8 is out of beta, that’s very great news given the tremendous lot of efforts they put in building a reliable browser, talking to and getting feedbacks from the community. IE8 was originally scheduled for the end of 2008, but has finally been delayed to the beginning of 2009. This release candidate—probably the one and only—is to be considered as nearly identical to the final product though (via). So what exactly is exciting about this new browser, from a geek perspective?
   1. Full CSS2.1 support: that means no more hacks, at least to overcome display bugs, and we’ll finally be able to use the full spread of CSS selectors and properties, giving us even more control on presentation. Oh, and it passes ACID2 without any problem. This is a very big announcement, even if IE is still years behind its competitors with regards to Web Standards;
   2. Improvements to the DOM and better JavaScript support: interoperable getters/setters/removers, cross-domain requests, enhanced XMLHTTPRequest, ... are just some out of a list of many;
   3. Support for emerging standards: IE8 partially supports and will improve support for HTML5, ECMAScript 3.1 and other standards of tomorrow;
   4. ... Finally, the development team has made efforts to bring up a standards-compliant browser without compromising applications and websites based on legacy components. Therefore, IE8 is there to completely remove IE6 from the surface of the Earth, something IE7 completely failed to achieve.
6. It’s a week of announcements. This one is for owners of Windows Mobile handsets: ‘Fennec, the mobile browsers developed by Mozilla [...] is expected the first week of February and will target the HTC Touch Pro.’
7. On a final note, SitePoint Reference is back online; it is the online reference for HTML, CSS and JavaScript languages and gives practical details on how to use them (via)