What we got:
What we didn’t get:,
What I didn’t check but I think it’s safe to say we didn’t get:
Another thing we lost in the transition is the TV guide. I don’t know where they lost it but you can get it here.
Source: ShutterstockA big Slovenian media house is announcing a relaunch of the biggest Slovenian web page (according to Alexa). Since they own two TV channels they’re advertising it with a short commercial that shows a glimpse of the new design. Another hint is a very very small, almost unreadable banner on their front page which “reads e-volution / evolution continues / next stage in [4] days”. What I want to know is whether it is to be an evolution in technology. That’s why I’ll list a few things I’d want if I was the client:
The current page sports a fat table layout. The time of lame browsers and the need to create such a layout has passed and using semantic HTML for all the elements is the standard now. As a fan of XHTML Strict I’d also opt for that, allowing users to use the page as a source of content.
The current page is 800px wide with a skyscraper banner on the right. I think a wider default with a hint of elasticity (that would make it almost or completely useful on smaller screens) would be a great choice. If elastic is too difficult I’d opt for 960px.
The current homepage needs more than 180 request and more than 700kB to download. It takes about 5 seconds to do all this. I’m sure that with a little smarter use of CSS and image sprites these numbers could be much lower. A smart thing would be to move the static content to static.24ur.com so the browser could download all the resources faster. I’d also want the styles to be on the top and the scrips on the bottom. And since they use their own system to deploy banners I would expect them to use WEDJE to deploy them without stopping the site.
Since all the content on a certain page is actually a news feed I would want them to use the hAtom microformat, with hCard for people and hCalendar for events and the TV schedule also possible. There’s no need to use propriatary format in the age of interoperability.
I don’t think they should offer blogs, but it would be nice if they had a way to embed their content into blogs commenting on the current events. It would also be great if news posts would allow trackbacks so other people could see who blogged about the news.
I’ve noticed lately that when they have a few heavy banners that it’s important to close the tab the page is in to get the full power out of my computer. This could easily be solved with a screen saver JavaScript that would hide all the banners when a user doesn’t interact with it for some time.
With OpenID providers around every corner I really don’t see why anybody would want me to register on their page anymore.
Can you think of anything else?
Zemanta, a Slovenian start-up that got into seedcamp, moved to London for a few months and came back a few months ago launched their service at Spletne urice yesterday. The service that bares the name of the company helps you enrich the blog posts you’re writing. What you need to do is download their browser extension (only Firefox currently supported) and a box will appear in your favorite blogging tool (WordPress, Blogger, Typepad currently supported) that makes adding relevant images, links and related articles to the post a one-click operation.
I like the technology and I think it will make the life of an ordinary blogger a whole lot easier. What I don’t like that much is the HTML they produce in the blogposts. I understand the dilemmas they have with all the themes and platforms they need to support but adding that much style attributes is really not nice.
Disclaimer: I’ve cleaned up the HTML in this post, to see the output check the demo.
There’s a paragraph in the CSS specification regarding the background property that states the following:
For HTML documents, however, we recommend that authors specify the background for the BODY element rather than the HTML element. User agents should observe the following precedence rules to fill in the background: if the value of the ‘background’ property for the HTML element is different from ‘transparent’ then use it, else use the value of the ‘background’ property for the BODY element. If the resulting value is ‘transparent’, the rendering is undefined.
This might lead to a surprise when trying to add a background on top of what you have on the body element – when you add a background property to the HTML element everything will shift. You can observe this in most browsers on the links below.
html {}
body {background:#fcc;}html {background:#ccf;}
body {background:#fcc;}It seems you really have to add a semantically meaningless element…
I’ve been trying to ignore this issue since I doubted I could have added anything to the debate.
I understand Microsoft, I first saw Chris speak in London and met him later at Mix07 at the POSH table. I can’t say I know what’s going on in his mind but from what I gathered he has a job many of us would not even want. How do you promote standards without breaking the internet – not only stuff other people made but also pages that are made by your own software (think not only FrontPage but also SharePoint) or networks you yourself need to maintain.
What Eric did to prevent a flame war between web developers was amazing. If all the discussions around the development and progress of web related technologies were this civil we’d probably already be using HTML 5 and CSS 3.
Broken by Jeremy Keith outlines the main problem with the technique – you have to use it to disable it. Pardon my language here, but that’s plain stupid.
Or is it?
Microsoft does not want support calls about IE8 breaking pages and they don’t want calls about their SharePoint breaking (believe me, it will). There is no way of knowing when the new IE8 engine should be used. There’s also no way of them saying “Hey guys, change your page for it to work in IE8”, since they’d ultimately be saying “We need to roll a SharePoint update for this.” If you’re making a page for IE8 you can just add this as you make the page.
What we need to achieve is that the feature is there to be used but the default for the rendering is IE8 or more generally the latest version of the browser we’re using. To put it another way I think that IE=edge should be the default.
IE is famous for it’s yellow status bar. I know people don’t usually see this bar even when it does appear but how about using a semi reliable logic to define whether to render in IE8 or IE7 (think Date header, Generator META tag, HTML features) accompanied with a bar like this:
If the META header would be added it would work as described. If it wasn’t it would check a Microsoft provided and internally updated list of set page-rendering pairs (per domain?). If there’s still nothing found we enter the fuzzy logic that is biased to present the page in the latest IE8 rendering. If the fuzzy logic decides that IE7 should be used it displays the infamous yellow bar.
Let’s assume that usually pages that are “broken” are broken all over the domain. If this is enough we can use a proprietary solution for this problem. When Adobe Flash wants to make cross-domain requests it first requests a proprietary file called crossdomain.xml. Let’s say that IE8 requests a ua-compatible.xml that contains the URL patterns with corresponding IE rendering engine version. This would defy the idea that there needs to be no change to current pages but I would say that a single file for the whole domain is not too much to ask.
I know the proposed solutions might not be what we’re looking for (yes, I think I, and all other web developers, have a say in this). What I think we need to do is find other possibilities that might not have the side effects that the current one has. Microsoft might want to elaborate on what they’re looking for – we won’t question their reasons, we’ll just try to find a solutions that suits all of us. So let’s have a brain storming of blog posts (blogstorming?) and we might find the ultimate solution.
SEO is a theme I have been trying to ignore for a long time at Spletne urice, a weekly meeting of (mostly) web professionals. As a programme director and before that only a voice that could be heard my opinion on the matter was that SEO is a simple thing if you’re a web developer (semantic HTML – POSH, web standards, level 1 accessibility) and is a boring issue. The only way a talk about SEO would be interesting was a talk about its dark side. As people might mistakenly think that I (and my predecessor before me) endorse this kind of behaviour I declined any such propositions.
After a few debates and brainstormings I figured what bothered me the most – the notion that all real SEO experts have no conscience and would therefore not be able to talk about the shortcomings of polluting the web with pages that exploit the imperfections of search engines to create traffic and the desperation of users that will click on any banner that promises a better life. I trusted my instincts and invited Mitja to give a talk on SEO and I’m really glad I did. As he said in the talk – a retrospective of what he’s done in SEO made him think and he and Davor (his co-speaker) launched a site called Stop Web Pollution for all of us who don’t want the Internet to become a “big pile of shit”.
While we’re on the topic I’d like to point you to a video of a presentation made on Le Web 3 ’07 conference by Jason Calacanis. You can find it in the “07 – Day 2” tab, the title is “Internet Pollution”.