iWeb Takes On the Competition

My take is that iWeb is good, intuitive software, but that Sandvox is better for 5 reasons: 1. It produces more standards-compliant HTML and CSS (and why not do this if it's possible?); 2. The designs are more inspired; 3. You can insert HTML if necessary (in the Pro version); 4. The flexible Collections feature means you can have a degree of dynamic content on the homepage, for example the weblog section can show the most recent post. To do this in iWeb, you have to copy and paste the most recent blog post onto the homepage every time the weblog is updated. 5. The developers interact with users on the mailing list and product wiki.

Rick

On Jun 21, 2006, at 5:09 PM, Google Kreme wrote:

> On 21 Jun 2006, at 11:23 , Marilyn Matty wrote:
>> On Jun 20, 2006, at 7:06 PM, Edward Reid wrote:
>>
>>> At 09:40 06/20/06 -0700, Marilyn Matty wrote:
>>>> Whether or not it's bad coding is irrelevant if it works
>>>
>>> It may be irrelevant if your outlook horizon is less than six
>>> months. If
>>> you like to engage in what the current business world oddly calls
>>> "long
>>> term" planning, three years or more, you are far better off -- in
>>> terms of
>>> your ROI -- going with good coding and standard-conforming web
>>> pages.
>>>
>>> Standard-conforming: because the browsers' interpretation of
>>> non-standard-conforming is in constant flux.
>>
>> It's in flux all the time anyway, standard are inconsistently
>> implemented across browsers, and more likely to be so when Longhorn
>> is released.
>
> Everyone is moving toward standards compliance, even Microsoft.

This isn't the first time we've heard this, and I will believe it
when I see it.

> Originally they promise it for IE 7, now they are saying "IE
> 7.mumble". Firefox/Mozilla are working towards compliance, and
> Apple's Safari, Opera, and iCab are already there.

IE has about 85% market share, making all other browsers minor
players. Another consideration is that even if the next version of IE
is all they promised it to be, and without bugs, it will take a few
years for it to achieve its share of market.

And even if all this could possibly be achieved within a year, the
standards as they exist still suck. Any new standards that might be
defined would take years and years to be implemented by the browsers,
if they are.

>
>> The problem as the designers (either novice or professional) and
>> marketers on this list are talking about is that the standards are
>> inadequate to achieve many important goals,
>
> Goals that only important to people who view the web as nothing more
> than another printed page.

In fact, the web is becoming increasingly motion, time, sound and
dimensionally oriented - standards don't take this into account.

>
>> they are too time consuming and difficult to learn,
>
> Well, in fact, you shouldn't HAVE to learn them. Your Dreamweaver/
> GoLive should be doing this for you. They don't. At all. That is
> the problem.

As someone else mentioned, this should not be a problem. You can edit
video in Final Cut Pro, print in Quark or InDesign, Sound in
GarageBand, etc., etc., etc., without touching a line of code.
Programs like iWeb make web publishing simple for everyman - they are
bringing the newest and most exciting medium into the hands of the
masses, enabling social networking as well as communications.

Coding should not be the exclusive property of an elite group of coders.

>
>
>> they aren't implemented well by
>
> SOME
>
>> browsers,
>
> (And this number is decreasing daily)

Though TidBITS Talkers, esp. myself, might not like it, the only
browser that counts is the one with 85% market share, and to date it
is not standards compliant.

>
>> and require too many hacks and workarounds to even have a
>> remote hope of a 100% standards compliant site working across
>> browsers. For novices, the barriers of entry are often set too high;
>> for corporations, the money, time and limitations are often
>> prohibitive.
>
> For Novices they shouldn't be trying to do 'pixel perfect' web design
> anyway. No one should, but even the large corporations are
> constantly showing their total ignorance.

This is something that cannot be dictated - there is no no Internet
Design or Coding Police. Frankly, I find the idea of an Internet
Design or Coding Police very scary.

>
> For example, I recently tried to register an email address with
> Coke. The email I use to register with companies is
>
> spam+<companytag>mydomain.com
>
> All mail to spammydomain.com is discarded, and the recipient
> delimited is parsed, compared to the headers, and if something looks
> wrong, the mail is discarded. So, for example, I only receive spam
> +amazon mail if the mail really comes from Amazon.
>
> Coke's registration claims that spam+coke is invalid because their
> clueless webdesigner decided, all on his own, that '+' is an invalid
> character for email.
>
> This is a company that is larger than most COUNTRIES. They should be
> ashamed.

Coke was a former client of mine at more than one job, and marketing
is run not just on a country by country basis, but larger companies
like the US, regionally. And again, in many cases there comes a time
when a marketer has to make decisions based on what will ultimately
be of most benefit to the bottom line. Do they alienate 10 people or
10,000,000?

>
>> This is fine, but it's not how the vast majority of people in the
>> world are thinking and acting. People who agree with you should not
>> criticize other commercial or personal sites who choose to ignore
>> those that turn off Flash for whatever reason.

They tend not to criticize them, and in my case I regard it as a
personal choice that anyone is free to make. Concurrently, people who
choose to turn off Flash or Javascript should not expect the world to
stop using them because they decided to turn them off.

Iit's naive to assume companies and people must adapt to the lowest
common denominator 100% of the time, or that the only people who
should code are hand coders who build sites exclusively in CSS-p.

>
> These businesses are not making informed decisions. Their hired hand
> webmonkeys are not saying "BTW, a certain percentage of your
> potential customers are never going to be customers because we're
> using flash all over the site" now are they?
>

In the US, corporations are legally and morally beholden to their
stockholders, and overwhelmingly, stockholders want to make money. If
having Flash, Quicktime, MP3s, WMF, etc., etc., will achieve these
goals, then they will not care about the small percentage of people
who have turned off Flash. Sorry you don't like it, but it's a fact
of life.

It's also a fact of life that people want to build websites for
themselves, participate in MySpace, YouTube, blog, etc. - iWeb
facilitates this and makes the Mac a more competitive platform with
Windows. Making the web the sole and exclusive province of an elite
group of uber-coders would be to deny accessibility of an important
communications avenue to a potentially large audience.

Marilyn

On Jun 21, 2006, at 5:09 PM, Lucas K. Mathis wrote:

> Marilyn wrote:
>>
>
>
>> visitors are just as likely to click on a paid
>> result as they are on a natural link.
>
> How exactly do you measure that? Surely you don't suggest that people
> click more often on your site's link if you buy a Google ad than if
> you
> are in first or second place of the "natural" search results?

I don't personally measure this - it's a Google provided statistic.
They began publishing the 50% at least 2 years ago. Individual sites
that participate in AdWords, etc., can check out their particular
results in Google Statistics or any of the free tracking tools that
come with the program.

Most web hosts also have stats packages that will track how visitors
linked in.

Marilyn

At 16:06 -0700 UTC, on 2006-06-20, Nigel Stanger wrote:

> On 21/6/2006 4:40 AM, "Google Kreme" <gkremegmail.com> spake thus:
>
>> I'm sure this is a feature. Tables are, 99.999% o the time, evil and
>> to be avoided.

For tabular data they are good 100% of the time ;) And IMO that can apply to
things like forms too -- when you have text entry fields and their labels,
it's useful and perfectly appropriate to consider that tabular data.

> I'm not necessarily talking about HTML tables here, simply the ability to
> easily create table-like layouts in the editor, or at the very least
> multi-column text.

The challeng for HTML generators is how to figure out whether the data is
tabular or not. When it is tabular, a HTML table should be generated. When it
is not, CSS tables should be generated. I think a HTML generator can probably
find useful clues in the rest of the markup that can help make that decision,
but the only way to be 100% sure which is appropriate is to ask the user.
This is one of those areas where the user will have to understand some basics
about the Web/markup/separation of content and presentation.

> I recently wanted to create a bullet list in three
> columns across the page, with three items in each column, and I ended up
> having to do it as three separate text boxes and then fiddle around with
> alignment, etc., individually. That's just lame.

If it's a list, mark it up as such. Then use CSS to suggest it be presented
as whatever, including as table. I don't give the exact code because it isn't
entirely clear to me what you want to achieve, but maybe you'll find it
useful to take a look at my personal website (URL in sig) where every page is
marked up non-tabular, but the CSS suggests it be presented tabular --
heading levels 2 and 3 as a left-column, everything else as a right column.
Browsers that don't support CSS tables will simply ignore this, so it's an
approach that scales well. The downside is that it requires some
HTML-uglyfication (some DIVs).

[...]

        [serving proper charset info with Apache]

> The default charset is set to ISO 8859-1, but the config file seems
> to be claiming that it only uses this if the document has no charset of its
> own.

That's more or less right. Documents can indicate they're UTF-8 through a
BOM[*], and in the case of HTML files the HTTP spec says they can contain a
META HTTP-EQUIV providing charset info *for the server to read and generate
an apporiate HTTP Content-Type header from*. But that last bit is much
misunderstood and mostly useless as most webservers do not make use of it,
and some web browsers *do* seem to use it, despite of the specs. (This is
another area in which most HTML generators suck.) So in reality there's no
telling what will happen when a HTML document's META HTTP-EQUIV claims one
character repertoire, and the server claims another. The only realiable way
is to ensure the server sends the proper info (through a HTTP Content-Type
header).

If you have a directory of which all HTML files are to be served with a
different charset then your Apache's default, you can use .htaccess to tell
Apache what Content-Type header to serve those documents with. Simply create
a text file named ".htaccess" in the directory (it will apply to all
subirectories too) containing the line

        AddType 'text/html; charset=utf-8' html

(That's assuming your HTML files have a name extension of ".html". If they're
called ".abc", then say AddType 'text/html; charset=utf-8' abc.)

Be aware though that you, the author, will always have to *know* what
character repertoire applies. The Content-Type header's charset info simply
states what character reopertoire applies. It does not, as some people
believe, magically change a document from one character repertoire to another.

By default, Mac OS X writes everything as UTF-16 (which you don't want to
serve on the Web), but an editor should allow you to write files as something
else.

Btw, this is an area that's not that easy to handle by standalone HTML
generators such as iWeb, RapidWeaver, whatever. They can't configure the
server for you. But a CMS running on that same server most certainly can (yet
it seems that some do, some don't).

> This clearly isn't what's happening though. I've fixed the problem by
> forcibly serving everything as UTF-8, but this seems rather inelegant.

No, it's the only way. (But it assumes you know your files to in fact *be*
utf-8.)


[*] <http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#BOM>


--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

[OK, this thread has so completely overwhelmed itself that I'm going to limit what gets through from the queue severely, and I'd ask that everyone refrain from all but the most important posts. -Adam]


At 10:23 -0700 UTC, on 2006-06-21, John C. Welch wrote:
> To the end user, all that matter is "can I use the sites I want to use?". If
> the answer is yes, no bug. If no, bug. The entire standards compliance issue
> is not, and should not be something the end user cares about. It's like
> worrying if your toaster can handle sliced bread.

A better analogy would be worrying if your TV can handle station x or your CD
player can handle CD x. People don't buy TVs that can only handle TV
broadcasts from a specific station. They don't buy CD players that can only
play CDs by a specific orchestra. Those industries use a standard that
ensures interoperability, thus indeed, users don't need to worry about
standards. But on the Web they do need to, because so much of the Web
industry acts as if standards don't matter.

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

[Last post in this Apache sub-branch! -Adam]


On 22 Jun 2006, at 10:03 , Tom Gewecke wrote:
> On Jun 21, 2006, at 5:09 PM, Google Kreme wrote:
>> On 20 Jun 2006, at 17:06 , Nigel Stanger wrote:
>
>>> if anyone can tell me how to beat
>>> Apache into doing this properly I'd be very grateful.
>>
>> AddCharset UTF-8 .utf8
>>
>> <Directory />
>> ...
>> AddDefaultCharset utf-8
>> </Directory>
>>
>> I believe that is all. This works in 1.3.mumble and 2.0 versions of
>> Apache.
>
> The right way to do this is
>
> AddDefaultCharset Off
>
> This lets the document meta statement determine the browser behavior,
> which is how things should be set up.

Yes, this is correct. I misread (or rather, stopped reading too
early) the AddDefaultCharset specification. It should ONLY be set in
the document, and the server should only set it as a global value if
there is some reasons documents can't specify it.

On 22 Jun 2006, at 10:03 , David Ross wrote:
> While www standards were designed by people who wanted the end user to
> control how information is displayed, the money is behind producers
> controlling both content and format. And the folks with the money
> could
> care less about the utopian (as they see it) standards compliance
> fight.

But the other side of that, and what the companies don't realize, is
that when they choose the 'easy' path or the pretty flashy path --
the path that is not compliant with standards and that forces the
designers view on the user -- when they do that they lose a certain
percentage of eyeballs. What percentage? i don't know. No one
does, but I can tell you that I know many Mac users who have changed
banks ONLY because their online sites didn't work well with Safari.

I can also tell you that some of these companies are going to start
being sued under the ADA for enforcing non-compliant sites that
someone can't access with their customized browser that helps them
deal with their particular disability.

When Acme Bank loses several million dollars because of their website
design, it's going to be a really fun day for Acme Bank's webteam.
REAL fun.

At 09:03 -0700 UTC, on 2006-06-22, John C. Welch wrote:
> Well, what they're saying is "The number of actual technical problems with
> Flash are quite small. There are a number of people with philosophical
> problems regarding Flash, but not enough to cost us more than a rounding
> error in a profit statement. Flash is everywhere, it allows for a consistent
> presentation and viewing experience, and it pretty much removes browser
> differences as a problem."

The fact that it's simply not true.

Flash is not installed by default on many systems, and even if it is, we all
know that most users never upgrade their software. They stick with whatever
was installed by the vendor of the box, untill the box breaks down and they
buy a new one. So when authoring Flash-dependantly, you exclude not just
those with a 'philosophical problem', you also exclude those who don't have
Flash, and you still need to ensure your Flash movie works for people who
aren't using the latest Flash plug-in (there are plenty of Flash-dependant
sites that only work with an older or newer version of Flash than I happen to
be using that day). Thus there is still the aspect of backwards compatiblity,
which is easier to achieve by using Open Standards than by relying on
proprietary software.

Btw, AFAIK Flash can dynamically receive its content from elsewhere, which
makes it easy to use Flash while still separating content from presentation:
feed the user-agent your content presented through Flash when such is
requested, feed it as properly marked up text when the user doesn't have
Flash. This approach has the added benefit that you don't need expensive
techies to keep content up to date.

The only requirement is that you pick a Web site generator that produces
accessible sites. When such authoring tools are available and customers can
easily identify them as such, I'd be surprised if they'd still choose to use
authoring systems that can only offer reaching an undefinable subset of their
potential audience. (Of course I'm excluding other factors here, such as the
UI and price of the authoring system.)

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

At 09:05 -0700 UTC, on 2006-06-22, Marilyn Matty wrote:
> In fact, the web is becoming increasingly motion, time, sound and
> dimensionally oriented - standards don't take this into account.

I think it deserves repeating what someone else brought to this discussion:
that use of RSS is increasing rapidly. Seems to me a strong indication that a
large group of people prefers simple presentation of easily accessible
content. RSS may very well be so increasingly popular *because* so many
websites have serious accessibility/useablity problems.

> Coding should not be the exclusive property of an elite group of coders.

{sigh} That's exactly what your 'opponents' are arguing for: that website
generators, like iWeb, make it easy for non-techies to publish attractively
presented *accessible* content.

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

On 6/22/06 9:05 AM, "Marilyn Matty" wrote:
> IE has about 85% market share, making all other browsers minor
> players.
[snip]
> Though TidBITS Talkers, esp. myself, might not like it, the only
> browser that counts is the one with 85% market share, and to date it
> is not standards compliant.

IE may have 85% market share -- and even that number is debatable nowadays
-- but the other 15% is disproportionately important and influential. Those
who choose to use a browser other than IE tend to be Web- and tech-savvy,
and thus more likely to purchase goods online, more likely to search out
content, more likely to influence others, etc., etc., etc. This is one area
where you can't simply look at the "market share" numbers and be satisfied
that you're coding for the majority. (Not to mention that IE's market share
has been declining as more and more people get fed up with IE and, perhaps
related, as more and more people become more Web-savvy.)

On 23/6/2006 4:05 AM, "Sander Tekelenburg" <tekelenbeuronet.nl> spake thus:

> If it's a list, mark it up as such. Then use CSS to suggest it be presented
> as whatever, including as table.

You miss my point. I wasn't coding this layout by hand, I was doing it in
iWeb, which doesn't give you this level of control (and which most iWeb
users wouldn't want or know what to do with anyway). You *can* create text
boxes and tell it that the text inside the box is a list, but it has no
concept of multiple columns or tables or whatnot. What I was trying to
achieve was something like this:

    * Item A * Item D * Item G
    * Item B * Item E * Item H
    * Item C * Item F * Item I
    
In a page layout application I would create a single list that spanned three
columns. In iWeb the only way to do it is to split the thing into three
separate and totally independent text boxes and fiddle the alignment
manually. Ugly, especially if I want to add more items. It would be even
worse if it was a numbered list, as I would then have to manually tweak the
item numbering as well.

Now while CSS may not particularly support multi-column layouts all that
well, it should still be feasible to achieve the above layout in CSS using
element positioning, without resorting to physically splitting the list into
three.

My argument is that if iWeb is going to pretend to look like a page layout
program, it should at least support multi-column text and tables, otherwise
you end up resorting to ugly hacks like the above. Add those two features
and it would be pretty damn good for most casual web creators.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

At 09:03 06/22/06 -0700, David Ross wrote:
>While www standards were designed by people who wanted the end user to
>control how information is displayed

I can't speak for the motivations of the standards designers, but to judge
by the results, they cared a lot about the producers. CSS provides a lot of
control over presentation -- not pixel-perfect, but mighty good given the
variety of display devices in the world. The ability to provide multiple
style sheets is a great producer-empowering feature. Want field XYZ to show
only on the screen and not if the user prints it? Make it invisible in the
printer style sheet. Most uses of this feature are more positive, though
I've sometimes been startled when I printed a web page and the layout or
background differed from what I'd seen on the screen.

Yes, the standards designers wanted to enable users to have a good web
experience. They also wanted to enable producers to create content so that
users could have a good web experience, and they realized that users having
a good web experience is a good thing for the producers. Etc ad nauseum.
The two go together. Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

At 09:05 06/22/06 -0700, Marilyn Matty wrote:
>>Everyone is moving toward standards compliance, even Microsoft.
>
>This isn't the first time we've heard this, and I will believe it when I
>see it.

Open your eyes. There are sites tracking the standards conformance, and
they show IE doing very well -- not perfect, but very well given that it's
a rather difficult task.

>IE has about 85% market share, making all other browsers minor players.

I still haven't seen your source for this figure. It isn't in the Ad Age
document you cited. As I pointed out before, you CANNOT rely on web server
logs, because the other browsers lie about their identify. Please stop
quoting this figure unless you can cite a reliable source.

You also need to define "market share" in this context. It should be
something like the number of web pages loaded, or the number of
person-hours spent using the browser -- not the number of people in a
survey who say they user browser X (or have no idea what browser they use,
which I'd guess is probably more than 15%).

>Any new standards that might be defined would take years and years to be
>implemented by the browsers, if they are.

It took decades to implement physical accessibility standards. Does that
mean we shouldn't have tried?

It took decades to get seat belts installed as standard equipment in cars.
Does that lessen the value of the achievement?

It seems that ...

... environmentalists consider 1000 years to be long term planning.
... politicians consider 20 years to be long term planning.
... businesses consider 3 years to be long term planning.

>Coding should not be the exclusive property of an elite group of coders.

Right. NOBODY should be coding HTML or CSS, any more than anyone should be
coding assembler. I hand coded my own web site, not because I wanted to,
but because there were no tools to allow me to meet my goals without my
knowing the meaning of every HTML tag and CSS definition. I will definitely
be looking at some of the products mentioned in the followup article,
because it looks like we are starting to get some useful tools in this area.

Actually, not quite nobody. Some people will always be interested in
learning and using the details, and that's good too.

>Though TidBITS Talkers, esp. myself, might not like it, the only browser
>that counts is the one with 85% market share, and to date it is not
>standards compliant.

That figure again. Source?

I think you've misinterpreted the term "standards compliant". It's a
technical term, so you need to understand the technical meaning. With
respect to W3 standards and browsers, it means that the browser interprets
a standards-conforming document as specified by the standards. The term
says nothing about what a browser does with a document which does not
conform to the standard.

IE does a darned good job with standards-conforming web pages. IE 6 was
much better than IE5, and IE7 is even better. That's why the best way to
build a portable web page is to make sure it validates on w3.org and makes
iCab smile -- that technique isn't perfect, but it's a real good start.
Nearly all the arguments about browser incompatibility, and IE in
particular, are about what the browsers do with non-standards-conforming
web pages. But by definition, that has nothing to do with their status as
standards-conforming browsers.

>Iit's naive to assume companies and people must adapt to the lowest common
>denominator 100% of the time,

Then I take it you'd roll back the physical accessibility standards? As
Curtis pointed out, a part of this is not about adapting to the lowest
common denominator but about whether you are going to act like an ass to
your fellow human beings.

>or that the only people who should code are hand coders who build sites
>exclusively in CSS-p.

You seem to have a real chip on your shoulder about this "elite coders"
thing. It's obvious that you're responding to something other than what
you've read here.

Edward
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

I just received this link to a humorous pie graph showing how a web designer
spends his time. Some of the slices and their relative sizes seemed relevant
to this thread. Warning: contains "adult" language.

"Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design"

http://poisonedminds.com/comics/pm20060621.png

On 23.6.2006, space aliens observed John C. Welch saying:
>>The sooner people get rid of the idea that what they want the page to
>>look like is what *I* want the page to display like, the better.
>If the designer gets essentially no say in it, then why bother at all?

Aw, come on! Good designers are perfectly capable of coping with
different restrictions in different media. If you ask "why bother with
web design at all" because users can affect the design of web pages, why
not ask "why bother with typography at all" if people can draw into
books? Web pages are being rendered on the user's computer with the
user's settings, the user's browser, the user's fonts. Deal with it.


>>>Whether or not it's bad coding is irrelevant if it works
>>It may be irrelevant to you, but it's not to the people who have to
>>maintain the mess you leave behind. That would be people like me.
>Coders don't pay the bills. Customers do. If the customer is happy and
>the coder isn't, who wins?

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Customers aren't the ones
responsible for the crappy code. Incompetent web designers are. The
simple fact is that bad code - code which isn't standards compliant,
code which doesn't separate semantics from layout, code which isn't
clean and semantically well structured - inevitably leads to problems if
you have to maintain it.

And no, it doesn't matter one bit if coders aren't happy. What matters
is that it takes a coder a week to update a tag soup website instead of
the day it would have taken had the site been programmed properly in the
first place. That's a ton of money spent for absolutely nothing right
there.

Now, if you create your blog or personal homepage using iWeb and never
intend to move beyond iWeb, and don't care if some browsers - for
example, browsers for blind people, or browsers running on devices with
tiny screens [1] - can't render your code in a way that makes sense,
that's fine. But if your web site actually is an asset, something that
helps your business, something that you need to maintain and evolve in
the future, then iWeb is simply not good enough for you.


On 23.6.2006, space aliens observed mmatty saying:
>>Everyone is moving toward standards compliance, even Microsoft.
>This isn't the first time we've heard this, and I will believe it when
>I see it.

They've been getting better with every version. But you're only seeing
what you want to see.


>And even if all this could possibly be achieved within a year, the
>standards as they exist still suck.

They don't suck. They're missing some features (but improving), but
they're perfectly usable, it's possible to achieve almost any layout,
and it's not hard, either. The problem aren't the standards.

Of course, I do understand that it's often easier to produce tag soup,
check it in a few browsers, insert some more tags, insert some
JavaScript to check for browsers and fix some of the issues that were
found during testing, and then call it done. That may even be acceptable
for sites which you don't intend to maintain and don't need to update
for new browsers. For everything else, it's only cheaper in the short
run.


>>For Novices they shouldn't be trying to do 'pixel perfect' web design
>>anyway. No one should, but even the large corporations are constantly
>>showing their total ignorance.
>This is something that cannot be dictated - there is no no Internet
>Design or Coding Police. Frankly, I find the idea of an Internet
>Design or Coding Police very scary.

How in the world did you go from "no one should be trying to do 'pixel
perfect' web design" to "an Internet Design or Coding Police"? It's not
about a coding police, it's about simple facts. And it should be noted
that if you *wanted* to do pixel-perfect designs, CSS is the only option
you have, because HTML tag soup does not provide for anything
approaching "pixel-perfect design", unless you put everything into one
huge JPG.

lukas


[1] for example, Opera on a Nintendo DS:
<http://my.opera.com/organicchunkysalsa/blog/show.dml/309706>

At 00:47 -0700 UTC, on 2006-06-21, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> At 16:06 -0700 UTC, on 2006-06-20, Charlton Wilbur wrote:
>> [...] Please provide me with HTML and CSS markup that will produce
>> a three-column layout where text of an arbitrary length is evenly
>> divided among the three columns. This is a common and reasonable
>> thing to require, and impossible in CSS as it stands now.
>
> Yes, that would be a valuable feature (and I too think there's still a *lot*
> of room for improvement in CSS). I'd even like it better if you could simply
> suggest a column max-width and leave it up to the user (window width) over
> how many columns the content will be spread -- if the window is too small to
> allow for 2 columns, use 1, if it is wide enough for 5, then by all means use
> 5, thus allowing the user to not waste valuable screen space.

Well I'll be damned. Of knew I should have checked first: it turns out
exactly that is already being defined for CSS 3:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-css3-multicol-20051215/>. They're just waiting
for browser vendors to implement it... Contact your favourite browser vendor
if you care.


--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

[Remember, this thread is closing soon... -Adam]


On 6/27/06 09:49, "Sander Tekelenburg" <tekelenbeuronet.nl> wrote:

>> To the end user, all that matter is "can I use the sites I want to use?". If
>> the answer is yes, no bug. If no, bug. The entire standards compliance issue
>> is not, and should not be something the end user cares about. It's like
>> worrying if your toaster can handle sliced bread.
>
> A better analogy would be worrying if your TV can handle station x or your CD
> player can handle CD x. People don't buy TVs that can only handle TV
> broadcasts from a specific station. They don't buy CD players that can only
> play CDs by a specific orchestra. Those industries use a standard that
> ensures interoperability, thus indeed, users don't need to worry about
> standards. But on the Web they do need to, because so much of the Web
> industry acts as if standards don't matter.

That's because the broadcast and music industries don't just "come up with
stuff" ad hoc. They sit down, plan the standards, get down to maybe two at
most, and then see which one comes up the best. In many cases, it's a single
standard. They don't just start building hardware and the rest, and hope it
all works out.

How the rest of the world does things:

1) We have a problem
2) Here are possible solutions
3) winnow list down to one if possible, two if we just can't agree
4) Define standards for solutions clearly
5) Build device that follows standards, see what people buy more of

Here's the Internet

1) NEW TOY (NT)
2) NT isn't compatible with anything else because we never defined how
things need to communicate in this instance
3) Define standards
4) NEW TOY v2 doesn't work with those standards but we aren't going to delay
NTv2 because by god, we want to sell our NT, and besides, if we're popular
enough, we can ignore your standards and make people do things our way, at
least for us to make some nice profit. aka goto 1)

Comparing the products and processes of any other industry to the Internet
is like comparing a drawing of an apple to the solar wind from Alpha
Centauri. They aren't even in the same galaxy as each other.

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

At 09:03 -0700 22/6/06, Curtis Wilcox wrote:
>Guess what? Most blind people can see. I don't know the percentages but

In the UK it is around 2-3% of registered blind individuals who have
absolutely zero vision.

As in not capable of detecting light at all - it is then a spectrum of
increasing sensitivity and acuity towards full vision.

        f

On 6/27/06 10:14, "Sander Tekelenburg" <tekelenbeuronet.nl> wrote:

>> Well, what they're saying is "The number of actual technical problems with
>> Flash are quite small. There are a number of people with philosophical
>> problems regarding Flash, but not enough to cost us more than a rounding
>> error in a profit statement. Flash is everywhere, it allows for a consistent
>> presentation and viewing experience, and it pretty much removes browser
>> differences as a problem."
>
> The fact that it's simply not true.
>
> Flash is not installed by default on many systems, and even if it is, we all
> know that most users never upgrade their software. They stick with whatever
> was installed by the vendor of the box, untill the box breaks down and they
> buy a new one.

Every OS with a browser I've installed in the last 5+ years came with flash.

> So when authoring Flash-dependantly, you exclude not just
> those with a 'philosophical problem', you also exclude those who don't have
> Flash, and you still need to ensure your Flash movie works for people who
> aren't using the latest Flash plug-in (there are plenty of Flash-dependant
> sites that only work with an older or newer version of Flash than I happen to
> be using that day).

Again, the number of os installs sans flash is quite small, and Flash, FAR
more than almost any other plugin, makes upgrading dead simple. At this
point, you don't even have to always restart the browser.

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On Jun 27, 2006, at 11:14 AM, Edward Reid wrote:
>> IE has about 85% market share, making all other browsers minor
>> players.
>
> I still haven't seen your source for this figure. It isn't in the
> Ad Age
> document you cited.

A quick Google turned these articles up, and I've seen the 85 -86%
quoted frequently in many other articles very recently:

http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170702586

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/12/HNfirefoxloses_1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

And very a interesting article from the Harvard Business Review,
"Lessons From The Browser Wars"

http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5288&t=technology

Which has a link to the study, "Economic and Technical Drivers of
Technology
Choice: Browsers" by the subject of the interview:

http://people.hbs.edu/pyin/papers/ETB0605.pdf

Marilyn

iWeb is pretty sweet. It does CSS, and layers, and the code doesn't look like the web page. But it can. I just added text navigation links and covered them over with an opaque rectangle; which was all I needed for my 8 page site to be useful and navigable via lynx.

Bizarre? Yes. Clean, lean, and optimized output? HAhahahaha, no. Usable by multiple browsers including text only readers? Yes. Something I would let my mom use? Yes. And that's where it really stands out for me.