Nikoport

While being confronted with a question a couple of days ago, if the 800×600 resolution is still matter for the web design, my first reaction was to say that even if it matters, then not much, but after remembering seeing some statistics from some portuguese sites, i have remembered. So i have checked just statistics for 5 different sites with a different audiences, to see if the 800×600 resolution still matters. The results were a kind of surprising for me.

But first of all, a good site should have a liquid design, this way it should display in 800×600, more or less in the same way as in other higher resolutions. I am still trying to convince the designer with whom i am working on websites to start moving into making flexible designs, and the next project i am finishing at the moment is quite a step from the previous experiences. =O)

But back to the resolution statistics - in a specific theme site (geology), having more than 90% of the visitors portuguese - the percentage of users having a screen resolution of 800×600 was 10.59%, in a general shopping site the percentage was 8.54%, a site connected with the children had 8.47%, some web design site - 1.82%, this site on the contrary to the others i have compared has only 2.85%, but the most users visiting my site are not from the Portugal =O)
And if you still think that such numbers as 8% or 10% are not really important, then the fact of not ignoring the Macintosh users, which is more or less accepted across web community, seems to be ridiculous, because for the general statistics Os X users do not represent more then 1% in Portugal.

After seeing that numbers i decided to check on the statistics from other sources, so this what i have found about the users using 800×600 resolutions:

• W3Schools - 14%
• Digital Web - 28% (January 2006)
• tamingthebeast - 10.88%
• Upsdell - 12%
• Jakob Nielsen - 17%
• Game Producer - 2.57%

In short - in Portugal it is still matters, to test sites for this resolution. As for the web in general - i believe that the answer is pretty much the same, there are many users, who are still bound to the 800×600 resolution, and we have no right of ignoring them, or at least we should try to pay attention. =O)

=O)
I would even add, then when in General the 800×600 resolution statistics will drop below the percentage of the Macintosh users, then it will be the time to consider of ignoring it.
=O)
On a more serious note, the phone, palm and smart devices with browsers are becoming more and more common, thats why we should pay more and more attention to them, and they are so far from that “miserable” 800×600 resolution, so i think there is no way we will ignore this resolution in the next couple of years.

Yahoo has announced that they introduced a new way of marking extraneous content: a CSS class, which is called “robots-nocontent“. First, when i have read about it, i could not believe my own eyes - so i read this again and again … A CSS class which will serve for one search engine, sounds weird, isn’t it ? Now that is one kind of a CSS class - i can imagine hundreds of pages all over internet filled with robots-nocontent tag, making it all less and less relevant and more ridiculous. Yahoo is obviously making fun of us, but no, it was not announced on fools day.

Yahoo has provided some examples of robots-nocontent usage:

<div class="robots-nocontent">
Hehe this is a extraneous content, please ignore me
</div>


Personally, I hope that people won’t step into this rather disappointing game of using CSS classes to mark their content. In my personal opinion, it is absolutely unappropriated way of coding the web page. Mixing something, which is intended purely for the presentational use, with a something which is just a content processing algorithms(bots), is quite a “hack”, which with no doubt could lead to some serious problems in the future (imagine people starting using CSS instead of robots.txt for redirection and indexing). There must be another way to avoid such happenings, and by the way - why should web designers create the way the search engines are indexing their sites. Its like being lazy, and if Yahoo is lazy about it, then i do not see why web designers should be excited about it.

I do not wish to see pages full of class attributes, written with half a dozen of classes, something like this is surely to avoid:

class="footer classical myspace robots-nocontent"


Final thought: avoid it, it does not make any sense at all mixing the things which were separated by the mean and by the design. Presentational layer(css) should not provide functionality, which even its own functional layer (xhtml) is not providing by design.

The WaSP has announced that at their annual meeting a few days ago at SXSW, they have decided to create a WaSP Street Team. The aim of the new team is to give ways to get involved with web standards evangelism in the local areas and in the places of work and online.

The information that is published is very few at the moment, basically what the Web Standards Project is doing is encouraging the people to put their names and addresses on the list, which will distribute the information, in some near future. The most important message is that the WaSP Street Teams will help the promotion of web standards in local communities.

I am quite excited about this, and this is a measure i believe that that was needed for quite a long time. Making big topic of the standards will make people talk of them, making a group will help to spread it out. I have to confess, that besides some portuguese names and portuguese sites on the net, that i find, there are just 2 people in real life, that i know capable of maintaining the conversation on the topic of XHTML/CSS standards. It is a very sad statistic, since i know quite a lot developers working in a lot of big portuguese companies. Only by the local teams it will be possible to reach some of the minds, which are still living in a long and forgotten 90s.

I hope there are some Portuguese interested in this project, so there will be a positive result (wider standards adoption) out of this idea.

Today i have a very distinctive plug-in for wordpress “Tiger Style Administration“, which completely redesigns the administration of the wordpress. It changes completely the look and feel of wordpress administration to be similar to the latest OS X release 10.4 codename Tiger. I think that orderedlist (the authors of this plug-in), has got the right feeling about implementation, and this “skin” turns the wordpress administration from a dark blue into a light white style. All the changes are done with a css style sheet, which could be a very good study for any css specialist or enthusiast.

There are still some minor glitches, but they really small and easy to ignore. This is a plug-in i can really recommend to anyone, being tired with the default settings of the wordpress administration console. If there is something really out of control at the panel, then you can just overwrite and modify the css style to something, that you find acceptable, so for any advanced css author, there are no limitations.

This style and example also can serve as a inspiration to do more plug-ins like this one, but exploring other themes like Linux or Playstation or whatever, as people are always welcoming the adaptation of their favorite platform or game or whatever. =O)

After working with a software done by the amateurs, it is a great pleasure seeing and working on something that is implemented with so much imagination and care.

As Ian Hickson has suggested, i will try to join W3C HTML working group, though i do not consider myself a big expert in this area, i have certainly read a couple of W3C’s documents and as a software developer and a project manager, i have had a lot of things to do with specifications based on the W3C standards. The most important thing about working in such group should be a common sense and being more or less reasonable which i hope to be. =O) HTML and xHTML represent a very big interest for me, all web design is based on them and there are so many elements and functionalities that all web developers are missing.

I have already completed the first step by signing to the W3C’s page requesting an access to the reserved area, so theoretically in the next couple of days i should receive some response from them, and hopefully they will allow me to proceed and to join the HTML group.

W3C new working group is starting recruiting members for a new HTML working group, which will dedicate itself to the development of HTML5 and xHTML 5. Last october, W3C’s director Tim Berners-Lee has announced that a new group will be created which will work in the direction of a new HTML development. The new HTML is going to publish their results somewhere in 2010 which means that in 3 years, we will have something new to talk about. It is quite fast remembering other W3C specifications and standards which takes much more then 3 or 5 years, a good one is a CSS 3, which is still under development for a couple of year already.

Chris Wilson (Internet Explorer 7) and Dan Connolly (W3C) are the main leaders, which should publish new draft HTML and xHTML specifications already this July (2007). I believe that the large part of their work will be based on the WHAT-WG group, simply because there is no time for reinventing the wheel, and the first draft should be published in about 3 monthes. I hope that this group will include the parts from all major browser developers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari, because we need a stable progress from all browser developers to advance to the new specifications in the future. Mozilla Firefox has “conquered” something between 10 and 20% of the market, depending on the country and statistics, so excluding them will make no sense, as well as Safari, which is almost completely controls growing Apple’s market.

Interesting is that the old group working for xHTML 2 for already 5 years, will continue their work independently. Here i do not agree with W3C ideas, since forming a new group dissolves an elder one, otherwise we are risking to have 2 standards reigning and fighting against each other, and even the fact, that the main Internet Explorer man Chris Wilson is participating in a new HTML5 group does not change the fact, that so many decision are taken in upper echelons by people who has no knowledge about technology.

My voice and support goes to the new HTML 5 and xHTML 5 group, i am not a big fan of xHTML 2, since it breaks a lot of compatibility and introduces not so much of the elder xHTML things and being quite an old trouble maker. I feel that a lot of the new stuff from the HTML5 specification proposed by WHAT-WG, is desperately needed by the webdesigners. As for xHTML 5 - it can and should take the best ideas out of the xHTML 2 and implement them together with new changes of the HTML 5.

In the battle of HTML 5 vs xHTML 2 the first round is certainly for the HTML 5 and that is fine in my opinion, since the web desperately needs to move on from the state and standards of the last century.

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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