technology – Page 16

9 Sep 2008

e-government, technology

browsers, coi, consultation

COI's contradictory rules on browsers
Timely, given the release of Google Chrome, and the reopening of the Browser Wars: COI has just issued a consultation document, five months in gestation, on browser standards for public sector websites. Its 15 pages can essentially be boiled down to the following, based on an intriguing 2% rule of thumb:

17. Browsers used by 2% or more of your users must be supported.

18. Operating systems used by 2% or more of your users must be supported (although it rather undermines itself later on, demanding support for Mac and Linux).

19. The two most popular browsers on each supported operating system must be supported.

20. Browsers and operating systems used by less than 2% of your users may be semi-supported. This means that the content and navigation works but the website might not display correctly.

Like it or not then, we’re obliged to ensure the content, functionality and display all work ‘as intended’ on IE6 – although there’s no precise definition of what ‘as intended’ means. One would hope for a pragmatic (ie not ‘pixel perfect’) approach. And it sounds like bad news for Opera, whose user base is highly unlikely to pass the 2% threshold, or hold the no2 ranking on any one OS.

There’s an all too predictable write-up in The Register; Andrew Orlowski opens with the statement that ‘a firestorm is brewing’, and quotes ‘experts’ who say ‘taxpayers will be forced to change their browsing habits and computer setup to accommodate the guidelines.’ I disagree with the first part, and I’m not sure I see the second as a bad thing. It’s entirely appropriate for government to advise people on suitable behaviour where their body’s health is concerned… why not also their PC?

Orlowski quotes Bruce Lawson of the Web Standards Project – and, as Orlowski neglects to point out, a Web Evangelist for Opera – who apparently said something along the lines of ‘designers should conform to commonly agreed basic standards, rather than browser idiosyncrasies.’ (Shame it’s not a direct quote.)

Philosophically, I can’t argue with that point. But pragmatically, it can’t work. The browsers are here, on the ground already; and Utopia it ain’t. You can’t tell people unable to use your site with IE6 that ‘hey, it’s not our fault Microsoft didn’t buy into web standards seven years ago.‘ And whilst the latest browser releases are getting closer to standards compliance, the current IE6 market share of 25% clearly shows (as does the 66% of people hitting COI’s own site) that it’ll take a l-o-n-g time for everyone to upgrade accordingly.

Deep down, I want COI to take a stand on IE6. As I wrote (coincidentally) the other week: development would undoubtedly be quicker, easier and most importantly, cheaper for the taxpayer. A friendly ‘government health warning’ could advise you to upgrade, for this and other good reasons. Others have already set the precedent. But I know such a brave step isn’t likely.

If anyone from COI is reading this, please consider the following to be my contribution to the consultation process:
- There’s an inherent problem with the 2% thing. You don’t have to support a browser unless 2% of your own unique users are using it; but if the site doesn’t support them, they won’t be able to use the site anyway. Catch-2%, you might say. Whilst I see the value in the ‘2% of your specific user base’ rule, it may have to be a global assessment of market share.
- Keep the geeks on board by including an explicit note about web standards, welcoming the progress towards better standards compliance… but acknowledging the reality of current usage levels, particularly as regards IE6.
- Terms like ‘look as intended’ or ‘major/minor maintenance release’ are too vague to be meaningful. Similarly, there are problems with the get-out clause for beta versions (para 27), especially now Google (with its perpetual betas) is in the game.
- There’s no recognition of emerging scenarios like the iPhone or Nintendo Wii (over 1m sold in UK). I accept I may be an ‘edge case’ here, but as video becomes increasingly important to the web experience, I find myself using the Wii – and specifically, the big telly in the living room – to browse the web.
- You simply can’t make an exception for Linux (para 32), or indeed the Mac (para 35). Either the 2% rule stands, or it doesn’t. Grant one exception, and you’ll have countless others making an equally strong case.
- If you’re specifying operating systems, you might as well go the whole way, and specify particular browsers and versions. This isn’t as impossible as it sounds: the BBC does it. There’s a strong case for the simply ‘contracting out’ the testing process to the BBC, and adopting their rules as the gov-wide standard. They are subject to the same accessibility obligations as any government site.
The consultation document is here, in universally browser-unfriendly DOC and PDF formats.
3 Sep 2008

technology

browsers, chrome, google

No extensions, no Chrome

It was the usual mix of excitement and fear as I downloaded Google Chrome last night: the former to see what Google would do when it had total control of the browsing experience, the latter in case it rendered any of my designs horribly. To be honest, there wasn’t much to report on either front.

Let’s not get carried away: Chrome is a web browser. I like the minimalist interface (with Vista-esque styling even on XP). The ‘omnibox’ is a great idea, as long as you’re happy with the privacy question. It’s kinda fun – and sometimes a bit frightening – to be able to see how much memory an individual page consumes, particularly if you can recall the days of the ZX81 and its 1K of memory. I’ll take their word on the stability and security features, but (happily) I’ve yet to see any evidence. The automated ‘favourites’ on new tabs is a nice touch, I suppose. But for all this, it’s still just a piece of software which renders HTML, CSS and Javascript into pages.

Chrome’s main selling point seems to be its improved Javascript performance – according to one test, it’s 2.5x faster than Firefox, and a ridiculous 22x faster than IE7. That’s going to matter in the future, allowing Javascript interfaces to become more complex. But I don’t imagine many websites will feel ready to take things to that higher level for quite some time.

Will I be switching? No – for one simple reason, and that’s the surprising lack of plugin capability. The help documentation declares:

Currently, Google Chrome supports the most popular plug-ins necessary to display the Web correctly, including Flash, Acrobat Reader, Java, Windows Media Player, Real Player, QuickTime, and Silverlight.

And that’s it – which is a problem. Firefox is my do-everything window on the world. I get an alert when new email messages are detected by the Gmail plugin I use. My bookmarks are fed into the browser courtesy of the Delicious plugin. Without these and many others, I’m feeling lost in cyberspace.

It’s a curious omission, given that Google’s quite happy for developers to write their own Gadgets for Google Desktop and iGoogle. According to Google blogger Matt Cutts:

I’m sure that extensions/add-ons are something that the Chrome team would like to do down the road, but the Chrome team will be a bit busy for a while, what with the feedback from the launch plus working on Mac and Linux support. I’d suggest that you give Google Chrome a try for a few days to see if enjoy browsing even without extension X. A lot of really cool extension-like behaviors such as resize-able textareas and drag-and-drop file upload are already built into Google Chrome.

So it looks like Chrome won’t be able to give me the online experience I’ve grown to expect, not any time soon. It confirms the theory offered by Shane Richmond yesterday, that Chrome is an attack on Internet Explorer rather than Firefox. It’s for people – the vast majority of people – who don’t know or care about customisation. It will give them a streamlined online experience, with all the plugins they need and no more, within a controlled environment. If you want more, well, you’re probably on Firefox already… and, like me, unlikely to move.

Quick update: it looks like the new Javascript engine planned for Firefox v3.1 (known as TraceMonkey) is even faster than Chrome. But for me, the most interesting comparison in this new data isn’t between Chrome’s engine and Firefox v3.1’s engine… it’s between XP and Vista. Chrome’s V8 is 30% slower on Vista; TraceMonkey is 20% slower on Vista. I’m no expert, but that doesn’t sound good.
2 Sep 2008

company, technology

freesoftware, google, stephenfry

Selling free software

Presenting, in the blue corner, Google’s announcement of its forthcoming Chrome browser – by the medium of the comic book. And in the red corner, Mr Stephen Fry’s armchair chat on the subject of GNU, the movement to create a completely free operating system.

Both are trying to do something quite peculiar: they want to give you something for nothing, and they feel they have to really push the boat out to persuade you why that’s a good idea. For the record, I’m not sure either is a presentational success. I find the comic book really hard work to read, especially when it starts talking about detailed tech stuff. And much as I hate to say it, Stephen Fry’s video piece is rather dry and a little repetitive. Maybe it needs more Alan Davies. (It certainly could do with better audio.)

Selling ‘free’ software – normally WordPress, of course – is effectively what Puffbox does. But what am I actually ‘selling’? The manifestation is usually in the form of custom theme design, selection and configuration of plugins, brainstorming of new features and functions, plus a bit of coaching and training. But fundamentally, clients are paying for my experience with the product: knowing what it’s good at, knowing how to make these things happen, and being able to do it more quickly (and hence more cheaply) than they could themselves.

And as WordPress (well, strictly Automattic) CEO Toni Schneider told the recent WordCamp in San Francisco, it’s a flourishing business. You can’t say that about much these days, can you? But then, as noted on my last piece about Internet Explorer… I really believe the £0 price tag changes all the rules.
27 Aug 2008

e-government, technology

internetexplorer, microsoft

Should HMG support IE6?

I’m on the brink of starting another coding project – a blogging initiative on behalf of another central government department, which I won’t name just yet. And I know how it’s going to turn out, because it always turns out the same.

Many a true word, as they say, spoken in jest. But the reality is, most coding jobs would take a fraction of the time if we didn’t feel obliged to support IE6.

I mention this because today, 27 August 2008, is the 7th birthday of Internet Explorer v6. Seven years, people. Yet the latest data from Hitslink shows IE6 still has a market share in excess of 25% – despite the upgrade to v7 being free, despite the availability of better competitors, despite the lack of ongoing support from Microsoft itself.

But there are rumblings in the industry. Apple’s MobileMe service announced back in June that users would need to be using Internet Explorer v7 (the first major service to do so, according to 37signals). Then, 37signals themselves announced that their entire product line – including the well-known project management tool, Basecamp – would stop supporting IE6 as from this month. They wrote:

Continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress. We want to make sure the experience is the best it can be for the vast majority of our customers, and continuing to support IE 6 holds us back.

It’s an even more compelling case when we’re talking about taxpayers’ money. Is it right for a government web project to cost (wild guess) 20% more than necessary, just because some of its potential users can’t be bothered doing a free upgrade – which, since 93.2% of UK internet connections are now broadband, most of them at speeds of 2Mbps or higher (according to the latest ONS data), should take a couple of minutes, at most?

It wouldn’t be difficult for sites to do a quick browser detection, then offer links to download pages for IE7 and some other alternatives you might want to consider (Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc). It’s in everyone’s interests, not least Microsoft’s, to make more people upgrade. We’d be open to allegations of ‘nanny state’… but I wonder if the ‘public finances’ argument would win out?
26 Aug 2008

company, technology

google, search, seo, twitter

Another reason to use Twitter

I’ve recently noticed people’s Twitter accounts ranking particularly highly on search results for their name. So is the benefit to your search engine ranking good enough reason to get into Twitter, even just as a token gesture?

For example, I run an experimental Twitter account for Puffbox: it’s just a Twitterfeed thing for blog posts specifically about the company. It only has a handful of subscribers, and I’m neither offended nor surprised. But it’s ranking remarkably highly on Google searches for ‘puffbox’: at present, it’s number #3, beneath two results for puffbox.com itself. Setting up a new Twitter account takes seconds; setting up a Twitterfeed something similar; and once it’s up and running, that’s job done.

Of course, a one-way Twitter account isn’t going to win you many plaudits, or indeed many followers. But if it pushes your content up the appropriate search rankings, for zero cost and zero day-to-day (or even month-to-month) effort, surely it’s worth doing? The choice of a sensible, search-term friendly username seems to be the most important factor; but don’t forget to add meaningful ‘personal’ information to your profile, so people know where to go next.
20 Aug 2008

e-government, technology

wordpress

WordPress runs America too

A fascinating photo from WordPress chief Matt Mullenweg’s keynote address at last weekend’s WordCamp in San Francisco revealed a list of (US) ‘government agencies using WordPress’:

So that’s all the armed services, NSA, CIA and FBI… which kind of puts the ‘(in)security’ argument in some context. Hey, the Marine Corps love it so much, they’re listed twice! But no reference to 10 Downing Street, that I’ve seen reported anyway. Whassup Matt, no love for the UK? Ah well, it’s good to know that we’re not alone.
5 Aug 2008

e-government, technology

basecamp, buddypress, huddle, socialnetworking

Would you want a gov-wide social network?

OK, so it’s hardly a shock for a survey from a UK-based ‘web 2.0’ company to conclude that UK public sector workers think ‘Government should buy local, go social’. But I don’t want to dismiss this piece of research from Huddle.net completely… particularly since hard numbers, no matter how dubious, always look good in a business case.

Huddle‘s survey of 202 local authority officials found a (very slim) majority to be ‘disappointed with lack of innovation in IT services’, and (just under) a third thinking ‘Government’s IT problems could be solved by buying from local, UK-based companies rather than multi-national conglomerates’. If anything, I’m surprised those numbers – particularly the latter one – are so low.

But I’m interested to see 31% would like to set up a social network for their own organisation, whilst 38% would support a government-wide social network. Again, to be fair – they would say that, wouldn’t they.

(And equally inevitably, I’m going to say ‘WordPress’: the planned BuddyPress theme/plugin collection looks fabulous, particularly these recent screenshots on the lead guy’s blog. However, the consensus from WordCamp the other week seemed to be that BuddyPress isn’t quite production-ready yet. See: I can be dispassionate about WordPress.)

I’ve got an account on Huddle, but I’ve never used it properly myself. It looks like a nice tool, not dissimilar to Basecamp but with a slightly more corporate, less startup kinda feel – and that’s probably not a bad thing. Apparently it’s been used by DCMS and John Lewis, but they aren’t on their website’s list of case studies, which remains a bit short on household names.
4 Aug 2008

news, technology

olympics, skynews, twitter

Sky News group-tweeting from Olympics

I note Sky News are trying something unusual in their coverage from Beijing. All 22 members of the crew departing Osterley for the Olympics will be contributing to an ‘Olympic Twitter Microblog‘. They promise we’ll hear from ‘presenters, reporters, producers, camera operators and engineers: 22 different perspectives, 22 different pairs of eyes & ears, and 22 different experiences of Beijing 2008’ – all via SMS, by the look of it.

It’s an interesting idea, but not without its problems. Of the 22 in question, we might recognise the names of a couple – Chris Skudder, Jeremy Thompson. The rest – no offence, chaps – could be anybody; and I can’t see many people signing up to follow them. There’s a generic SkyNewsOlympics account, but at the moment, it’s little more than a directory of the other 22 accounts.

So the only way to follow the entire group effort is via the page on the Sky website… which may or may not have been a conscious decision. But an idea occurs to me: could you aggregate the 22 accounts back into Twitter from outside, using Twitterfeed, and the 22 individual (outbound) RSS feeds? A bit of a roundabout method, but I’ve done such RSS-cannibalism before, to great effect.
29 Jul 2008

e-government, technology

crimemapping, police, powerofinformation, telegraph

An idea whose time has come

Crime mapping is front-page news today (in the Telegraph anyway). Most of the stories follow a predictable pattern: Ministers say it will inform the public, and make the police more accountable, but it’ll lead to house price chaos. Etcetera.

But I’m finding myself infuriated by the Telegraph leader column which proclaims:

The Conservative Party has appeared a little paranoid over the past year or two with its reluctance to set out detailed policies for fear of them being plagiarised by Labour. […] The latest was yesterday’s commitment from Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, to publish crime maps for England and Wales by the end of this year. This is based on the Conservative Party policy document Giving the Public a Crime Map (PDF), which was published in April and which formed a key plank of Boris Johnson’s successful campaign for the mayoralty of London.

So.. did Boris Johnson cook up the idea, all by himself? Hardly.

The project which first brought the idea to prominence was pioneering geek-journalist Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org, launched back in May 2005. It received global media coverage, on the web and in print; and was specifically mentioned as a case study in this government’s Power Of Information review, published in April 2007. (The project has since evolved into Everyblock.)

Further, two UK pilot studies are being quoted in news coverage today. DNS records show that MyNeighbourhood.Info, run by West Midlands Police, was conceived as far back as 10 May 2006; the site itself was launched in September 2007. The West Yorkshire site, beatcrime.info, traces back as far as April 2004, with a launch in February 2005. (Incidentally… do those dates provide a clue as to the lead time needed to produce these sites?)

So by all means, we can have pointless arguments about which UK political party first stole the idea from Adrian Holovaty if you like. It won’t get us anywhere. The point is, this is an idea whose time has come.

The luxury of opposition is that you can throw ideas around, without having to actually implementing them. The burden of government is that you have to overcome the technical, legal and procedural hurdles to get the things out the door. And we’ve got ample evidence that this is happening already.
28 Jul 2008

company, technology

puffbox, wordcampuk, wordpress

My show-stopping session at WordCamp
A week since the inaugural WordCamp UK, and I haven’t got round to writing up my session on ‘WordPress in large organisations’ – specifically, government. Then again, with Chris Garrett and Dave Briggs doing it on my behalf, why should I? 🙂

My key message was that in many large organisations, there’s often open warfare between marketing/PR, the IT department, and Procurement. But with WordPress (price: zero) designed to be used by solo bloggers with no IT support, it effectively allowed the marketing people to sneak past the other two, and get feature-rich sites up in no time. Its ‘straight to content authoring’ interface suited the comms person mentality, and RSS would allow for seamless integration if the ‘main website’ people got annoyed.

I then talked about a few other things I could see WordPress doing in large organisations, which may not be immediately obvious. For once, if you don’t mind, I’m going to keep quiet on those; the ideas aren’t yet fully developed, and I don’t want people stealing them just yet. I’ve got a mortgage to pay.

I closed on four things I thought WordPress needed to become a stronger force in the corporate world:
- Drag-and-drop page ordering, on the admin interface. We’ve got it for other elements, but pages would have been my priority.
- A slightly slicker workflow. WordPress has all the ‘draft awaiting approval’ functionality it needs, but the presentation is lacking. Plugins may help, but it’s an extra layer of risk, due to…
- The need for a new ‘Long Term Support’ version. I’ve mentioned this before. At the moment, there’s no guarantee that plugins working in the current WP version will work in any subsequent version. The official policy on security is to upgrade as soon as a new version becomes available… but that’s a risk many corporate clients won’t like. There is a ‘legacy branch’ (horrible name), but it’s based on the dated v2.0. We need a newer one, based on the v2.5+ dashboard, with a commitment to update it with security patches.
- A proper WordPress ‘ecosystem’. There’s a lot of interest in the platform, and plenty of work to go round. But I’ve learned recently that it takes a certain expertise to get the most from WP; you can’t just give it to any PHP programmer. We need people to identify themselves as WP experts, and help each other build businesses out of this.
The highlight of my session, inevitably, was the news that 10 Downing Street would be launching shortly on WordPress. I’ve written countless times about the persuasiveness of precedents; is that a big enough precedent for you? I got a round of applause for it, too. 🙂

The scary part was when I sat down. Throughout the weekend, there was a constant stream of chatter on Twitter. It was no-holds-barred stuff at times. And as I hit ‘refresh’, I was genuinely terrified to see what would come up. Thankfully, the few comments there were, were positive, even complimentary.

And some of the participants have been really nice about me in their reports: attention-grabbing, rousing, showstopper. ‘The only session that really had everyone buzzing‘. ‘A pity that it isn’t Simon that’s running the country!’ Thank you all. (Not sure about that last one, by the way.)

Which reminds me. I haven’t had any speaking engagements in ages. If anybody in the central government world wants me to come in, and talk to staff / management about all this stuff, I’d be glad to. Just ask.

Picture credit: Richard Williams, RKW Internet.