Five by Five

As developers we seem to naturally always want to be on the cutting edge, the internet therefore often seems to be the best place to be to scratch this itch. Whilst this is largely true we also have a bit of a large downside to deal with as well, the horror that is legacy issues. Let me show you a practical example, I was recently reading a horror story of a feature from Javascript extraordinaire John Resig. Essentially it boils down to a feature which was developed rather short-sightedly a number of years ago. Because this is a long standing feature it is therefore potentially utilised in billions of web pages. Can we fix this “bug”? The short answer is unfortunately no, fixing this “bug” will potentially break far too many sites. What we are left with are legacy problems which we have to work with. It is the same issue as having to deal with the blight of IE6, we all know it is broken, we developers hate it with a passion, but we can’t do a lot about it. There’s a bleeding edge of development we’d all love to be working on but it is tantalisingly out of reach because of the legacy we all live with.

I have long been of the opinion of - well that sucks but hey what can we do? Lately though I have been wondering how long we can continue working like this? I shudder to think how much money the economy bleeds through supporting these legacy issues, I know we spend a large proportion of front-end development time wrestling with cross browser support. What if we just said no, we will no longer do that. We will no longer accommodate these issues. I can see two things happening here, first let’s take the bug mentioned above. Let’s say we will say no more to DOM0 expando properties, from now on they are gone. What will happen is that we may break a ton of code, but is this such a bad thing? If the code is that important wouldn’t it be worth fixing for the greater good? Don’t break the web has long been a mantra from Microsoft, yet even they have seen the folly in this approach and in their next release of IE8 they have opted for standards which will potentially break a lot of existing code.

The second thing I could see happening if we were to say no to legacy issues is pretty much what the concept of progressive enhancement is built on. We say ok we know there are legacy issues, but accommodating these legacy issues is too much work. As long as the application works, if it isn’t the best experience, hey we can live with it. People affected may have an option here, users may be able upgrade their browsers to remove the legacy issues and probably should be actively encouraged to do so. It would be a bold move for sure, however if you have followed the development technique of progressive enhancement you are not actively excluding people.

Another thought I had (or more likely read somewhere else and took as my own) was updating some of the legacy issues which are actually bugs through automatic updates. Browser vendors fix security bugs, why not fix layout bugs as well? Whether this would work or not I’m not sure. If people don’t upgrade their browsers, they’re probably unable or unlikely to install automatic updates. Still it could potentially get around one of the problems highlighted here, enterprises could choose not to install such updates and then their internal applications wouldn’t get affected. Or imagine being able to switch your layout engine or javascript engine on the fly, an update for IE6/7 could be created which did just this. Ok my brain just overloaded with the potential confusion this could cause.

What we really need is a brilliantly simple solution to the legacy issues, anybody?

I’ve tried to resist the urge to write a post on the latest flavour of the month Google’s venture into the Browser market Chrome, guess my resistance isn’t that great. Being hailed by some as a market changer I have a somewhat more sceptical view of what impact Chrome will have on the market. Whilst there are obviously some good innovations in the browser, the one process per tab thing being in my mind the most notable, what impact will Chrome really have? This has been quite a point of debate here in the Five by Five Tech Team. I decided to give it some time (well 3 weeks!) and have a look at some of the stats I have available to me. Taking a sample of a few sites with widely different audiences I thought I’d take a look at the impact Chrome has had.

Using a UK based consumer site, a European based consumer site, and a Global based product site to give a relatively wide spectrum of sites, here are the last three weeks stats:

So what does this tell us? Well not a lot really, its still early days and the stats are from a very narrow time frame. The most interesting thing I can see is when you factor in the type of audience. The UK based consumer site is not for a very tech savvy crowd, nearly 90% of users are using IE, here Chrome has made little difference to the browser share, 0.3% which users these were previously is hard to tell, they could have been IE or Firefox. However if you switch over to the Global site which is very tech savvy, high percentages of Firefox and Opera, Chrome is already at 3.2%, however it would seem that most of these users were previously Firefox users, perhaps a worrying sign for Mozilla?

I can’t say I am surprised by these stats and to be honest, it’s what I’d expect given that the only users of Chrome will more than likely be the tech savvy early adopters. Google’s challenge will be to get the browser out to the masses, and if anyone is going to succeed in this it’s them. What impact overall they have remains to be seen, as I’ve said before, one of the keys to breaking Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market is if they can also get into the enterprise market, something which Mozilla is probably still failing to do.

Even if Chrome doesn’t manage to become a mainstream browser, hopefully at least it will help drive innovation further in the browser market, something which has been a very hot topic this year.

This is a bit of a followup to my post in July about ‘Standards still on the horizon’. Given that according to some figures IE6 still commands about 36% of browser market share is it reasonable to stop supporting the browser given such a high percentage of potential users. The answer in my mind was a resounding no - it’s a simple numbers game. However after having read an article yesterday on Sitepoint I’m no longer convinced that argument is so simple.

This article suggests that perhaps a high percentage of traffic that is atributed to IE6 could in fact be bots masquerading as IE6. SPAM and malicious bots could conceivably represent a high volume of traffic on the internet and as such could well be skewing the IE6 browser share. Of course the other numbers still hold true, with corporate users and users unable to upgrade for whatever reason still commanding a high enough percentage of the market to still support the browser.

Food for thought though!

A bit late to the party on this one, but hey better late than never! bbc.co.uk is one of the most visited sites in the UK and rightly so. It is a virtual treasure trove of information and fun. I have to admit I spend probably more time on it than is good for me, in particular the sports pages! It is also a site that I have long admired because of the fact they have always had clear and defined guidelines in developing and managing content for the site. In short it is a site I’d love to work on more given the opportunity.

Even though they have clear and defined guidelines and have in the past been a shining beacon of web site design, in the age of web 2.0 bbc.co.uk as a whole was becoming a bit stale. However because of the fact so many people visit it I can quite confidently say that most people will have noticed that the site, or more accurately sites, have changed quite a bit this year, and mostly for the better.

Let’s start at the beginning, the BBC homepage. I hope I’m right in saying this was the first part of the site to get an upgrade, and boy what an upgrade. I’m going to put aside for the moment the visual refresh and pick up on that later, instead I am going to focus on the level of customisation the page offers. This page gives you the user the control over what you consider most important, and therefore what you would like to see when you visit the page. Information has been divided up into modules most of which you can add/remove/rearrange to your hearts content. Don’t car about children’s content, remove it, want to see more stories about science and technology add more. In addition to this you can also set you location which is then used by the various modules to offer up more relevant content to you. Set your location to Southampton and you get to see weather in Southampton and news from Hampshire. This is obviously not a new concept and customisable home pages like Netvibes and iGoogle have been around for a number of years, but somehow I feel the BBC have done it in a very clear, usable and under stated way. I have heard some call for the ability to add your own modules, I for one am against this idea and would much prefer the control of what can appear to sit in the BBC’s hands. This kind of functionality is best left for sites which prime focus is such functionality.

OK so back to the visual refresh, the first thing that popped straight out at me is that it is wider. This to me heralds a new age for general web design. For quite a while now we as an agency have in general, although not exclusively, designed our sites for 1024 and above resolutions. That decision though was more a reflection of our target audiences, it has been accepted that in general our users had higher spec machines. There has however always been an argument that by designing for this we are cutting out the experience of a percentage of the audience who have a lower resolution. The BBC’s decision to move to this resolution says to me that the general population (and not just our select audiences) of the UK is browsing at this resolution, and if that’s not a ringing endorsement then I don’t know what is.

On the technical side the site has switched from a table based layout to a strict XHTML semantic mark-up standard. The new design also gives creative’s a far greater degree of flexibility than the old template system. The extra width allows for the use of more white space which is essential in pages where there is a large amount of information to display. Overall its dragged the site into the web 2.0 era.

To complement the new design the BBC have released a visual language guide which is nothing short of superb and spells out concepts and guidelines for design that I have long struggled and failed to put across. Anybody out there who is interested in applying a little science to their creativity should read this guide and indeed many of the public documents that form the guidelines for developing to BBC standards. Quite a benchmark.

So as you can tell I like what the BBC is doing, but are they doing anything wrong? Of course nobody’s perfect My main criticism is that I am having to discover these upgrades myself. If the BBC team happen to write about an update all well and good but I as a user need to discover these upgrades myself or stumble across them. It would be good to have a feed of latest developments, or even better a homepage module that described site upgrades! I recently commented about this on one of the blogs and got pointed at this (non BBC) resource. A good start but I’d prefer something a bit more official. This brings me on to my second criticism which is the amount of time it takes for these upgrades to roll out. The sport site was updated a couple of months ago but there are still many parts of the site which are in the old page style, or has content in the old style dropped into the new template. Surely it can’t be that hard to update them all, but then again I don’t work for the BBC so am no authority on this. Perhaps information on when upgrades are due could be added to a recent upgrades feed?

So the future looks exciting for the BBC sites, we can look forward to more developments to bring all sections of the site in line with the new visual language, DNA anyone? More customisation probably on pages other than the homepage. And hopefully to us as an agency more opportunity to work with the BBC

2008 is looking like a good year for standards, or is it? The browser wars continue to rumble on, Firefox, Opera and Safari all have recent updates which push their standards compliance forward yet another notch. IE continues to lag behind, but has a new browser round the corner with better, if not ground breaking, support. Could development finally be getting easier for us developers? I’d like to think it was, but the sad reality is that even with all these advancements in support it will be a few years yet before we can reap the rewards.

Even though it is two years since IE7 was launched and IE8 will hopefully be released at the back end of this year or early next it doesn’t mean a great deal to the now. IE6 is still around and is likely to be around for some time to come. The simple reason behind this is that IE6 still commands a high percentage of browser share, likely due to corporations who have applications that are dependent on IE6 features and people who are unable to update IE6 for lets say “legal” reasons. The lack of adoption of Vista contributes to this, all of which means that although it is a blot on the browser landscape IE6 will continue to be a thorn in our sides.

It would take a very bold client to ignore such a high percentage of their potential users, especially when one of the users tends to be themselves or their boss. So for all the strides browser vendors are making in standards support, if we cannot reliably use it, the frustration remains! Some people are making tentative steps in the “right” direction, 37 signals, for instance have announced that from August they are dropping full support for IE6 for some of their products. Unfortunately cases such as this are very much in the minority.

So the future still promises to be rosier, but for the moment it’s still a distant dream…

Information tagging is not not a new concept and in social media it is very common place. Effective tagging of content can be both tricky and time consuming and in some cases subjective. It is also a real pain to do if you have a lot of content which needs tagging but hasn’t been tagged from the start, unfortunately this blog falls into that category. Clearly there is a problem here which is begging to be solved! And of course it has been solved, well at least there is a service which is attempting to solve the problem.

OpenCalais is a new service offering from Thomas Reuters which in their words:

…automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it…

In simpler terms it analyses your writing and proposes tags which are suitable for the information. This simplifies things for you as you don’t need to think up tags, tags become consistent and overall just easier to apply.

Sounds fantastic, and it is, you just need to be able to integrate the service into your content generation software. This blog is a fine example of content generation software, powered by Wordpress and with a tagging mechanism already built into it. All that is needed is to take the tagging mechanism and integrate it with the OpenCalais service. Step forward Tagaroo, a plug-in available for Wordpress which does exactly this.

With a little technical knowledge I was able to install this plug-in to our blog in under 15 minutes, and bingo, it was up and running. Less than another 15 minutes later I had tagged the last 25 posts that had been written with the help of Tagaroo. Still work to be done of course but the process has been made considerably easier!

Tagaroo doesn’t stop there either, the plugin also takes the suggested tags and performs a search against flickr to suggest images tagged similarly to your content, instant visual context. Ok actually here I didn’t find the images as relevant but I like the feature concept!

Overall a fantastic service and a fantastic plug-in. And of course this post has been tagged with the assistance of Tagaroo.

• OpenCalais
• Tagaroo

Social media is currently big news in, well, social circles. There are now multitudes of sites on the net which are dedicated to the social aspects of the web. There are so many different sites - Facebook, MySpace, Digg, reddit, Twitter, del.cio.us, and many many more - it is hard to know what each site is for and really how useful each one is.

In the web age there is so much information, produced at a staggering rate, on the internet that keeping up is hard. Signal-to-noise ratios make it difficult to know which information is worth your time and which is, simply put, noise. Social media sites can help here, they can act as a kind of filter for the information out there by allowing you to essentially listen to others, be they friends, colleagues or industry experts, in order to promote content which hopefully should be relevant. Potentially a great solution, problem is that now there are so many social media channels that once again the signal-to-noise ratio is interfering again.

I use quite a few social media sites so thought I would show how I use each service for a particular function that keeps me up to date with industry chatter but also allows me to keep in touch with some of the noise from outside work.

RSS

First off is not a social media site as such but more of a service that the majority of sites now offer. RSS allows me to subscribe to regular content from a large number of services which I consider to provide high quality material. My RSS reader of choice - IE7 - looks after everything for me and notifies me that there is new content from a good source which I can read at my leisure. I have gone for a desktop-based solution rather than a web-based solution as I’m mostly desk bound but there are many different solutions out there.

Digg

Digg is a site I have been visiting for a number of years and it pioneered the social news movement. Stories are divided into a large number of topics and people vote on what they consider to be a newsworthy story. When enough people have voted a story becomes popular and is promoted to the front page. If you read the front page you can almost guarantee the stories are good quality and worth your time, comments are usually worth a laugh or two as well.

Digging stories yourself can act as a kind of bookmarking system however I don’t tend to use the service for this, I digg stories more as an expression that I found a particular story good. Digg also allows you to follow friends on the site, the idea being that if your friend found it interesting that you would probably find it interesting too. If you choose a select few like minded friends you are essentially promoting content to each other.

del.icio.us

Like I said I don’t use digg for book marking, for this I use del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. I use this service not for content discovery but more as a store of sites which has specific information that I would find useful for my work. If I book mark something it will usually be for a page I would visit more than once.

Again with del.icio.us you have the opportunity to make friends and follow each others bookmarks. This for me is not an important feature so I just have a select few friends but I don’t follow their bookmarks too closely.

twitter

Twitter is a microblogging platform and it is only just recently that I have found a good use for it. Twitter allows you to make small statements on a very regular basis, it could very well be likened to the status update on Facebook. There is however a much better use of this service. I use it to follow the industry experts who often use the service to highlight newsworthy material. I don’t find it very useful to follow friends, but people who I have never met, and am unlikely to ever meet to call them friends. In turn I would like to use the service myself to highlight high quality material, with the occasional update on how I’m feeling

Facebook

Probably the most hyped site for the past year, this is the site where perhaps you can be the most social. Hundreds of friends (I wish!), a way to keep up with people you don’t see often enough because of hectic lifestyles! This is the service where I can switch off from the professional uses and use simply for fun. I have a MySpace page as well but I never got serious about it, Facebook is where it’s at! A true social network, in the social sense, but not much use to me in my professional life.

friendfeed

So as can be seen from above there are so many sites which I and some of my friends use on a regular basis. Some people may use alternative services for a similar function, how do you keep up with what everyone is using, and how do others keep up with you? Friendfeed provides a summary view of everything you publish on the net. It also allows you to follow others to see everything they are doing in a summary view. I once again use this for a select few friends, I don’t want the signal-to-noise ratio to be destroyed here as well!

So as can be seen there are a lot of facets to the social landscape, but they are important tools for me and could be for you too. I recommend getting involved in them - join the social revolution. I’ll leave a few links to my profiles below, feel free to follow me or become a friend!

• http://digg.com/users/cs96acb
• http://del.icio.us/suicide_al
• http://twitter.com/suicide_al
• http://friendfeed.com/suicideal

It seems that our industry is in ball pit fever, as I reported earlier this year last.fm created a ball pit at work. Well it seems the ball pit fever has spread to XKCD. Yet more evidence that we need a ball pit here…

[Update] Seems I should do more research… last.fm were in fact following XKCD’s lead, regardless the movement is gathering momentum!

I tend to subscribe to quite a few sites on a regular basis and have quite a few RSS feeds in my reader of choice. I have quite a broad range of topics I like to follow, but sometimes I come across a site where there is really only one bit I want to follow, but the site has only one feed url split into categories. This presents me with a problem as I only really want to visit the feed when there is a story from the category I want to follow. My feed reader will tell me when there are new items in the feed but not when there are new items just from my category in the feed. In this situation I have not subscribed to the feed and just visit the site periodically if I remember.

Yesterday I stumbled upon one such site. A colleague sent me a link to a site which has a segment called “Zero Punctuation”. After watching this segement and laughing so much I almost cried I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this before, it was a regular segment, lets subscribe to this feed. But no, not that easy, the site only had a general feed. Another site to try and remember to visit.

After my exclamation of dismay Ben, who I sit next to, suggested why not use Yahoo Pipes to customise the feed to my liking. What a brilliant suggestion, I had wanted to try out pipes for a while but hadn’t had a good reason. Today I set about the task of creating this feed and it turned out to be incredibly simple. After logging into the site here are the steps I went through to create my feed.

1. Add a Fetch Feed Module and enter the feed url.

2. Add a filter module to site

3. Link up the modules

4. Save the pipe

It was that simple. By choosing to get this pipe as RSS I had an alternative feed URL which I could use in my reader which gave me exactly what I wanted. It was so easy I created another one for another site which I wanted to subscribe to but up until now was unable to. Here are the URLs to my new feeds, the content of which are not very work friendly, so you have been warned! They will also probably be empty because they are so periodical that there is often no content in the feed which matches my criteria, rest assured though if there was your feed reader would tell you…

• Zero Punctuation
• The Register: BOFH

I have just seen a blog post from the guys at last.fm which left me thinking back to the old days of the dot-com boom. The guys decided, over a couple of drinks, that’d be a great idea to fill a meeting room up with the types of balls you’d find in a ball pit in Butlins! All I can say guys is I salute you and do you have any tips I can use to persuade my boss this is a good use of resource