Thursday, January 31, 2002

>>>Kimbro says: "Here's what I'm talking about. Not to pick on Clark but right after I wrote the last post I went to his site. He has a new CSS based style. Here's the problem, Omniweb on the left and IE on the right. The Omniweb rendering is not only ugly, it's completely unreadable. CSS is not a safe technology." I certainly agree with Kimbro on some of these points.  For sure the OmniWeb rendering is ugly, actually the whole pic is pretty ugly.  But he's right on two points; OmniWeb is not a standards based browser and CSS is not safe. OmniWeb posts this information on their website about their lack of CSS compliance.  I'm sure that they are trying, but it seems odd that they spent the time to make their browser work with so many languages before getting it to work well displaying the content.  They supported 12 languages at last count, including Chinese.  Marketing knows the drill, get the browser out there, then we'll have the money for standards.  It's  backwards. But it's not just their fault.  The bigger problem here is the fact that Microsoft and Netscape, in their push to become the dominant browser maker got everyone used to browsers that were 'fault tolerant.'  The difficulty now with making a browser standards compliant is the fact that there is so much badly coded content out there that everyone wants it both ways.  They want the browser to support all of the HTML and XML formats as well as failing gracefully.  That in itself is a chore that can be accomplished by only the biggest organizations. It would be much better for the web if HTML and XML pages failed outright when they contained errors.  That's the incentive that would be needed to get content creators to do things right in the first place.  It's so hard to do that now because so many of the browsers hide all of the errors you make.  No DOCTYPE declaration, no problem.  Missing TABLE tag, no problem.  No HEAD tag, no problem.  This feeds into the problem. What would you get in return for writing valid HTML and XML code?  You'd get real choice in browsers and probably a lot more of them.  You'd see some real interoperability between browsers.  You'd get the security of knowing that your code will run as expected. Which brings me back to my comment that CSS is not safe.  No technology is safe, you can even write HTML that will appear as messed up as the previous example. What's important to think about is 'what can you do now.'  For now you can learn the standards and try your best to write code that uses them safely.  Sure the previous attempt looks messed up in OmniWeb but that doesn't rule out CSS.  Look at a site like Jeffrey Zeldman's, his pages degrade nicely on browsers that don't support CSS.  Seek out people like this and learn from them.  And most of all keep talking about it. 11:49:26 PM

>>>I'm so tired of HTML.  It's such a drag to feel this way.  On the one hand I have clients who want content to appear the same, sometimes to the pixel, across all of the 'potential' browsers.  On the other there are my feeligs that HTML is not and was not ever meant to do such a thing. Some clients are more than willing to have you spend a lot of their money on a site that looks the same in 'most' of the browsers, but this is such a waste of money.  Content should be the focus, not presentation. I agree that presentation is very important, but content still comes first.  My preference is to create pages that work well using the current standards and degrade gracefully for those that do not.  Unfortunately, many clients and users of the web still feel that pages should look consistent across different browser versions. The mistake made early on by designers and producers of web content was to abuse HMTL and create pages with this consistent presentation.  It's probably going to take a long time before these unrealistic expectations go away. In the meantime, I'm doing what I can to not feed in to this problem.  I'm trying to find a balance between simple design and consistent user experience. 8:02:25 PM

>>>Don Brown's puzzle is great, it totally stumped me. 7:48:05 PM

>>>CNET News.com says: "FTC to hit anti-spam campaign trail. The Federal Trade Commission is gearing up for a battle against unsolicited commercial e-mail, known as spam." I hope that something concrete can be done about this, I spend a lot of my time every day dealing with Spam. 7:43:52 PM

>>>Weblogs.Com crossed the 500-site level today at 3:26PM. I see many more copies of Radio out there.  Is 500 the number of regularly updated sites?  I'm curious because I really want Radio to be a success!  The last time I looked there were 2998 sites in the Radio directory. http://radio.weblogs.com/0102998/ 7:40:40 PM

>>>CNET News says: Suit targets pay-for-play sites. A diet pill maker files suits against AltaVista, Kanoodle and others, saying the practice of arranging search results based on how much a company pays is misleading. Duh!, if you hadn't noticed, none of these companies are a public service.  It costs a lot of money to run these search engines and they have to do something to pay the bills. For example, while looking at the phone book I noticed that the numbers and information for some companies was much larger and more colorful than others.  Is this 'misleading?'  It might be misleading if you had some reason to feel that ALL listings in a phone book were be on equal footing, but those things cost money to make.  Unless a search engine classifies themselves as 'search engine based totally on the relevance to your search terms' you have to take some personal responsibility and look at the information with a critical eye. People do it every day when they watch the nightly news, don't they? 7:34:36 PM

>>>Doc says: "I walked around with a cordless phone on my head from 10am to 1pm today. Most of that time all I heard was Music on Hold, interrupted by messages urging me to solve my problems by sending an email [...]" I agree with Doc, I spent an amazingly long time trying to get a few different accounts cancelled at Interland.  My biggest mistake was using the online support area.  There is absolutely NO accountability in that system.  I could never respond directly ,or even indirectly, to the person who had just attempted to help me.  The system is designed in such a way as to prevent you from completing an issue with the same person.  It was like a giant, faceless monster. The weakest people manage the messages in the email queue and they are not empowered to solve your problems.  Many times I received replies to my questions that indicated that the person had not even read my description of the problem.  It felt like the measure of success was the number of emails 'responded' to, and NOT the number of problems solved. Because I have had so many bad experiences with email as a medium for solving issues I have turned back to using the phone.  At Interland, I have been very lucky with the phone system.  They almost always respond in less than 5 minutes and that is much better than either Hostpro or Verio. I can tell right away whether the person on the other end understands my problem and it helps move the process along.  By being on the phone I feel it improves the communication process and I have consistently gotten better advice. Any company looking to gain a cost savings or service improvement should really look into the challenges of successfully implementing an email based help system.  I believe that it can work, but I haven't seen it yet. 7:20:13 PM

>>>Robert Penner is a really awesome Flash resource.  Way more math than you'd want to shake a stick at, very clean design.  I am so happy that he's sharing his FLA's.  Even if you don't use Flash it's worth a trip to his site just for the eye candy. 6:54:05 PM

>>>Alanna is trying out Radio.  That's two down and many to go. 10:19:19 AM

>>>nefarious: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. nefarious I saw this and almost immediately the word Disney came to mind. 10:13:42 AM

>>>My computer and Radio are not getting along when it comes to pop-up notifications from other programs.  For instance, when RealOne (which I've since uninstalled) shows a pop-up message, Radio stops proccessing some requests.  It cannot post Email-to-Weblog posts. Also, when I'm running a McAffee scan Radio and McAffee seem to hole eachother up.  One or the other process stops and will not start unless you give it the focus or click on the other application.  Turning Radio off did allow McAffee to finish it's processing. I am running WinME, 1.4G, 126MB. 10:05:05 AM