Puffbox

Here’s a screengrab from an early preview version of Internet Explorer v8, lifted from a video on Microsoft’s Channel 9 website.

Why is this significant? For those who don’t recognise it, this smiley face is the Acid2 test, to see if your web browser is playing by the rules of CSS coding. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but it’s the generally accepted standard test. And most browsers fail it. In terms of the broad public audience, it’s basically only Opera and Safari (on the Mac). Or to put it another way, maybe 3% of the average website’s traffic.

This matters because, in a nutshell, coding websites is a pain in the arse when all the various browsers have their own annoying quirks in how they process CSS code. If we had widespread compliance with the rulebook, coding would be a breeze. Instead, I’d say the majority of coding effort is spent not on getting the initial design up and running, but on tweaking it to make it work across the board. This is costing you money.

Things are looking up. Firefox v3 will include an updated ‘rendering engine’ which will pass the test; and there’s been joy bordering on hysteria at the news this week that the latest test build of Internet Explorer version 8 – full release next year some time – passes the test.

But if I’ve learned one lesson lately, it’s the fact that big organisations (especially public sector) simply aren’t updating their browser software. Looking at the stats for the Our NHS Our Future site I built, with a predominance of public sector users: 70% of all users are using IE6. (On other private-sector sites I’ve built, it’s still well over a third.) And this is 14 months after IE7’s public release.

Yes, someone just switched on the light at the end of the tunnel. But it’s a very, very long tunnel.

(Anyone else fancy sharing their browser percentages?)

Thanks to Dave Winer for spotting that the top three things people asked Google (US) to explain in 2007 were:

1. what is love
2. what is autism
3. what is rss

Impressed to see signs of a Howard Jones comeback there, incidentally. 🙂

Today was meant to be launch day for my latest, and I’d say my greatest, piece of work since going solo. But with a new server arriving late, our live date has slipped past Christmas. Of course it’s the only sensible thing to do; nobody would launch anything dramatic a week before the week-long shutdown, would they?

Step forward my old mates at Sky News, who have unveiled their new Sky News Video Player – actually, more of a dashboard, if you ask me. Video was the big improvement when Sky relaunched back in April, and this takes it to the next level. You get a split-screen view with a large playback window, and an overview of all current clips, which you can arrange in a personal playlist. Then hit the huge ‘play’ button (and probably ‘fullscreen’), sit back, and enjoy. There’s even a YouTube-style option to ’embed’ each individual clip in your own page (although WordPress doesn’t seem to want to let me use it?); click on MENU to find it. Part Flash, part HTML, a bit of Ajax too. All in all, a truly, truly brilliant execution, now some way ahead of the direct competition.

(Nice touch to do the Scoble-style amateur camerawork on executive producer Julian March’s walkthrough, too.)

They’ve also added the ability for people to comment at the bottom of individual news stories: see this example on an Amy Winehouse story. I’m not sure how much use people will make of this; the implementation’s a bit patchy; and to be honest, you have to look quite hard to find a story it’s been enabled on. But I suppose it’s early days.

Finally got my hands on a Wii last week, and when I’m not otherwise occupied by work, family duties or Guitar Hero (not necessarily in order of preference…), I’m finding it an extraordinary step forward to have a web browser on the big screen in the living room… especially when it comes to Flash-powered video streaming.

But there’s two drawbacks. For one, it’s just a little disappointing that you have to download the browser manually; and that (since July 07) you have to pay for it. Admittedly £3.50 isn’t going to break the bank, but it’s a shame there’s a financial hurdle in the way. Countless families will have a revolutionary internet device plugged into their telly, and won’t even realise it.

And secondly, it doesn’t work with the BBC’s new Flash-powered iPlayer. The Wii browser only comes with Flash 7, due (apparently) to Adobe not providing a more up-to-date SDK; and it looks like iPlayer expects more. A pity, as that would have been an absolute killer.

The new BBC personalisable homepage is now publicly visible, if you know where to look. Acting head of design, Richard Titus explains the thinking: ‘a lick of paint’ for now, with the really juicy stuff – ‘your unique personal user profile’, ‘video on the homepage and an iPlayer widget’ – to follow after Christmas.

Having played with it (very) briefly, they’ve done an excellent job of delivering great functionality in a straightforward way, largely thanks to a bit of Ajax magic – and clearly taking Netvibes as its principal role model. This is not a bad thing. Interesting to see a slightly larger font than we’re used to, and some nice ‘breaking out of the box’ imagery. Expect to see much more of both on other sites.

And of course, there’s the relaunched streaming iPlayer. The geeks may tell you that ‘cross platform’ is the big story here. It isn’t. Nor is DRM. It’s the fact that streaming actually makes it usable. A ‘wait for a few hours’ service in a post-YouTube world was never going to work.

Martin Belam is writing a series of posts charting the history of blogging at the BBC. It’s well worth a read if you have any interest in this stuff, especially since ‘well, that’s how the BBC does/did it’ is still a powerful weapon in any workshop.

I was particularly struck by an almost throw-away line in part three: ‘ As I understand it, the way blogging out-reach is being done nowadays by the BBC in the English regions is to provide encouragement from the BBC for people to start blogging for themselves, but not to provide the platform.’

Quite right of course: and another significant victory for the upstart mentality inside the monolithic organisation. The fact is, a quick WordPress installation can do it quicker and better than any monster corporate-led project. And besides, I hear ominous things regarding the technology environment at the Beeb. Unrepeatable words have been used.

I’m sitting in McDonalds on Whitehall, having finally managed to log into the free wifi service. I’ve tried doing this numerous times over the last few months, each time without success… finally learning that there’s a problem in Vista’s wifi implementation, which means you often only get local access if you’re logging into an older wifi router. Yes folks,  you heard me right. Microsoft’s top-of-the-range operating system can’t log into wifi reliably.

So how am I sending this? As a last resort, I’ve started carrying a Ubuntu Live CD in my laptop bag. (Haven’t dared do a full install since the last disaster.) And guess what? Ubuntu worked, first time.

If Vista’s SP1 doesn’t fix this, I’m going to try installing Ubuntu again, and if I lose Vista this time, I won’t be shedding any tears.

Looks like Sky News weren’t overwhelmed with people wanting a tour of the studio. The deadline for their Backstage-style developers contest (blogged here) has been pushed back to the end of January, with EP Julian March admitting to disappointment at the ‘low turn-out of entries’.

This one’s going to be controversial. I’m doing a lot of coding at the minute, sticking as best I can (naturally) to using DIVs, CSS and all that. It’s quite refreshing to realise that you can almost entirely eliminate imagery from the page code itself. But, of course, not always. And if you’re using inline images, you have to use ALT text, for accessibility and all that. Right? Well, maybe. I’m no longer convinced that it’s an absolute.

The W3C guidelines are pretty clear. Indeed, it’s actually checkpoint 1.1. ‘Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”…’ But let’s bear in mind these guidelines were published eight and half years ago: the days of banner imagery, text in GIF files, and all that. Most of which, thankfully, is behind us.

Here’s the quandry. Let’s say you have an article about Joe Soap. You’ve got Joe Soap’s name in the headline, and Joe Soap’s name throughout the article. You decide to add a picture of Joe Soap to make your page look a bit prettier. It’s just any old picture of Joe Soap; it’s not directly relevant to the story. Do you:

• interrupt the screen reader’s passage through the text of the story, to say ‘it’s an image of Joe Soap’?  (Like it’s going to be an image of something else?) or
• leave the ALT text blank?

My inclination is the latter. It’s surely better, in terms of usability generally, to make a judgement call, rather than relying on the absolute. Does the reader need to know what the image is? Is it essential / important / helpful to the reader’s experience? It may not be.

The Wikipedia page on the subject says: ‘While the use of meaningful alt text is necessary to comply with accessibility standards, and is good practice, sometimes an image is used for purely decorative purposes. In this case, one should use an empty alt attribute (alt=””).’ That sounds about right to me. But strictly speaking, that’s not what the W3C guidelines say… and that’s what we’re supposedly held to.

More details emerging about the new BBC homepage, courtesy of Martin Belam. We’re getting drag-and-drop widgets (BBC content only), changing header colours, a big search box, big fonts. All much more 2.0-y. But I can’t remember the last time I actually looked at the BBC homepage itself.

It’ll apparently be launched in December ‘as a see our new homepage and then fully in January’. The URL looks like being www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta but it’s password-protected as I write this. Here’s the best screengrab I’ve seen so far, showing a few sample customisations straight outta Ballymena (hai).