Save the Developers: Ditch IE 6

IE 6 is a wretched nuisance to develop for. It is broken in so many ways: its ability to render pages properly according to standards, as well as its security holes. Some web developers have set up a site called Save the Developers to try to get users to upgrade from IE 6 to just about any other browser around, including Firefox, Opera, IE 7 and Safari. All you need to do is to put some Javascript on your site, and if your visitor arrives at your site with IE 6 they will get an unobtrusive notice that overlays the top right of their browser for a short while, asking them to upgrade.

Unfortunately, I can’t put that script here, since wordpress.com doesn’t allow JavaScripts.

Filed in Web Design.

IE8: What One Hand Gives, The Other Hand Takes Away

As I suspected in my previous post, the beta for IE8 is out. Although this is just a beta, Microsoft made some promises for the final IE 8 version. The commitment that will delight most developers is their aim to deliver full CSS 2.1 support in the final IE 8. At last! Nearly a decade late, but better late than never, right?

But wait, what one hand gives, the other takes away. Along with IE 8, they will create a new proprietary tag to implement their WebSlices crap. Actually, I don’t know if it’s a proprietary tag, but it sounds like it: ‘Developers can make parts of their pages “subscribable” with just a little mark-up’. I don’t know of any current mark-up that makes portions of a web page subscribable.

I guess Microsoft is trying to show that they can still innovate in their browsers. The sad thing is that when they “innovate”, they create proprietary things that lock people into their browsers, whereas when other browsers innovate, they don’t need to do that. For example, Opera brought many new features in web browsing to the masses: tabbed browsing (I don’t know which version, but I remember using tabs in Opera 5 back in 2000), mouse gestures, a built-in IRC client, a built-in BitTorrent client, a built-in RSS feed reader, sophisticated keyboard navigation, etc. Okay, maybe not the masses, but you get my point. Their innovation did not lock anyone to their browser, but improved the user experience.

What I’d rather Microsoft do is, instead of spending man-hours developing their new proprietary technology, to work on getting their browsers to render the standards correctly the way the other browsers have done for ages. I mean, CSS has been available for about 10 years now. It’s not like it’s new technology anymore. They’re holding back the progress of the web.

This is a modern world Microsoft, where no one person controls the standards. Get used to it.

Update (March 8 ): Looks like I have to eat my words above. According to the IE team, to make a webslice you just use a certain combination of standard HTML and IE 8 will interpret as something special.

Filed in Web Design, Software, News.

Why Does Microsoft Love to Be Cryptic? What is IS7-VIS3.rar? Or IE7-VIS1.exe? Or IE7-VIS2.rar?

In a sudden urge to test my site in as many browsers as possible, I came across a link to Microsoft’s free distribution of virtual machines with various versions of IE. And there I ran into a roadblock. Remember when I grumbled about their use of cryptic acronyms in one of their announcements? Well, it’s not just their announcements. Even their download links are cryptic.

The web page tells you that you can download Virtual PC images with IE 6 and IE 7. Then it proceeds to list the various files that you can download - by shortened filenames. Take a look at this. What do you make of them?

• IE6_VPC.EXE - okay, I can figure this out. It’s IE 6 in a Virtual PC image. That’s okay so far.
• IE7_VPC.EXE - this must be IE 7 in a Virtual PC image.
• IE7-VIS1.exe - is this IE 7 running on Vista? If so, then what’s the next one?
• IE7-VIS2.rar - IE 7 running on Vista? Again? Or perhaps it’s because it’s packaged in a RAR archive. But wait - there’s more…
• IS7-VIS3.rar - IE 7 running on Vista! Again! In a RAR archive! Again! Will wonders never cease?
• IE8_VPC.EXE - IE 8 (huh?) in a Virtual PC image.

What good are all these filenames to the downloader? Why give the filenames at all? Don’t these wizards at Microsoft realize that you can give a link a different text from the actual filename? Not everyone in the world automatically knows what you mean when you give these cryptic filenames from the MSDOS era. They should at least give a description if they feel compelled to write the filename.

Anyway, if you can tell the difference between those VIS filenames, let me know in the comments. I’m just gonna download the IE6 image for now.

Yeah. And I noticed the IE 8 thing too. I think it’s probably just a beta. I’ll investigate and post again when I find out more. Update: it’s true - IE 8 beta 1 is out. Update 2: I just noticed that it’s not three IE7 links, but 2. The third one is IS7 not IE7. But what is IS7?

Filed in Web Design, Software, Windows.

Sanity Strikes: Microsoft Decides to Support Standards for IE8’s Standards Mode

My post title may seem like a “duh” statement if you don’t know the story of IE8’s dubious new meta tag, where Microsoft intended not to support the standards in IE8 but required web developers to add a special tag in their web pages to opt into the standards.

It looks now like Microsoft has reversed its decision, thankfully, so that those who want the non-standard IE7 rendering have to specifically opt for it. Developers who simply create pages to comply with web standards will automatically have IE8 render those pages correctly. Sanity at last. This style is in keeping with the web browser and standards traditions that have been established since the dawn of the Internet - where browsers automatically opt to render the page as compliant with the standards as it can. This sane method is also in line with the IE detection code that Microsoft developed in IE6 and later, where developers can target code designed for specific IE versions. Now you can target code for IE6 and IE7, and know that the standard compliant code of the rest of the page will be used in IE8. That’s the way it’s meant to be.

Filed in Web Design, News, Opinion.

Drupal Must Learn How to Do a Proper Patch Updater: Looking at the new Drupal 6.1

The Drupal 6.1 release is out. Interestingly, Drupal 6 users are encouraged to do a full update - that is, to upload every single file to their server again. They have a patch updater, but that only plugs the security holes. And that updater leaves Drupal “in an unversioned state, confusing the update status module”. There’s no set of files that can upgrade Drupal 6.0 to 6.1 cleanly, the way it’s easy to update WordPress by simply uploading a few files.

Drupal really has a long way to go to get up to the usability of WordPress.

Filed in Web Design, Software.

Hurray! Network Solutions is Sued - Bad Domain Registrars Should Be Punished

Chris McElroy has filed a class-action lawsuit against Network Solutions for its unsavory practice of secretly buying up domains that visitors to its site search for. The suit says that the “fraudulent and deceptive” practice is intended to “trap consumers into paying its grossly inflated domain name registration fees”.

I’m glad someone is fed up enough to take up a lawsuit against unscrupulous registrars like this. If no action is taken, other registrars will soon start doing the same thing, and it will no longer be safe to check domain names at registrar sites.

Filed in Web Design, Opinion, News.

The Glorious Contempt WordPress Theme

Well, after living for nearly 2 months with the default WordPress theme, which I complained about in the past, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and changed the theme to one called “Contempt”. This theme has the advantage of having two columns even on the post pages, so that they will also contain the Recent Posts list and so on. The default theme does not. With this theme, I think my blog finally meets all the criteria on the blog theme design checklist.

As you can see it looks more or less like the default Kubrick theme, which suits me fine.

How to Get the Contempt Theme with Widget Support

The Contempt theme as implemented in the hosted WordPress.com allows you to add widgets to the side panel. Try as you might, you will not be able to find the contempt theme in the usual WordPress theme repository - or at least I couldn’t find it. If you look for the Contempt theme in Google, you will be directed to the author’s site that allows you to download the theme files - but that set does not allow you to add widgets from the WordPress interface.

To get the version that gives you the widget support, go to the WordPress SVN for the Contempt theme and download every single file and directory. Keep the directory structure when you place install the theme into your blog.

Filed in WordPress, Web Design.

Second Thoughts on WordPress’ Default Theme

I mentioned a while back how I thought WordPress’ default theme fared pretty well against the checklist for blog theme design. I have now changed my mind. After running this blog for nearly two months now, I’ve belatedly realized that there’s a big deficiency in the default theme: the permalink post pages don’t have a side column where the tag cloud, archive links and recent posts are listed. As a result, people who go directly to a permalink page from the search engine won’t go much further than that page.

I wonder whether the other supplied themes fix this problem.

Filed in Web Design, WordPress.

The Awfully Limited Stats of WordPress.com

The WordPress.com stats are awful. Sure, it gives you which pages have been viewed. Yeah, that and the phrases that led people to your site. But there’s really a dearth of information. For example, which search engines were used for those phrases? Where is the visitor path report? Browsers? Operating system? And so on.

It’s not just the poor stats. It’s that they prevent you from even effectively using third party web statistics by their removal of all JavaScript code whenever you post. So all you can do is use the stats’ basic image option, which can’t really provide sufficient information.

I want better stats. And I want JavaScript support for my blog entries.

Filed in: Web Design, Web Hosting, WordPress

Microsoft Should Get Out of the Web Browser Business

The more I think of it, the more I believe that Microsoft should get out of the web browser business. This latest mess with a new tag to render web pages correctly illustrates the point very well.

The other web browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, etc, all have no trouble keeping up with the web standards. As a result, when web designers create a page, it is a simple task to get their page render correctly in all non-IE browsers - just follow the standards. Then they have to add a lot of hacks to check if the user is using IE, and to use all sorts of workarounds so that the page will render correctly in IE.

Now, as IE tries to be more standards-compliant, it is umpteen years late in the task, and has to contend with the plethora of websites with these hacks. So it introduces another non-standard hack.

If IE cannot keep up with the web standards, which incidentally has been around for innumerable years now (what is it, 8 years now?), then Microsoft should really get out of the web browser business. Just install Firefox or license Opera to place on Windows machines. I’m sure these free modern browser vendors would be delighted to have it as the new default Windows browser.

In other words: shape up or ship out.

Filed in: Opinion, Web Design

De-”spinning” the Corporate Gobblygook of the IE Developers

As everyone knows, Internet Explorer is truly behind the curve in standards compliance. Even the latest version, IE 7, is a pain to workaround if your site does any sophisticated use of CSS. With IE 8 in the horizon, Microsoft is now looking for a way to do things so that they don’t have to break all the websites that currently have to bend-backwards to support IE 7 and IE 6. There are some suggested solutions in the works in their IE article.

What I found interesting is the way they have to skirt the issue why IE is so incompatible with the standards compliant sites on the web:

In IE7 we made a lot more changes to improve IE’s standards compliance, particularly with CSS. We limited these behavior changes to IE’s “standards mode” only, and we expected that this would help limit compatibility problems as it had in the past. Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly to us, this wasn’t true; many of those changes made IE incompatible with content that was already part of the web…

But wait, a lot of people say at this point, why isn’t this a problem for Firefox, or Safari, or any other browser? The answer is that developers of many sites had worked around many of the shortcomings or outright errors in IE6, and now expected IE7 to work just like IE6… In many cases, these sites would have worked better if they had served IE7 the same content and stylesheets they were serving when visited with a non-IE browser, but they had “fixed their content” for IE. Sites didn’t work, and users experienced problems.

Now the above is one way of spinning events. Let me un-spin a portion of this to describe things as they really are:

But wait, a lot of people say at this point, why isn’t this a problem for Firefox, or Safari, or any other browser?

The answer is that when the other browsers fixed their browsers to deliver standards compliant behavior, they actually fixed it correctly. The browsers thus were able to render pages in accordance with what the standards specified. When the browsers saw, from the DOCTYPE, that a web page wanted to be rendered in a standards compliant fashion, it did accordingly.

Sadly, When IE 6 and 7 said it was standards compliant, it was only paying lip service. Webmasters everywhere found to their consternation that pages that worked perfectly in Safari and Firefox and Opera and Konqueror, and every other modern browser around, broke horribly in IE 6 and its supposedly-improved successor IE 7 when rendering in “standards-compliant mode”.

So they had to work around it. When IE 7 (which is, ahem, standards compliant) came out, they had to apply all sorts of workarounds to deal with the remaining major problems it had rendering pages.

We expect the same thing to happen again when we release IE 8, with its newer definition of “standards-compliant”.

Filed in Web Design, Humor.

Checklist for Blog Theme Designing

I was going through a checklist for designing a blog theme to see if the current Flora and Fauna Rocks theme meets the requirements. Interestingly my blog theme didn’t score too badly, even though it’s just the WordPress default. The only things I don’t have in this theme is the meta description. I have no idea how to add this here, since I don’t see a way for me to install any plugins. But it’s supposed to be not so important, so I’m just going to leave it for now.

Although I wasn’t very sure at first, I’m now more convinced than ever that choosing to use WordPress was a good decision. I initially wondered whether I should have gone with Drupal, but it looks harder to use than WordPress.

Filed under: Web Design, WordPress.

Logo Making for the Graphically Challenged

This hilarious article on logo making actually has good practical tips on how to create a professional-looking logo for your blog the quick and dirty way. I like the way it breaks down the process into manageable bits that make the whole thing easy to do.

I already made a logo for this blog, but haven’t quite figured how to put it in the header. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had much success selecting a different theme either. I must be an idiot, but I can’t seem to find a way to set the theme after selecting it for preview.

Anyway, what I said earlier about there being more features here than the typical wordpress install isn’t quite true. I realized that some features I used to have in my install aren’t present here. For example, I can’t change my permalinks.

Filed under Web Design, WordPress.