Nikoport

Almost one year later, after the original Portwatch research, i have decided to do one more research, this time dedicated to the standard compliance (and not compliance) of the portuguese banks.
I am expecting to be able to conduct a new research dedicated to the principal portuguese municipalities later this year, just to be able to compare if there is any progress, but i also wish to compare other “industries” and governmental authorities, so i am going to include them all into Portwatch or whatever name this project will shape into in the nearest future.

I have visited websites of 9 biggest portuguese banks, to compare their standards compliance, to test their sites in 3 major browsers - Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, and to know if there is at least one bank who cares about their customers with special needs. The banks i have chosen to test are: Banif, Barclays, BES, BPI, CGD, Deutsche Bank, Millenium BCP, Montepio and Totta, as the others only make part of these ones, or their impact is really insignificant for 99% of the portuguese bank customers.
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About one month ago, Microsoft has redesigned their home page, to make it more usable, to allow people a better search on their page, etc… “The new page incorporates months of research, testing, customer feedback, and refinements.” - are the (marketing) words published by them selfs promoting a “well done” work to the believers.

As it is written by the webmaster in about the new Microsoft home page, it took them about 6 month to redesign it. If it is true, then it is a very typical corporate product of not-understanding how to get things done. Has anyone expected a better visual and usable work from Microsoft ? Not me, that for sure, as i have never seen any visual presentational work, worth remembering. They are making me understand the whole meaning of the word wrapper in the worst sense possible when i look at their new home page, they are not using mouse hover status when going over the menus, creating a half second delay when passing over it, using so many types of the blue that i have even lost its count, writing a copyright above the footer - with no disrespect to disabled people, but someone, who designed this page was blind, deaf and actually testing www.google.com ?

From the web standards point of view, going “forward” to using invalid HTML 4.0 Transitional (sweet old 1995 or 1996) is such a typical waste of potential. Who are the developers ? Guys, either you are new to whole that web thing, or your bosses are nuts, and if it is so, ignore them and make some good changes to that page, for your own sake. An interesting meta tag “DCSext.wt_target” is revealing users browser and platform - Microsoft most probably has already forgotten the money they have paid, for wrong handling Opera by MSN a couple of years ago, when they were sending script with errors to disable access for people using this browser. No, everything seems to be ok when visiting this page with Opera, but it is not a good signal when i see such information as there are so many plugins to change the user agent identification string.

Not everything is bad, as the design has become more clean, more usable, no table-based design ( congratulations, it is a big step forward to the current state of the web), though i still do not understand why “developers” and “it professionals” are two different categories. I think that the most people are expecting something extraordinary when it is about some big companies like Microsoft, Apple or Google, that’s why any other result is not acceptable, because being able to choose between the very best developers and usability specialists available they could have done much better work.

Fazit: guys and girls, if it took you 6 month to redesign one page, then forget about redesigning the complete site, you will not it end until the end of this century. =O)

Recently i have spent some serious time constructing a test site in Drupal CMS 5 beta2, and i was very positively surprised by the ease of its configuration a standard compliance, that i am definitely going to try constructing my next work in it. I have already made one site in Joomla, and it is a very nice system, but in the sense of standard-compliance it is still far away from Drupal. Though there are several templates on the net which are not table-based, the basis configuration of Joomla to start with (even in the most recent 1.5beta) is still largely based on the tables, when Drupal’s default templates are all standard-compliant div-based designs, which is a very decisive factor for me. Being still the beginner (actually a noob) in various CMS available on the market, i am even considering using Wordpress as a complete solution for some very simple projects.

I loved the ease and the speed of the changes that i made to transform drupal from what seemed to be a very blog-based system into a very well-looking content editing site.

The next thing i am going to do some heavy experiments is a user management, and if its going to be that good as the customization, am definitely going to consider completely switching to Drupal.

A few days ago Google, Microsoft and Yahoo has agreed to join forces for defining a standard for sitemaps usage based on a XML which simplificates the work of the search engine bots, by distributing available site strucutre information. Originally developed by Google and already in use since about a year by Google Sitemaps has become a standard de-facto and as a matter of a fact, the version publicated on the sitemaps.org site has a higher version(0.9) then one i am using at the moment(0.7).

It is very nice to see, that the big 3 of the search are finally agreeing on something, which will make work of the webmasters easier. This way, we wont have to implement three independent solutions for each of the search engines, and i am more then welcoming it. The only question that i have in my mind is how much time will their stick to it and keep working together, since Microsoft is known for ignoring the common standards and defining their own, but in this case, because Google is the absolute market leader all over the world, i believe, that as long as microsoft dont have market controlled, they are most probably going go stick to it.

Another interesting thing about this organization is the license, under which they are distributing this information. I confess, that this “Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License” is quite a surprise for me, especially since a rant, made a couple days ago by Mr. Ballmer about Linux and its license.

It was about the time … Finally there are some movements in that direction, i don’t even want to remember the year 199x, when the last Html 4.01 version was publicated by the W3C. This post from the W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee finally makes understand that maybe in a couple of years, we will finally have something new. I believe, that it is an answer by the W3C on the critics from the most respected and influential people on the web, who lately even started threads in the sense of making changes inside the W3C.

There are a lot of people around the net, who already wrote articles on this matter, between them the most interesting in my opinion are from 456BereaStreet and the one from Anne Kesteren. Even with the lot of pessimism to be found around the web, like “we will see the first publication of the new HTML somewhere between 2010 and 2012″, i still think we should rejoice, cause spending 7 years for nothing is much worse, then having a first glimpse of the hope.

The things that i wish to see in this new version are: the most of the work from the WHATWG group called HTML5 (datagrid,input attributes!!!,and more semantics) , i have even written about it before, as well as the menu elements, which would finally bring some dynamic into the web development. You wont find a lot of sites, which don’t have menus, but still every time the developers have to write them almost from the scratch, and what is worse - in a couple of years a lot of them becoming buggy and/or unusable.

I have to confess, that it is a pretty exciting year so far, 2 new version of browsers (Firefox 2.0 and IE7), initial XmlHttpRequest standardization by the W3C and now even a new HTML … Nice … =O)

W3c has silently released a new update for a Markup Validator. The previous version was released in february earlier this year, that is more then 8 month ago - lately i have even started worring if they were still working on improving the validator, but as it seems they are =O).

The most of web designers, who use their services almost daily, have surely noticed some serious changes in the work of the validator. The list of the principal changes is fine:

• A new (experimental) Web Services API
• The proprietary (and experimental) XML output format is deprecated
• New Document type supported: XHTML-Print
• New Character Encoding supported ISO-8859-11 (Thai)
• Usability fix: better error messages for documents with no character encoding declared, and for which the encoding fallback fails
• HTTP Fix: Be more lenient about whitespace and linefeeds in Content-Type
• Usability Fix: Adding the possibility of Doctype Override for SVG Document Types
• Compatibility Fix for OpenSP 1.5.2
• documentation updates and improvements
• Improved Feedback mechanisms

I am especially excited about this feature: Web Services API. Finally a serious improvement in the handling of the requests. The fact, that with the local installation one could publish this services over the net is a very welcome feature. Supporting SOAP 1.2 is a matter of fact a big improvement over the many web services i have seen lately (maybey i wasnt that lucky… =O)).
I have also noticed some warnings appearing over the pages which were parsed without them before (links and &s stuff), but that is the case for a more detailed study in the future…

I hope to live until the day to see the final 1.0 version online published and welcomed by all web comunity. There were a lot of critics lately about W3C’s functionality (and for the most part rightly so), but for the new validator version they have my gratitute at least =o)

Lately, all over the net, there were written so many articles about doctypes, i have even joined some comentaries to some of the discussions. I have no doubt, if its possible, then one should try and implement sctrict doctype, no matter if its Html or xHtml - a bettrer standartisation will be possible, only if we will set some good examples. There are moments, especially when using some javascript library, when complete compatibility with strict doctypes is impossible, but with every day, the number of such solutions is getting lower and lower, so i think that there are not too many excuses now for ignoring the fact, that transitional doctype was suggested only as a temporary _transitional_ solution.

So after this thought i have decided to adopt strict doctypes in all those projects that i am implementing at this moment, including a new design for this very site, which right now is scheduled for late december.