Nikoport

To all the people from the VOD human resources and reporting departments — thank you so much for your efforts and patience — you were the greatest students i have ever had. I hope, that in the passed weeks you have learned something useful, that will improve your webdesign skills and will bring some speed enhancements into your work efforts.
I am grateful to you, that i had the opportunity to spread the word about the web standards beyond the Dreamweaver means, and that i feel that i didn’t waste my or your time.
Thank you once again.

A couple of days ago, Microsoft has launched open beta version of the Internet Explorer 8, also known as IE8. This should be quite an important release, which actually should have been IE7, because of the complete CSS 2.1 implementation, for which all webdesigners around the world have asked, screamed and cried for quite a number of years.

The final release of the IE8 be passing the ACID 2 test, which depending on the release time, may be even ahead of the Firefox. (Opera and Safari are already passing it for some time). Besides ACID 2 being just a synthetic test of the CSS 2.1 standard, it is quite an important mark as well – it at least tests some of the important functionalities of the Cascading Sheets and represents the dreams and wishes of a lot of webdesigners for years. I hope, that there will be an ACID 2.5 test, including some of the most complicated situations in CSS standard, especially those where the major browsers are still having problems. Such test would always be a motivation for browser developers to improve their respective products and for the rest of us mortals a simple comparison tool to see which one is making bigger effort in providing a higher quality product.

The most interesting thing about IE8 web standards compliance is that it won’t support standard compliance mode like IE7 by default. One will have to use much talked and contested “X-UA-Compatible” header. I do not like this idea at all – but i have no illusions that no scream of web developers community will make Redmond change its mind.

2 interesting technologies included in IE8 are those to combat Google: Activities (think embedded Google Maps,) and WebSlices( selecting a part of the web page for saving for later viewing – for years there are quite a number of plugins for Firefox allowing this functionality).

Activities will allow to check out the address on the webpage by selecting it and then viewing it on the maps (microsoft maps, of course), and also social services links like digg it, facebook share links, etc. There must be a number of plugins in the future to include your preferred social services. I hope it will eliminate all those useless social links on the pages in the nearest future. =O)

I am still testing IE8 beta and still not sure if i keep it for more time. What i am concerned at the moment is whether we will have a possibility to have 2 browsers at the same time on the same computer – we are about to have IE6, IE7 and IE8 active – i don’t remember seeing 3 Microsoft browsers being in statistics for quite a number of years… With the recent death of the Netscape browser it brings a lot of nostalgia to me. I do not think about having IE6 on Vista – it is impossible, but for argument’s sake i need to have IE7 and IE8 on Vista, cause i won’t buy another license for a virtual machine just to get 3 browsers working at the same time.

p.s. A lot of sites are broken, quite broken if i might add – some of mine are included. Also there are a lot of cases when text adjustment does weird things, and IE7 emulation is far from perfect – many cases text justification sometimes is quite weird, but i do understand that it is just a first beta.

I have designed a new version of a website for TARH lda, which was finally launched a couple days ago. The site at the moment is completely static xhtml (php version is already in plans for the end of the 2008). Besides reworking graphic concept the new version includes a home page with news and archive, and a special page for the firm CEO José Martins Carvalho, also the work is being finished to add Spanish and English versions for the international visitors.

TARH Lda is a portuguese geological company in the area of ground water development. They are one of the most respected portuguese specialists in the project and supervision of ground water research as well as working with mineral water for spa and bottling and geothermal purposes. They have a very vast curriculum of doing works on 3 different continents and with no doubt are one of the finest portuguese firms.

At the moment it contains only a portuguese version, while english and spanish are still under revision, but they should arrive in the next weeks (english is almost ready, just a couple of small things are being reviewed and refined). The PT letters which stand for portuguese bellow the main menu are basically the start of the international menu.

The site of TARH was created using XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.1 with a fluid design which is viewed best with 800×600+ resolutions.

Some words of dis appreciation go to the infamous Arsys hosting: no .htaccess access – guys, in which century are you living ? Anyway – enjoy the rest of the prepaid year – because it is the last one when TARH is still hosted on your servers. 2GB of traffic per month seems to be like a bad joke to me, especially in the year 2008 when most providers offer you no limits on the web traffic.

Last week, Apple has released the new version of their browser Safari to all operating systems – Safari 3 final version was included into the 0s X 10.4.11 update for Tiger users, and Safari 3.04 for Windows users. It was quite an important update remembering that a couple of weeks ago, with the release of the Leopard, Apple has launched the 3rd version of Safari for the OS X users who has upgraded their system. The new Safari has brought some restyling to the user interface – now it has the unified look and feel of the Leopard operating System. Also it finally includes (after 4 years of waiting) the possibility of styling the form controls with a css. This is a major improvement for GUI development, i believe every web developer went nuts with Safari, because of not being to style the controls.

This is a major upgrade for all systems. On windows a new beta version is much faster then the previous version. Not only the so called “cold start” but also the navigation, loading times and all the rest appears to be quite faster then before.

The list of the recent improvements to WebKit – on which Safari is based is quite impressive – it includes stability and speed improvements, improvements to the Enhanced Rich Text Editing: it includes TinyMCE and FCKEditor (think visual editors for Drupal and Wordpress), SVG (after Opera and Firefox one more player coming to this market, IE team – are you still sleeping ?), XPath and XML improvements (think XMLHttpRequest and Ajax).

OS X safari version include some development tools, which must be enabled by hand (do they continue to be in alpha stage?)

There are some bugs though to work on the Windows version – thats why it is still a beta, i believe. I have managed to see Safari loosing its look and feel and some of the windows control buttons appearing (quite an unpleasant change).

Apple is taking quite serious this Safari offensive, and if they will spend just a little more time implementing Web Developer tools and stabilizing the Windows version, i believe the time when some users will start switching to Safari.

A couple of days ago i have put online a new site for “Dino Consult“, that was developed on Drupal. The design is very simplistic, to accompany the visit card that the owner of Dino Consult has. It was also based on the schematic design that was created by the client. Dino Consult is by their description a “consultancy firm for the export of innovative technologies, process comparisons and project management”.

Besides creating a xhtml/css template I have used the following modules: Views, Google Sitemaps, Update Status, TinyMCE (i still argue that it or any other editor should make into the core of the Drupal), PathAuto, Meta Tags, i18n and IMCE.
Basically the Views were used to place together. I still cannot imagine more or less complicated site or even a normal one (like Dino Consult) without Views module, it simply can do so many things for you.

A couple of days ago, W3C has released a new version of a html markup validator (0.80). 8 months after the last release and a lot of work with 2 beta versions, W3C has presented a new “revamped” markup validator. They describe it as a “major milestone in the development of the validator”, that besides various functional improvements finally includes a major visual overhaul. Since the beginning, the W3C pages besides being accessible were having a really bad design, but the new markup validator is already a good change.

The usability of the validator has been greatly improved – one of the new “features” that i liked is the icon status which represents the status of the validated content – green when the markup is valid and red when it is not. This way it is easy to see which documents are valid, when you have a couple of them validating.
It is remarkable that the new markup validator works in resolutions until 640×480, in which it while having a small horizontal scrollbar, it is still represents everything on the screen.
The colors have been altered from straight #0f0 and #f00 to much smother #669900 and #1f2126 respectively, though i have to add that may be the color for the red is not a “web safe” one, and should be reconsidered for the newer version.

The functional changes, every regular user should notice in the next couple of days, while validating – for example for the XHTML 1.0 strict doctype the <html> tag started requiring “xmlns” attribute, and so on. This small things should affect the results of a lot of the already validated content, but it is for better – because it will help web designers to improve and to perfect their html and xhtml code.

Overall the changes are for better and W3C markup validator team have done a good job improving the most useful instrument from W3C.

A new website for Goumi Lda went online a couple of minutes ago. Goumi Lda aka Kromos Urbanos is a firm, which creates completely customized furniture. Basically they will turn your inspiration into a piece of furniture that you wish – should it be a lamp or a bed or anything else. But its better to see (visit) one time then to read or hear ten thousand times.

Goumi is actually a rare tropical fruit, which can be found in places almost all around the world. Just by watching the results of Goumi’s work, you will understand that. I hope that they are really going to fill their portfolio with the images of their work, because i expect them to have a great future. No, it is not a promotion, but as for me – i know where i am going to get some furniture for my future house =O)

The site of Goumi was created using XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.1. Also there is a “small” flash animation on the, which was quite easier to do in flash then in XHTML. I did my best to make this site working in 800×600 since viewing the statistics of this resolution usage in Portugal made me thing on this subject, but i am still considering that some of the things are not the way they should be, but when you have some big images, there are not many ways of making site 100% fluid while not breaking one thing or another in HTML.

There are two other projects, which are on their way to be published in the next weeks, i hope.