Archive for the ‘standards’ Category

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Developing for Opera

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

I’ve recently put a lot of time into Zemanta stuff working in Opera. There are a few things I’ve noticed that really bother me as a developer when developing for Opera.

OperaImage via Wikipedia

  1. The easiest way to be sure you’re getting a non cached file is to actually have it open in a tab and reload that tab. Emptying the cache does not seems to work as I’ve found out while caught in an alert loop.[1]

  2. I found the “don’t run scripts on this page anymore” checkbox in the alert box fascinating, but less so after I clicked it and couldn’t find a way to turn scripts back on for that specific page. Fortunately restarting the browser did the job.

  3. We load a loader.js that in turn loads other Javascript and CSS files. Unfortunately it seems I have to manually load these files in tabs in order to get them to work – even though I can see them in Dragonfly when I click them they seem to be blank. When I reload, the content appears. After that they work as expected. But even then I don’t see them loaded in the Network tab of Dragonfly.

  4. Can’t get the CSS loaded from a script to work. I don’t have any ideas, they just don’t work. I don’t see them in Dragonfly network tab (but I don’t see Javascript files either and they work).

  5. When using Dragonfly I cannot get out of the inspect DOm mode so I can’t use the site to do something while watching what is happening in the DOM – what you must do is switch to a different tab, do your stuff and then switch back.

  6. When you look at errors on a WordPress page Opera spits out loads of “-… is an unknown property” – thanks very much but properties that start with a – are supposed to be unknown to most of the browsers as they are vendor specific. This means that finding the error you’re looking for is much more difficult than it should be.

What I really hate the most when working with Opera is the lack of information about what is going on. They’ve added some really nice features in the recent releases but it is still quite far away from being a browser that people develop for. In this way it is sort of similar to IE but IE is a must and Opera isn’t…

If any of these are my mistakes I’d be glad if someone set me straight and taught me to use Opera as a developer. I bet others would too.

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  1. When you have a loop that alerts something and you keep getting the alert – the only way of getting out is removing the alert from code, emptying cache and trying to hit reload between alerts. In Opera this does not seem to work as the only way to get the new file is to reload the file and you can’t do that between alerts. back
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Posted in browsers, companies, css, html, ie, javascript, opera, software, standards, technology, thoughts, zemanta | 1 Comment »

Speaking about the web of data

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Today at 19:00 CET I’ll be speaking at a local web meet-up about the web of data. There’ll be a live feed of the talk available and since I’ll be speaking in English you can tune it. This is a quick translation of the abstract posted on Slovenian sites:

Numerous services are emerging on the web that provide data in a computer friendly form through APIs, microformats, feeds,… Even your blog is actually a database as it syndicates its content via feeds and new posts trigger a ping you can subscribe to.

This fact opens new ways of collaboration – so called mash-ups, but this isn’t really a new concept. What’s new about it is the fact that we don’t use this word anymore as all the new services are some sort of a mash-up leveraging existing services. But accessing data is not the only way to leveraging these services – it’s becoming increasingly easy to create an application that lives in other applications without their approval through browser extensions and bookmarklets.

Marko Mrdjenovič from Zemanta will talk about what you can do to make your site more mash-up friendly and why that’s becoming increasingly important. As a developer I’ll also present what options you have and give a few tips on what to do and what to avoid when developing these kind of apps.

If you have any questions during the talk use twitter to tell me and I’ll try to answer them. Or put them in the comments.

Update: The video is now online. It’s in English so go watch it and tell me what you think.

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Posted in ajax, browsers, companies, css, design, events, firefox, frameworks, ie, interface, javascript, microformats, openid, opera, posh, safari, software, spletne urice, standards, technology, zemanta | No Comments »

Firefox 3 Release Event 2008

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

So I’ll be talking at Firefox 3 Release Event at Kiberpipa today. Feel free to come listen to the talks or just come to the party. If you can’t come you can watch the whole thing online (the link is likely to be available somewhere on the event page).

Posted in browsers, css, design, events, firefox, firefox3releaseparty, general, html, javascript, microformats, services, software, standards, technology, whatwg | No Comments »

Review: Adria Airways and NLB

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Recently two more big and very frequented Slovenian sites relaunched and I think they too deserve a mention.

Adria Airways

The first page I want to put to the test is the new page of the first and the biggest Slovenian airline. It was recently launched by my ex colleagues at Parsek as the second version to be made there. The first edition was designed and prepared in another agency and Parsek only did the backend while the new version is all Parsek. To be fair the biggest and the most important part — the reservation module — is still made by the french company Amadeus.

The new design tries to incorporate a leaner navigation with less elements even though it became wider, almost reaching the 1000px mark. The front page is much more sales oriented, displaying a lot of useful information. I can’t get past the color scheme that is really too dull. There are quite a few validation errors, the ones in HTML mostly due to non–escaped ampersands, while those in CSS are just sloppy coding without checking the validator.

I was surprised to see that some stuff doesn’t work well with Firefox 3 and Safari 3 even though the first one isn’t released yet (will be tomorrow) and the second one doesn’t have a lot of users in Slovenia. I’d still stick to what Yahoo! has to say in their Graded Browser support table for browser support.

I was positively surprised at how well some inside pages are designed down to the last dot and icon and negatively how bad the pages that “only” present CMS content look. I don’t know whose fault this is and I don’t even care, it doesn’t matter for the end user. I’m sure the guys at Parsek will check these pages out and try to make changes that will make them better. When I first saw the design while I was still at Parsek I wasn’t sure if the title on the right would work but now that I’m surfing the page I actually think it does. There is one problem there though – if you visit this page (screenshot) you’ll see that you can see its title “About us” four times in a very small area. It’s nice to know where you are but isn’t this a little bit too much?

NLB

The next big redesign is the biggest Slovenian bank which redesigned their site after quite a while. I don’t really know what to say about the redesign – the last one was horrendous so this one is easy on the eye. It too got wider and restructured so people can find relevant information easier. The home page lists all the products for residents and businesses so you can access them directly.

If the design got overhauled the backend didn’t — if it did it got it fashion tips from the 90s. Validation returns a lot of errors and — prepare for a shock — the encoding is iso-8859-2. The number of non semantic elements is significant and inline scripts are there too (<SCRIPT language=JavaScript>).

The most interesting thing about the new page is the fact that it now uses “friendly URLs”. And how utterly broken they are. You could also say this page is a textbook case for how wrong things can go when you don’t think about them. So you’ll have two pages, one at /nalozbe-v-vrednostne-papirje and the other at /nalozbe-v-vrednostne-papirje1. I have no idea how that tells you anything about how the content behind these links is different. It would tell you more if the first was prefixed with /residential and the second one with /businesses.

Another funny thing I noticed is how banners are designed to look as if they weren’t images but rather just HTML parts of the page. The reason I noticed is that I was on the Mac while checking the page and since font rendering is different it looks really weird. I think I might have seen the same difference on Vista with ClearType on.

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Posted in blurps, companies, design, flash, fowd, fowdlondon08, futura10, general, html, ie7, leweb3, liffe, microsoft, openid, php, redesign, safari, standards, vista, zlitt | 2 Comments »

Redesigned media

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

A couple of Slovenian newspaper sites redesigned recently (today?). I got the news on Twitter. I’ll try to review what they’ve done1.

Delo

Newspaper vendor, Paddington, London, February 2005Image via WikipediaFirst notified by had, I was eager to see the new design and code. The design is very very wide — a good link to the newspaper that is probably the widest/biggest in Slovenia. At 1024×768 you see all the content, but the banner on the side is missing — I hope they subtract these users when selling ad space (or they should get ToboAds that actually count only the ones that are seen by the user using advanced JavaScript).

The design is boring with only the RSS icons giving it some color. It gives no feedback on links, the font on the front page is too small (11px) and it doesn’t hold its text–resizing well. The content is a bit hard to read with the font size at 12px, width of 600px (50em) and line–height at normal. There doesn’t seem to be any vertical rhythm applied. It’s also very hard to figure out where you are in the structure since some of the navigational elements seem to vary in color for no apparent reason.

The underlying code is disappointing. It’s really something that you would just delete and start over. It suffers from inline styles, divitis, classitis, inline scripts, validation errors (163 for the front page) and overall ugliness. The front page needs 67 requests and 724kB to load in 3.24 seconds (there are a few banners on the site though). Disappointing but expected is the fact that they don’t use Microformats but I was positively surprised that you can use OpenID to log in — I’ve never left a comment on local news sites because you need to register with each one. And I never do.

Mladina

Posted by Tomaž Štolfa it’s actually not available yetavailable now through www.mladina.si but can be accessed directly through www.mladina.si/dnevnik/. It’s a nice page but with a shift in concept — the magazine is a weekly publication while the online edition will publish daily (or probably all the time). It too is wider than the previous version with a width of 1024 leaning on the left side of the browser.

The design is nice and gives good feedback in use. It’s made on a simple 5—column grid with the 5th column being used only in the head and for the banner. The only thing that is quite annoying is the banner at the top that moves the whole page down another 90px for no good reason (at least not for the users?). The content is much easier to read with a 12px font size, 1.5em line–height at 563px width (~47em). It also makes use of few different typeface which adds to the overall experience of surfing. Vertical rhythm in text is achieved through crappy code with paragraphs being spaced with <br /> elements.

The code is nothing to look at. It has 71 validation error on the front page with the first ones starting in the head element (unclosed meta elements). It too sports inline styles and scripts (which are at least wrapped in CDATA) and it too suffers from a heavy infection of divitis. It even has some <center> tags that I haven’t seen for quite some time now. The front page loads in 2.54 seconds for 58 requests and 582kB with all requests except Google Analytics going to the same domain. Microformats are nonexistent and so is OpenID — no need to have registration if you can’t leave comments2.

  1. No need for a disclaimer anymore — I don’t know who designed or coded these pages and I don’t work at their competitors. back
  2. WHAT? Isn’t this supposed to be the most open and future thinking newspaper? back
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Posted in css, design, html, interface, layout, microformats, openid, posh, redesign, standards, technology, typography | 3 Comments »

Web Typography Sucks

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

The Elements of Typographic StyleImage via WikipediaThat’s the title of the talk by the first foreign speaker1 at Spletne urice — Richard Rutter from Clearleft, who’s really a great guy and a great speaker.

Web Typography is one of the topics I really care about and I think it’s an issue that iswas a bit overlooked in our local community. After my talk last year about fonts and possible ways to use / embed them I am happy that we got Richard to come to Slovenia to talk about this — who could be better than the author of The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web.

The talk went great2 (Cyberpipe filled up after the first few minutes) and it was followed by a good Q&A session. In the session I mentioned that a font foundry released a font that is free for use on the web and thus free for embeding — the foundry is called FDI fonts.info — you can read their press release or download Graublau Sans Web and Logotypia Pro for free. After the talk we went for a beer in Metropol (just above Cyberpipe) and then another one later on in the city center.

All in all it was great having Richard here and I guess he liked it too. I hope he’ll put in a good word for us and we’ll get even more foreign speakers to come to Ljubljana and share their in–depth knowledge of specific areas of webdesign and development3.

I would also like to thank our silent sponsor Parsek Interactive that took care of the air fare and the hotel bill and also Zemanta that shared their work space with Richard today4.

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  1. Technically Daniel P. Fischer was the first, but he gave his talk as part of the HAIP festival and his stay and talk was organized by the Cyberpipe crew. So what I’m trying to say is that Richard was the first speaker I organized by myself. back
  2. If you missed the talk the slides are here and the video should be online in a couple of weeks. back
  3. Any volunteer speakers? Any suggestions? Sponsors maybe? back
  4. Did you notice that I tried to punctuate with the correct apostophes, en dashes, em dashes, elipses’… It’s not that easy — somebody should create a WordPress plugin for this. back
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Posted in companies, css, design, events, html, layout, parsek, spletne urice, standards, technology, typography, zemanta | 1 Comment »

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