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?

Rounded corners are the bane of a web develope’s existance, a seemingly innocent splash of design flair responsible for countless tears and tantrums. It seems laughable that such a group of hotshot professionals would be phased by something as simple as rounded corners, but there’s an undeniable truth belying this source of heartache - the web is made from boxes - big, ugly, right-angled boxes and softening up the corners requires a disproportionately large amount of time and effort for your average lazy developer, not to mention the internal demons that developers have to wrestle with as divitis, extraneous images and javascript hacks creep their infectious way in to otherwise perfect Web pages.

Thankfully help is at hand courtesy of the W3C, an organisation of egg-heads responsible for standarising the Web. The specification for the next version of CSS, the de-facto choice for styling webpages, includes a module outlining a wonderful new property known as ‘border-radius’, to keep things simple I won’t go in to the details, suffice to say that this one-liner will magically soften the hard edges of the Web and wow us all with it’s possibilities.

Of course nothing ever goes to plan quite how it should, and as the W3C drag their heels over ratifying this new specification the browser vendors have taken it upon themselves to introduce their own mechanisms for creating rounded corners using CSS, and of course in the spirit of competition each do it differently (or not at all, Microsoft I’m looking at you). The end result is that we’ve gone from having no easy way to create rounded corners to having three different ways which means that for maximum rounding value all three ways must be implemented.

This shocking echo back to the browser wars of the nineties is an excellent example of why it’s important to have Web standards and browser vendors to implement them, if only to avoid the games of oneupmanship that the browser vendors played in the past. Unfortunately the huge scale of the CSS 3 specification and the glacial pace at which the W3C moves means that the threat of another browser war within our lifetimes is very real.

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!