This week saw a major discussion on the future of IE8 and compatibility and the launch of Inside RIA.

• O'Reilly Launches RIA Site - Inside RIA (RIApedia, January 21)
• Duplicating a database using SQL Server Management Studio Express (Arpit Jain, January 21)
• Evils of Global Variables when Unit Testing (Steve Nelson, January 23)
• Ask a Jedi/Stump the Chump: CFDOCUMENT PDFs with Forms (Ray Camden, January 25)
• Ask a Jedi: CFIMPORT, Application.cfc, and custom tags (Ray Camden, January 26)

The IE8 solution to handling backward compatibility is an interesting discussion. Here are some good links:

• Compatibility and IE8 (IEBlog, January 21)
• Microsoft's Version Targeting Proposal (The Web Standards Project, January 22)
• In defense of version targeting (Jeffrey Zeldman, January 22)
• Specs vs capabilities (John Dowdell, January 22)
• Meta Madness (John Resig, January 22)
• The Internet Explorer lock-in (Ann Van Kesteren, January 22)
• <META HTTP-EQUIV="X-BALL-CHAIN":gt; (Robert O'Callahan, January 22)
• Slipping The Ball And Chain (Robert O'Callahan, January 23)