Blog October 2007

I call myself a “new media junkie”. Now in order to live up to that name I need to do a fair bit of social networking: this may involve blogging, using Facebook (a lot) or answering questions on LinkedIn, and I love it.However, the increasing problem I’ve noticed is that, as more and more people use sites like MySpace to promote their music, YouTube to show off their videos or LinkedIn to shmoose, fewer and fewer people are getting their own websites developed.

Obviously as a web developer this presents something of a professional concern (if only a small one, as I’m only really talking about portfolio sites), but as a personal “fan” of the Web, I think it’s a real shame.

I certainly can’t blame people for doing it: it’s free, very easy and requires little promotion, as people will automatically find you and your content based on the network you inhabit, but it does serve to make the Internet just that little smaller and more uniform.

Is it possible the ubermarket invasion currently taking place on our high streets could be echoed online? Will smaller, independent sites be cut down by the mighty scythe of big business?

(Cue ominous music)

WebCredible bill themselves as "the usability and accessibility specialists" and quite frankly run an excellent site, with a lot of good content and a decent portfolio of work.

But I was interested to note that the facility allowing users to change the size of text is not available for those without Javascript enabled on their browsers; those people have to go to the About page to find out how to do so in their browsers, and still don't get the same effect.

Why would a company that knows so much about web usability force people to use Javascript in order to change the appearance of a page, when this can be done very simply with server-side code (ala this site)?

Just before you upload those photos of your mate’s stag party or that video of you, dressed like Britney Spears pole-dancing (come on, we’ve all done it!) it might be worth knowing that your future boss could make his decision visa-vie your next career move based on these snaps. And apparently, the same goes for Universities:

Oxford University staff, it has been reported, have been using the popular social networking site Facebook to check whether their students have been indulging in any post-exam shenanigans. Apparently, any student found to be indulging in mischievous activities such as egging other students (as is the University's tradition) could be fined anything up to £100.

It's been said for a while that employers look at elements such as the email address on your CV when making their decision, favouring straight addresses (johnsmith@whatever.com) over decidedly less wholesome ones (you know who you are!) but is this perhaps a step too far? Should we always remain on-guard lest our prospective superiors take offence? Of course not! If you're job hunting, just remove any suspect content until you sign on that dotted line!

Happy 'booking!

Mobile web browsing is by no means perfect, but there is currently a solution. When a browser (on a computer, a mobile device or anything else with access to the Web) accesses a web page, it sends a piece of data called a user-agent string. This bit of text tells the computer hosting the website what piece of software is being used to access it. For example, Internet Explorer sends a string like “MSIE 7.0” to identify itself, Firefox sends a string like “Mozilla/4.0”, and mobile browsers have a similar string.

This can be a boon for web developers, because it means they can tailor their content based on the technology reading it: because web browsing is much slower than browsing on a computer, large HTML files can mean longer waiting times, so web developers can send a cut-down version of the page to the mobile user, and keep the larger version for the computer user.

That is unless you’re on Vodafone. Their new Internet service strips out heavyweight HTML and replaces it with something more lightweight before sending it to your phone, so the page loads more quickly. Nice eh? Apart from the fact that it the service does not send a user-agent string, meaning it will be up to Vodafone - not the site developer - to decide how a site should render on a mobile.

Can’t we all just get along? Can’t we just pick a standard and stick to it? Evidentially not.

Recently I’ve been playing around with Windows Live, taking advantage of their Custom Domains service which allows me to use my own bluemilkshake.co.uk domain with Hotmail, giving me 5 gigs of lovely mail storage.

Because I have trouble scattering my eggs in different baskets, I wanted to try getting on with Live Search. The main problem is of course that it returns a different results set from Google, which will take some getting used to (I remember having the same problem switching from Yahoo! to Google back in the day), but the main problem seems to be actually breaking the habit of going straight to Google.

I’m an IE7 user - guilty as charged - but I don’t really take advantage of the fancy search bar at the top, even though it can be setup to use whatever engine you wish. Instead I type the address www.google.co.uk into my browser window or directly onto the Address bar underneath my Windows TaskBar. Because I’m a touch-typist this is easy enough and I’m ready to search in less than a second. But now I’ve got to condition myself to type in www.live.com, or use the IE search bar.

I could see this being the biggest problem most new search engines are going to face. Breaking a person’s habit is difficult enough, but when so many people feel unsafe on the Web and rely on what they know, this could make for a more secure monopoly than those two uni mates could have ever hoped for. Google is now a household name, and what’s more it’s a verb. If you want to know more about something you Google it, so good luck to anyone who wants to try and take that on!

Last year saw the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray, crushed partly by a bit of ingenuity on the part of manufacturers who are building in support for both formats into their latest models.

But times they are still a-changin’, and the next few years could see interesting times for the Web as HTML 5 and XHTML 2 do battle.

In the red corner, WHATWG’s offering: HTML 5. Before XHTML took hold, HTML 4 was pretty much the standard, and some would argue the only one needed (some suggesting that XHTML 1.0 offers no advantages). Because it builds on the code base of its predecessor, HTML 5 is fully backwards-compatible with 4, and offers some useful new features. It’s supported by the major browser developers, except (of course) for Microsoft.

In the blue corner wearing the W3C shorts, XHTML 2. This offers some very interesting improvements, and a real change in the way developers think about content online. XHTML and CSS have become big buzzwords, and this standard is seen as the “cleanest” and most sensible. The major problem with XHTML 2 is that it is not backwards-compatible with its predecessor, and that because it offers many new features, these cannot be used in good conscience until all major browser platforms are able to support them...so almost never.

As I’ve already mentioned, Microsoft’s complete absence from this debate raises serious questions. The simple fact is, unless Microsoft gets behind one (or both) of these standards, this argument is purely academic. The Microsoft and Mozilla code bases are the only two that matter, and let’s face it, the Internet won’t collapse if Firefox is unable to accurately reproduce newer web pages, whereas if developers get behind a standard that is unsupported by Microsoft, over 80% of web users could be stuck in 2007. This eventuality is unlikely of course, but the simple fact is that the Web can’t move forward before the Microsoft troll hiding under the bridge gives it the nod.

Content management systems are great for web developers and muggles alike, because they let us update content easily (depending on the system), wherever we are, whenever we need to. But as CMSs become more advanced, more options are given to the people in charge of editing content, and with more options comes the possibility of misuse.

What should a CMS do?

The question really comes down to how your CMS is designed. Is it, like the Mambo/Joomla! crop, an advanced text editor which works around a complex HTML/PHP template, or does it allow you to control every aspect of the site without any HTML knowledge?

Content vs structure

The problem with the Mamboid systems is that they require a great deal of technical knowledge, and there's quite a learning curve. For instance, their philosophy is that content and structure should be separate, so you don't edit "pages", you edit blocks of content, and choose which blocks should be visible in which sections. This is fine, but most people have a basic understanding of the web, and know that sites are divided up into pages, not blocks of content. When you start trying to introduce a system that doesn't deal with pages, but is essentially a database, you're likely to confuse users.

Systems like these are not appropriate for commercial sites, because companies have marketing departments that want to see certain things happening on certain pages, and often they want a site that looks different to others, and the problem with Mamboid sites is that they all look the same - menus, tables, forms, all of it.

The úberCMS

There are other (usually commercial) CMSs that will allow users to do everything, from creating and editing new sites to uploading and converting movie files to monitoring traffic stats. But do we want to open Pandora's box? If the great thing about a CMS is that anyone can use it no matter what point they are on the learning curve, should options and facilities be available that they don't fully understand? This problem can often be solved by a well thought out user privilege system, which allows only certain groups of users access to certain elements.

The content iself

This is the biggest problem, and the one that prompted me to think about the question of whether we will see a return to "old fashioned" sites managed by webmasters. You can give all the functionality you want to your users and some will excel, really getting into the spirit of the website and their teeth into the facilities available. But some just don't have the attention to detail required to keep a site looking professional.

I've been involved with a number of companies that have been discouraged from showing examples of their content management systems because they feel that, once the site has been put in the hands of the client's non-technical marketing directors, the impressive, professional look which is often born out of accute attention to detail is lost. This attention to detail spans across all forms of content, from images and movies to copy and navigation, but some people just don't pay attention to capitalisation, grammar or even spelling in the way that professional web copy writers do.

The style guide document

A style guide is a document that explains to clients how text should be formatted, what image sizes should be used, how to use list and bullet-points and if ncessary, what colours and fonts to use.

But how many clients will really take notice of this? One reason why people would use a CMS is to cut out the time delay, and of course cost of asking a webmaster to make the appropriate changes, safe in teh knowledge that his understanding of the web will win out. So when ti's 4:30 and the PR consultants have issued a press release that needs to go online before the end of the day, is the person in charge really going to sift through a long-winded document to find out whether they should put a full-stop after each bullet-point? I think not.

The inline style guide

Maybe then a style guide built into the system would work? Like the Microsoft Office Assistant of old, the system could display hints that pop up once a particular formatting style has been detected. For example, if the user has copied and pasted some text from a Word document, the style guide can ask whether the asterisk symbols should be turned into bullet-points, or the email addresses made into hyperlinks.

This could work, but then, you don't see the earstwhile Office paperclip any more do you? He's been thrown in the bin marked "it sounded like a good idea at the time"

To the point...if there is one

Are content management systems here to stay for much longer, or can they be re-energised to stop sites detereorating once they have been handed over to the client? Am I being arrogant in assuming that only web developers and copy writers have the knowledge to produce consistent web content, or am I simply trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist?

You decide.