There’s been a lot of talk lately about HTML5, which is the latest incarn­a­tion of the language we use to write the web. So far, most of it has been about the new struc­tural elements it brings, which is a great start, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Thanks to HTML5 and a handful of other stand­ards, in the not-too-distant future web browsers will do all of this without the help of plug-ins (e.g. Flash):

• Vector graph­ics (SVG, Canvas)
• 3D Graphics (Canvas3D)
• Animation (Javascript, SMIL, CSS anima­tion and transitions)
• Rich media (native handling of audio and video)
• Javascript at speeds close to native compiled code
• Proper layout and typography (through advances in CSS)
• Complex form handling

This all all poten­tially awesome stuff, but there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. I have questions.

Do plug-in techno­lo­gies like Flash, Java and Silverlight become irrel­ev­ant? Or will they continue to do things that the browser alone can’t (yet) do? What are those things?

What will it take to bring these new capab­il­it­ies into wider use? The likes of Webkit & Opera are already bring­ing much of this stuff to millions of users through their mobile phones and games consoles. Will that be enough, or will the domin­ant desktop browser (Internet Explorer in case you hadn’t guessed) hold them back?

Will efforts to hack support into IE by other means (e.g. Raphaël, which uses IE’s propri­et­ary VML to fake SVG support) be a good enough stop-gap measure to help with the adoption of these techno­lo­gies? Can we lever­age the likes of Flash, Java and Silverlight to help out where IE is lacking? (Will cross-browser headaches ever really go away?)

Then there’s the question of developer tools. The avail­ab­il­ity of decent author­ing software helped the adoption of Flash massively. Will such things appear natur­ally when enough people are hand-crafting these techno­lo­gies, or will the tools drive adoption?

Obviously I don’t have any answers. I can’t wait to start playing with it all though.

So, the Internet Explorer team has proposed that as of IE8, if you want the latest and greatest features you’ll have to opt-in. (Note: Microsoft have changed their mind.) You can do this by way of an http-header, or using a meta-tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

I can see under­stand why they’ve chosen this direc­tion. IE6 was absolutely chock-full of bugs, but was left to stagnate for so long that web-developers began to rely on it’s quirks in order to make pages render correctly. Eventually IE7 came along and fixed many of those bugs. Consequently, many pages that were reliant on IE6 bugs broke in IE7. Microsoft don’t want to see that happen again.

The rest of the world doesn’t seem so keen on the idea. The web has gone wild, shout­ing about the myriad technical problems. Representatives from Mozilla (Firefox/Gecko), Apple (Safari/Webkit) and Opera have all said they don’t like the idea (and won’t be imple­ment­ing it in their browsers). The big issue that stands out for me isn’t technical at all though. It’s education.

Getting the word out

Somehow, Microsoft need to get the word out to exist­ing web design­ers and developers. They need to tell newcomers to the industry. They need to let educat­ors know. I’m strug­gling to see how they’re going to do that. Why?

A quick look around the SitePoint forums reveals that people are still tripping up on using the doctype element to switch between quirks and stand­ards modes (the last attempt at provid­ing backwards compat­ib­il­ity to legacy web pages). They were first intro­duced with Internet Explorer 5 for Mac the best part of a decade ago. Over the years, every major browser has taken up the techno­logy, count­less people have blogged about it, written tutori­als on it, put it into knowledge bases, included it in web design books, podcas­ted it, and people are still strug­gling to get their heads around it.

I reckon Andy Budd hit the nail on the head:

No matter what great leaps forward the Internet Explorer team make from now on, the major­ity of developers won’t use them and the major­ity of users won’t see them. By doing this the Internet Explorer team may have created their own backwa­ter, shot themselves in the foot and left themselves for dead.

Things move quickly on the web

Of course, while I was writing that, the story developed a bit further.

It turns out that using the new HTML5 doctype will trigger the new super-standards-mode in Internet Explorer 8. What’s more, Ian Hickson thinks he knows a way to make an HTML5 compat­ib­il­ity layer for IE7 (see the last paragraph).

My inter­pret­a­tion? Microsoft are trying to make HTML4 and XHTML1 legacy formats (unless you specify other­wise with the X-UA-Compatible header) and push HTML5 as the stand­ard for content going forward. I’ll be very inter­ested to see how all of this plays out.

Lemurs

Katemonkey has gone and rendered everything I’ve written here irrel­ev­ant: The “X-UA-Compatible” Controversy — As portrayed by toy lemurs.

Some time later…

Microsoft have decided to do the right thing: IE8 now will use standards-mode by default.

Web access­ib­il­ity can be hard to get your head around. It’s all very well talking about best practise, but without personal exper­i­ence it can be very diffi­cult to under­stand the day-to-day issues people face.

I’m lucky, in that my eyesight is still 20/20. Yet today I ran head-on into a common web access­ib­il­ity barrier. I got a (diluted) taste of what it’s like to use a screen magni­fier to browse the web (like many vision-impaired users).

I was playing on the Wii and when I’d had enough of Super Mario Galaxy for the day, I jumped over to The Internet Channel (or Opera for Wii as us web monkeys know it).

I loaded Google Mail. Alas I have a relat­ively small televi­sion by today’s stand­ards, so the on-screen text was rather small. Thankfully, on the Wii it’s very easy to zoom in on a certain parts of the screen, so I did. I scrolled across to the Labels part of Google Mail and clicked one. Just as you’d expect, it updated the conver­sa­tions part of the page. No problem.

Well, no problem except for the whole zoomed in bit. Because the site is built using Ajax, there hadn’t been a full-page refresh. It meant I had no way of knowing something had happened elsewhere on the page until I zoomed out again.

Now, Google also offer basic HTML versions of their web applic­a­tions. These don’t use Ajax, so you get the full-page refresh (and hence you’re aware that the page has changed). That’s one way to solve the problem, but creat­ing separ­ate web applic­a­tions for differ­ent groups of users isn’t always an option.

I’m not saying Ajax is a bad thing — rather point­ing out one of it’s side effects. I’m not yet sure how I’d work around the problem (and I’d love to hear sugges­tions), but it’s certainly food for thought when design­ing for the web.

I’m sure you spend a lot of time making sure your website’s user exper­i­ence is up to scratch. But are you think­ing about all of your users? What about the poor sap who has to use the content manage­ment system (CMS) that drives it all? Are you making life easier for them?

I’ve come to the conclu­sion that a lot of default CMS install­a­tions are just plain horrible to use. They’re over-complicated, diffi­cult and ugly. After the initial Oooh, I’ve got a shiny new toy to play with! feeling has worn off, you (and your users) just don’t want to use them. If the user doesn’t want to update the website, the website simply won’t get updated.

So what’s the answer? You can either find yourself a new CMS and rebuild the website around that, or you can make the best of what you’ve got.

Now, it’s likely that your CMS users won’t know HTML and nor will they want to. To help them out, the CMS often comes with a WYSIWYG HTML editor that tries to look, feel and work like Microsoft Word.

That’s all well and good, but they often come with absolutely everything enabled. Imagine Word with all of it’s toolbars switched on — it’s got buttons that’ll do the washing up, summon a small army and invade New Zealand or even change the colour of your text. It all adds up to make an editor that’s hard to use and intim­id­at­ing to the new user. Besides, do you actually want the user to be able to change the text colour? Won’t that contra­vene your brand guidelines or ruin your lovely design?

Keep it simple, stupid

Now for a tangent: A lot of people love Apple products. Why? One reson is their simplicity:

The most funda­mental thing about Apple … is that they’re just as smart about what they don’t do. Great products can be made more beauti­ful by omitting things.

(from technologyreview.com).

It’s that good old maxim again: Keep it simple, stupid. So what happens if we apply that to our HTML editor?

I started by remov­ing absolutely all of the buttons and drop-downs. Every last one. I was left with a blank canvas on which to type. Obviously this is a bit limit­ing, so I slowly added back the functions I needed to do the job (and nothing more). The end result is vastly simpli­fied; an envir­on­ment that lets you focus on the content, not the features of the editor. What’s more, by strip­ping out some of the more advanced features, I reduced the likeli­hood of the editor going bananas and crank­ing out the sort of HTML that Word itself would be proud of *.

Now, this is obviously just one small aspect of the CMS. But apply that principle across the whole system and the end result will be simpler, easier to use and less intimidating.

Don’t stop there either. If you’re able to custom­ise the look and feel of the inter­face, make it look good, too. Here’s that article again:

Attractive things work better… When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn’t it? Or at least feels like it does.

(also from technologyreview.com).

If you get the inter­face right, it makes life easier for your users and they’ll love you for that (or at the very least, harbour less of a desire to kill you).

* Not sure what I mean? Open a document in Word, then visit File > Save as Web Page. Open the result up in your text editor of choice and — as Mr. T would say — Let me intro­duce you to my friend pain!

So, I’m creat­ing a layout that looks something like this:

It’s a fairly simple three-column layout. The thing is, I’ve used some funky negat­ive margin trick­ery to swap the first and second columns (so that the HTML is displayed in the correct order for non-CSS user agents).

Unfortunately, IE6 renders this:

…except in some hard-to-reproduce circum­stances when it gets it right.

It turned out to be a combin­a­tion of bugs, which made it ever so slightly diffi­cult to track down. First up was The IE Doubled Float-Margin Bug. Adding display: inline; to the CSS for the floated columns appeared to just make the problem worse, but was in fact needed to correct the issue.

Once that was in place, the page was only correctly rendered once I’d moused over certain links. It took me quite some time to figure out what was going on: IE was incor­rectly calcu­lat­ing the funky margins: Instead of basing them on the width of the floated column’s parent element, it was working them out from the body element. I figured that out because the render­ing was slightly differ­ent depend­ent on the width of the window.

The solution was to wrap yet another element around the outside, and set the width there too.

I’ve created a simple test-case that explains the solution for the anybody else that runs into the issue.

I’ve been evalu­at­ing some content-management systems recently. We’ve got a few require­ments that rule out a lot of them straight off: It’s got to be a .net system, be able to run over SSL and be very secure, have decent version­ing, document manage­ment, audit trails and so on. There aren’t many products out there quite fit our needs.

We’re currently working with one (I’m not going to name names here) which has a document manage­ment compon­ent that looks something like this:

It’s a simple tree-view that works very simil­arly to Windows Explorer. Believe it or not, to build that simple box they’ve used twelve nested tables, a div, a span, endless inline styles, javas­cript: URIs and even a made-up HTML attrib­ute (view the full horror). Even if you don’t know HTML, you can see that it’s overkill. Apart from one on the outer-most element, it’s lacking any useful IDs or class-names for me to hook into with my style-sheet.

I know I’m a mark-up purist, but really that’s just taking the piss. Accessibility? Search-engine friend­li­ness? Page load-time optim­isa­tion? Nope, never heard of them. It’s alright though, it does AJAX.

It’s no wonder that so many corpor­ate web-sites have appalling mark-up when this is the state of the default output from the “enter­prise level” CMS products that drive them. If web stand­ards and best practise are going to go truly mainstream, we’re going to have to reach out to the developers of these products and nudge them in the right direction.

I’ll leave you with this exerpt from Bruce Lawson & Patrick Lauke’s talk at the multipack’s Geek in the Park event:

Legal & General… made their site access­ible because they were worried about the legal risk.

And they found as side effects: 30% increase in natural search engine traffic, a signi­fic­ant improve­ment in Google rankings for all their target keywords, a 75% reduc­tion in time for pages to load, access­ible to mobile devices, their time to manage content reduced from an average of five days to half a day per job, they saved £200,000 a year on site mainten­ance, they got a 95% increase in visit­ors getting a life insur­ance quote (which was the purpose of that site), a 90% increase in sales online, and 100% return on invest­ment in 12 months. And that was the side effects of making the site accessible.

Microsoft aren’t the only ones releas­ing a new browser this week.

Mozilla have stepped up and released Firefox 2, the latest version of their browser. A built-in spell-checker and protec­tion against fraud­u­lent & malicious web-sites are amongst the new features.

If you already use Firefox, the built-in update system should let you know about the download shortly (if it hasn’t already). If you aren’t you really ought to give it a go — Grab a copy from getfirefox.com.

Just a quickie to note that Microsoft have released Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP. Get it while it’s hot!

This will be pushed out via Windows Update in the next few weeks, though it’ll be a non-crititcal as a high-priority update for now. IE7 will not install without asking first. More inform­a­tion on the IE Blog.

[Thanks to Andrew Disley for the tip-off]