Nikoport

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.

I have been playing and testing the available alpha version of the Microsofts new kid on the Ajax block - The Atlas. Atlas is an add-on for the Visual Studio 2005 and is the response to all those javascript libraries available on the market, to all those Web 2.0123 applications which have appeared on the net in the past years.

There are no doubts, as it is an early version, a lot of the functionality is going to change and starting building important applications on the Atlas at the very moment is not the best decision - we mortals do know what is going to be different in its next version.

After experimenting available for the download examples and playing a little bit around i have decided for me, that as long as i wont see something close to the release candidate of it - i am going to stick to the “usual suspects”.

So, what about the first Atlas coming ? Honestly saying - i am a bit disappointed, as i was expecting a little bit more “robust” product, less quantity (no 100’s of kilobytes) and more quality (less bugs). Also i am a bit surprised by the “xml-script” appearance. I don’t know if we need one more xml translation script language at this very moment. Wasn’t Microsoft developing its own version of the Mozilla’s XUL ? I don’t think it is reasonable to go into the 2 direction at the same time, when everyone else goes the third one, but hey, i know the history of the Microsoft, and their capabilities of changing the things =O)

Today I was thinking a lot about Backbase and their future. From one side Atlas will help them to break into the bigger masses, but from the other side - it will probably sweep away the biggest market share, and i would still prefer a smaller fish to get bigger, instead of the bigger sharks consuming everyone around.

No, the world is still spinning in the very same direction, and the xHTML code produced by Visual Studio + Atlas is still invalid as it shouldn’t be, some exclusive IE things (nothing unexpected here, but still it hurts a bit).

Waiting for the next coming, as there are no doubts, it should be more interesting…

About 1 month later then expected, here are the results of the research… First of all - seeing Austrian’s pages after the Spanish is not the most pleasant thing which can be done. Having set my expectations extremly high for the Austrian’s municipalities i was quite disappointed with the most of them, though at least one of the pages was quite up to the expectations.

• Frames in Austria are as good as dead (and its a good thing) - the only site to use them is Burgenland, which represents about 11.1%.
• The same number of sites (1 - 11.1%) is using a table-less design and its not much, i have to say
• Carinthia’s site is the only one which does not use any doctype at all, and its pretty much against the vast majority (88.9%) of the rest of Austria
• Only 1 site (11.1%) has a valid HTML, and its too few. Too few, to be considered something as a tendention in the governmental sites
• 2 sites (22.2%) have a valid css and once again it is a very low numbers, for such an advanced country as an Austria
• The screen resolution 1024×768 is something, that should not be required at the governmental sites, and the percentage 44.4% is way to high, thinking about the number of the users with a laptop
• Just a couple of sites have a fav icon which represents about 44.4%
• Just a three sites (33.3%) have some other language(english) integrated, and though the number i expected was much higher, its not that bad as it seems from the first sight
• Web acessability has a relatively small percentage (about 33.3%), though i have to say, that i was very positively surprised with Vienna’s implementation of the priority 2 of the WCAG

The max percentage for the municipality in Austria is about 91.6%, which is very close to the maximum percentage, which one of the finest Spain municipalities has obtained (96.7%). The minimum of the 10.9% is again lower then the spanish(15.8%) but again higher then the portuguese(0%).

As the Portwatch own page is still under construction, i have joined the final result with the Portwatch page.

While reorganizing my links i have decided to put here a list of those links, which for myself i consider the important and influent:

• CSS links - a good place to start from
• CSS Play - best experimental pages i have seen on the web
• CSS Zen Garden - what CSS can be
• Position Is Everything - Check out the bugs and solutions for the browsers
• the edge by Eric Meyer - not to loose this great content
• A List Apart - it is not only about the CSS, but if you work with the web - you may not miss it
• CSS Hacks - useful list
• Quirks Mode - has a lot of very useful info
• CSS Home - a W3C home for the CSS standard
• CSS Discuss - you may a learn a lot from here

Finally, after some days i have come to finallize the results of the research. First i should say that i was quite surprised. I have not expected, that there are so many advanced regional governments in Spain. It is a pleasure to surf on such sites as Galicia or Catalonia. I am really impressed, maybe because the municipalaties i have seen before has never shown big dedication to their internet representation.

The results are speaking for themself:

• Frames in Spain are in declain - and only 3 sites are using them (15.8%), but i think there should be even less then this number.
• Positive surprise 7 sites are using table-less designs (36.9%)
• 10 government sites are using doctypes - thats more then a half (52.6%), and its a positive number
• 3 sites (15.8%) have valid HTML, and thats a good start, and i am confident that this number will grow in the next years, anyway i was expecting much lower results.
• Only 4 sites (21.0%) have a valid css, but there is a big number of the sites, which have to do minor changes to pass the validation
• Only Extremaduras site optimized for the 1024×768 resolution, and knowing that this is one of the poorest regions in Spain, i have to say, that this is the thing that they have to change. All others have less strict requirements to the resolution, which is how it should be done.
• A reasonable number of sites - 11 (thats a 57.9%) have the idea about using the icons on the net
• In a country, where more then 1 variation of the language is spoken, i was expecting more then 6 sites (31.6%) having support for at least 1 more language

The max percentage for the municipality in Portugal is 27.7%, when in Spain it has reached 96.7% and the min percentage was 15.8%, which is quite a value for the portuguese municipalities, thinking that the min in Portugal was 0%.

The final results are applied to the beginning of the Portwatch page.

What about the future - what are the next steps ?

The answer is simple - continuing with the other european countries, but i am also going to do a reality check, by totally revising the current portwatch system verifying its sanity. I am aint no interested in creating a scale which does not represent anything. =O)

Also i am going to give this project a proper site and as i am considering inviting some people to help me with it, i think portwatch deserves its own subdomain or even a domain, we will see.

And as for the rest - the next targets are Austria and Germany.