Inayaili writes for Smashing Magazine again
CSS is one of the most powerful tools that is available to web designers (if not the most powerful). With it we can completely transform the look of a website in just a couple of minutes, and without even having to touch the markup. But despite the fact that we are all well aware of its usefulness, CSS selectors are still not used to their full potential and we sometimes have the tendency to litter our HTML with excessive and unnecessary classes and ids, divs and spans.
The best way to avoid these plagues spreading in your markup and keep it clean and semantic, is by using more complex CSS selectors, ones that can target specific elements without the need of a class or an id, and by doing that keep our code and our stylesheets flexible.
Inayaili has written another article for Smashing Magazine, this time on “Taming Advanced CSS Selectors”. It’s technical and in-depth — we would recommend it for serious web designers everywhere. Her last article for Smashing Magazine called “Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3” got to number 1 on Digg and Delicious, so go take a look.
17 August, 2009
CAPTCHAs aren’t worth it
Everyone hates CAPTCHAs — those hard-to-read squiggles of text and numbers that you sometimes need to decipher before you can use a website — but now someone has done some research and it looks like they aren’t worth it. While they helped stop spam, the effect on the failure of conversions in site sign-up was worse. (via Christian)
Why support Internet Explorer 6?
Popular link sharing website Digg recently considered removing functionality from the site as they spent so much time trying to get things to work with the ancient web browser. With that in mind they did some research into their users — the findings weren’t great news for web designers. Take a look at their research results here.
Websites still not up to standard
Computerworld discusses why even in 2009, 10 years after the Web Standards Project was founded, and after huge strides from all the browser makers (including Microsoft with the release of IE8), users still find that there are major problems using websites.
The problem with Content Management Systems
A good Content Management System (CMS) can be a fantastic help for people to easily update their website while keeping design consistent and use supporting technologies (such as RSS or clean, SEO-friendly semantic code). That said, if you use a CMS limitations and costs inevitably occur -it is a case of balance and what is important for your website. For example, in some situations a website that is highly focused on marketing a product or service and needs to be highly stylised may well find a CMS a hindrance. Paul Boag discusses some of these issues in his article The 5 Hidden Costs of Running a CMS.
The problem with virus detection…
Mike Davidson from Newsvine talks about how anti-virus software regularly can create more problems than they solve. We have even had issues when users simply click on a regular drop-down menu – and then nothing happens.
The browser wars: part 57 or so
Yet another opening has occurred in the long running war of the browsers… admittedly a war not many people are that interested in anymore – instead ‘web standards’ won. But back to the war.
The most interesting news is that Google have announced a new web browser called Chrome. My favourite feature is that it has been launched via a gorgeous and quirky comic by Scott McCloud (creator of the fantastic Understanding Comics). As for persuading a significant number of regular people to actually use it, I feel it will be a hard sell. There are features that developers and geeks will appreciate (we do!), but it has been hard enough to persuade people they should move from Internet Explorer 6, which is dangerous, let alone to think about moving to yet another browser after they may have made the effort to move to Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. It is also (arguably) quite ugly, which won’t help. That said, many of the ideas behind it are very interesting from a developers point-of-view and it may well become a very interesting browser in the future.
The other news, less interesting or fun, but news that will probably have more impact on the world in a practical way, is that Internet Explorer 8 has reached the next stage of development. When it actually comes out is anyone’s guess, but it will probably be much more important to web developers in an everyday sense than Chrome will be – at least for the foreseeable future.
2 September, 2008
Basecamp to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6
37signals, a company that builds web-based applications, are to phase out support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) for their products, including Basecamp (the project management tool we use extensively to run our various projects).
In many ways we support this move. IE6 came out in August 2001: that’s almost 7 years ago. While it was a real step forward at the time it has since seriously lagged behind other web browsers. It now is responsible for creating an inordinate amount of design and development problems for people who work with the web, as well as having a wide variety of security issues. It will be a great day when the web development world can finally move on. Unfortunately we believe it could easily be another 5 years before this might be possible — there are simply too many people using it.
The percentage of people using IE6 varies widely depending on the type of website and their audience, but looking at the statistics of websites we manage, it is approximately between 15% and 35%. Clearly a very significant proportion still use IE6, and one that can not be ignored. While websites do not need to look exactly the same in each and every browser, but they should not break or fail to work.
The move by 37signals has created various issues for us:
We do not want to overly concern our clients about what web browser they use. Most people neither know nor care about what browser they are using – and why should they? We would always encourage clients to upgrade their browsers to the most recent because of the security risks, but for medium to large organisations universally upgrading their browsers can be a very complex task.
The situation could also impact on our credibility: we have recommended Basecamp as a tool, and if suddenly some of our clients have problems using it, it would reflect poorly on us. Having the situation ‘taken out of our hands’ by 37signals puts us in an uncomfortable position.
Information for clients
We recommend that clients upgrade to the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. If this is difficult due to the restrictions of IT departments, then glitches or problems with Basecamp will probably occur. Hopefully these should not cause significant or ‘fatal’ problems. Please contact us if you have any questions or experience any errors.
8 July, 2008
Flash increases its visibility
One of our major issues with Adobe’s Flash, and one of the main reasons we use it sparingly and rarely recommend it to our clients, is that it struggles to be understood by Google and other search engines. This situation has now changed with an initiative by Adobe: they have released code that makes it easier for search engines to read Flash content. This goes some way of removing our concerns.
A key problem remains though: it is still extremely hard to create ‘deep links’ into the content. For example, if this journal post was instead text inside a Flash file, Google would not be able to link to it directly. Therefore even if the text was found, Google would send you to the ‘start’ of the Flash file, forcing the user to then hunt for it. This would be annoying not only for the user, but for us as well. The key way that Google ranks content is to measure the amount of links to it, but as websites can still not link directly to it, Flash remains problematic.
1 July, 2008
Content Management Systems still suck
We regularly research Content Management Systems, and in a recent spate of Googling I came across an article by Jeffrey Veen called “Making A Better Open Source CMS” from 2004. Sadly, most of its points are still completely relevant. Three years later and it is still hard to find a system that feels it is put together with the average user in mind (i.e. not techies). While Wordpress is not in any way perfect (what is?) or powerful enough (what is, unless custom built?) for all situations, it is relatively easy to comprehend for the user, which is why we so often recommend it.
UK government site accessibility
Not the most exciting of titles, but the The Web Standards Project discusses the UK’s drive for accessibility in government websites. It is bizarre and also shocking that so many content management systems in use by government agencies, ministries and quangos seem unable to generate good clean accessible and semantic code.
Google Map Street View – an invasion of privacy?
Google’s Street View, a new Google Maps feature that uses vehicle cameras to take 360 degree street-level views of major urban areas (so far only in the US), has set the Web buzzing with talk about its privacy implications. The photos are so detailed that one lady, whose cat Monty is clearly visible sitting in her living room window, contacted Google and asked for the image to be removed. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged,” said the perplexed Ms. Kalin-Casey from Oakland, CA.
Websites are making the most of the images captured too. The Wired blog has started a contest on the most interesting photos found using the new Google Tool that now includes sunbathing coeds, alleged drug deals, and the Google van itself. And the site LaudonTech.com showed an image of a man entering a pornographic bookstore in Oakland, but his face was not visible.
It does raise an interesting question: should Google be allowed to publish detailed intimate snap shots on the internet of people’s private lives? The images are taken in a public place so legally Google is doing nothing wrong – but is it right ethically? Well, we can’t answer that. But what we can do is marvel at Google’s technology.
6 June, 2007
Scaling web communities
Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! discusses how web communities scale. Yahoo! should know after all, as they’ve spent a fortune creating and buying a plenty of social sites. Found via Subtraction.
WYSIWYG vs. What You See Is What You Mean
Browser-based WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editors used in Content Management Systems (including ‘TinyMCE’ in Wordpress) rarely work as well as everyone would hope giving a false sensation of Word-style control. Take a look at this article discussing the issue and that proposes WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean).
Blood Diamond Action and Amazon S3
Our latest project, the Blood Diamond Action website, has just gone live. The website publicises the issues surrounding the film Blood Diamond that stars Leonardo diCaprio amongst others. Working again with Provokateur, the site is backed by Amnesty International USA and Global Witness.
The build of the site was fine. However, our problem was determining the potential traffic to the site. The film will be launched in the US in December and the UK early next year. This will raise the profile of the issue greatly and with it the profile of the site. The potential number of visitors to the site globally could be quite large.
It’s always great to have lots of visitors to a website. But it is, of course, not as simple as that. The website is designed for broadband and includes a 9MB video download. The main Flash-based element is approximately 190k. While these are not enormous files, a large number of global visitors could cause it problems. Even if the majority of visitors don’t download the video, the required bandwidth could become very costly and a surge in visitor numbers could even bring it down.
Our solution to this was to move all the key files to Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), part of Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services use infrastructure that Amazon has already set up for their own products, and are now offering to other companies. Therefore, not only are we tapping into a very reliable system that one of the largest web companies in the world is using, it is also easy to use, very cheap and you only pay for what is used. So if a large number of people visit the site or the expected visitors don’t arrive, it won’t be a problem.
Update: The website is featured in an article in today’s LA Times (16th November 2006).
15 November, 2006