Portwatch Spain

Posted on March 6, 2006 by Niko Neugebauer

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.

Portwatch Spain is coming

Posted on February 24, 2006 by Niko Neugebauer

A new part of the Portwatch, dedicated the Municipalities of the Spain is coming in the next few days.

I have been extremly busy with my job and all other things, that i have not managed to finish the results, but this weekend definitely i am going to put here an update to the Portwatch, this time about the Spain. I have to say, that the results at this stage are allready extremly interesting and really different to the first part of the research (Portugal).

p.s.: As of 27th of February, the page of the Ceuta, is still being unaccessable, for the unkown reasons, so i decided to give some more time(1 week), to be able to analize every municipality.

Tables vs CSS

Posted on February 11, 2006 by Niko Neugebauer

Through the StyleGala i have found this site, which critices the point of using tableless design, and i have found this article extremly interesting. While not agreeing in a lot of aspects, i feel it represents an important point of view — an opposite point of view, which have been missing inside the webdesigners community.

Here are some points where i do not agree:

Bandwidth — I believe that for the most home-made sites (like this one), which do not have millions of visitors per day, the bandwidth mayy not play a very important point, but for any corporate site or just a site with a lot of visitors — it can be pretty important thing. And as i have seen some corporate sites from the inside i can tell, that there are too many cases, where refacturing the HTML cuts some very serious percentage.
The future of the web is full CSS — yes, and even microsoft with the IE are also following it. Yes, microsoft have their own extensions, but Opera, Safari, Mozilla and others do have them as well. The best example of a good idea coming into the world of standards and being accepted by the communities is the AJAX. And i have no doubt, that though IE 7 wont be available for anything below Windows XP, microsoft will convince the most of the users of switching with the time to Vista
Remembering the styles applied to different pages after some monthes — the same as in a good professional programming, if you did a good job, giving good names to your functions and variables, you wont have a lot of problems. If you are calling your style or id something like “white” or “blue”, and not with the functional name — then most probably after some time you will start getting a lot of problems
Is full CSS faster — i dont know what kind of a “typical” page was represented in that case, but while doing some sites i have noticed the reendering speed inside the Visual studio for example. And having 200 rows or more in a buisiness web application is nothing special at all. Once again, for a home site with a few things, probably the difference wont be noticed. And one more thing — not everyone enjoying having the fastest computers at home
Return on investment — a well done page with a CSS, will enable the webdesigner doing a lot of the global changes in just a few seconds, and if a webmaster is tricking you telling that he needs the same time, then you better look for another one
W3C standards are useless — why everyone including microsoft are following them, ok not all of them, but as in the real world — some are getting through, while others not.
Separation of strcture and content makes websites more organized — no point to argue about it, organizing a page helps maintaing it
31K & 51K for a page — i see a lot of difference, even if its 41K & 51K. Once i decided to “reorganize” a page for some business application and it went straight from 130K to 73K, now that was big change, i would say. And if your application is being loaded like 500 times per hour or more, then very soon you will start seeing the difference
Common sense of skipping small images and webpages by the webdevelopers are the things which are not compattible. It is ridiculous to think, that the people with disabilities are in way or another should be “presented” a different page, then the others.
Selling your product is a question of marketting, which has nothing to do with a structural presentation of the page, though a good marketer can use the standard compliance as a prefential factor to his cause
“May work well” by Zeldman is much better then “wont work” by the tables design

But from the other side:

CSS Complexity — even today one of my friends was talking with me about the complexity of the CSS, i believe it is a valid point of view, the structure is not that simple, when you are starting out, but once getting in, and when creating a well-thought structure it can be very efficient
Tables are not only for the tabular data — i agree that sometimes tables can be used as a part of the interface, when the interface is pretty tabular
Always ask for “Return On Investment” of the LATEST STANDARD before going — as it should be done with any other thing, i agree with it. No need to use the CSS 3, especially because it is not final at this moment, but if you ignore the movement, you are risking to find yourself in a situation, being some years behind the rest of the web

Anyway — a lot of the issues depend on the point of the view, but i think, that the standard compliance(not a blind one, cause that would be stupid), brings a lot of advantages, but once again i think its good to do the “reality check” from time to time, to see if we are still going into the right direction.

PortWatch

Posted on February 7, 2006 by Niko Neugebauer

20 principal portuguese municipal websites have been deconstructed, analized and compared with the current webstandards, in a friendly attempt of advising those municipalities about the current state of the web and the points of view of a lot of webdesigners. Aveiro, Azores, Beja, Braga, Bragança, Castelo Branco, Coimbra, Evora, Faro, Funchal, Guarda, Leiria, Lisbon, Portalegre, Porto, Santarem, Setubal, Viana do Castelo, Vila Real, Viseu – are those, which sites have been included in this part of the Portwatch.

I was trying to create some kind of a definition what a modern municipality site in the year 2006 should have – and i came with the idea of the declaring this small list of the standards, which i consider to be important or “nice to have”: good support for different browsers, no frames, table-less design, good modern doctype, valid (x)HTML, valid CSS, minimum resolution 800×600, favourite icon, different foreign languages, and WCAG

To be short i will show a few statistics from the final result:

Frames in portugal are still popular – 6 sites are using them (30%)
No good design practic (fluid, table-less designs) were found between those 20 municipals, and its a big shame.
Only8 websites are using doctypes – thats about 40% of the whole pie
No valid html – at all, 0 sites, 0%, nada.
Only 5 sites (25%) have a valid css, thats a start … in a year 2006
6 sites (30%) are optimized for the 1024×768 resolution and i think it is to much, counting the number of computers in portugal with the resolution 800×600, though it is not that bad i would say.
Only 3 sites (thats a 15%) have the idea, about using the icons on the net
Only 3 sites have support for different languages, it seems that the most municipal minds are not interested in having more tourism

If you are interested in what came out, then check it out and take a look at the the results

Flash and valid HTML

Posted on February 1, 2006 by Niko Neugebauer

Recently, i have been “ranting” a lot about the accessability and the valid code – so here it goes again. =O)

Flash and a valid HTML are they compatible ? Who’s fault is the current situation ? How to solve it ? What do to ?
I have found some answers for myself, and here they are:

The valid HTML and a flash animation are perfectly compatible. It is more then common to see the invalid code, which is based on the old, proprietary IE and Netscape solutions, but there are no reasons to use it, unless you are lazy.
It is all the Netscape, Microsoft and Macromedia‘s fault. Those guys are unable to cook a soup together. Dont know exactly who has forgotten to bring the salt and who’s mushrooms were outdated, but i’ll tell you – it does not really matter. Most probably because of the compatibility issues (ghm…) the Adobe Macromedia’s Flash and the major of the designers are producing the code, compatible with old Netscape and IE but not compatible with old and new standards. Mozilla, IE, Safari & Opera (about 99% of the market) are capable of reading and understanding the standards, but almost noone is feeding standards to them. =O) Come on, Adobe, wake up, Macromedia ! Give us at least options to have a valid (x)HTML ! Why didnt you implemented in the Flash a possibility to save a valid html with an option (checkbox) to include the compatibility with those browsers, which almost noone is using as of today.

Use the magic of the “type” and “data” attributes, forget about the Netscape’s <embed>. Here you have the solution for having a valid HTML code:


<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="path/to/yourfile.swf"
    width="110" height="110">
    <param name="movie" value="path/to/yourfile.swf" />
</object>

What to do ? Use this code, mail to Macromedia, talk to your friends and show them how to use the right code, but as i have written before, it aint no going anywhere, until visual designer tools are going to implement the standards.

Portwatch is coming

Posted on February 1, 2006 by Niko Neugebauer

My new project is going to appear here in the next couple of days – it is called a “PortWatch”, and it is dedicated to the technology of webdesign, accessability at the institutional sites in Portugal and EU. The first part is dedicated to the websites of the major portuguese Municipalities.

The texts are going to be pretty ironic, i promise that. =O) I am also going to contact all of the institutions to show with them the result of the research, so they would be able to “enjoy” it as well – i am expecting some bitter comments…

As i am the only person working on them at the moment ( i am thinking about motivating some of my friends to join me) ,the results are really few and the speed of my testing isnt that amazing. Doing it in my free time is a kind of fun, but i have a life to live, you know =O)

Watch out, i was a kind of surprised to find out the final results. I am still processing them at the evenings at home and preparing them to be readable and presentable here.

HTML 5 vs XHTML

Posted on January 26, 2006 by Niko Neugebauer

Where are we going, what will prevail in the future ? XHTML, cause its a XML, better structured, more accessable, more generic, a W3C recomendation, Microsoft seems to wish to support it in the future, and so on, or HTML 5 – cause it brings something new, finally after a lot years of waiting something usefull for the web, cause Google, Opera, Mozilla, Apple and others are behind it. Or maybe there will be something in the middle, some kind of a hybrid?

Short descriptions:
HTML 5 – is a proposed extension to the current HTML, made by those, who currently provide us with a good internet experience.

<datagrid> – finally something to replace our favourite tables, some programming languages like c# have such elements, but inside HTML, this would be really cool and usefull
<canvas> – drawing without limits, but i am not sure how should it work together with SVG (Opera 8 and Firefox 1.5 have some support for SVG)
<event-source> – as i see it, a replacement for all those ugly frame and iframe things, nice !
<output> – would help the dynamic pages (think ajax)
input type=”range”, “time”, “date”, “email”, “url” – finally some help to get rid of the javascript checks
Attributes: autofocus, required, pattern, list, min – i think their names are self-explaining, very nice
Attribute: onstartdrag – a good substitute for javascript technics, i hope it would be some universal implementation
content = “editable” – yes, yes, yes – for a rich internet applications, this one cannot be missed
<section>, <article>, <aside>, <nav>, <footer>
<progress>, <gauge>, <date>, <time>, <menu> – we will see =O)
i18N(internationalization) – i dont really know what exactly do they want to do with it, but i hope to see some good features, eenabling us to do more stuff for international users
device independent, media independent, separation presentation from content, accessible, open standard

xHTML 2.0 – is a proposed standard by the responsable internet authority (W3C), who is responsable for the current standards

as generic XML as possible – more application and device independent, this is really important for the future growth and diversity of the web.
structure changes – at this moment i think there are other priorities, though i cannot deny, that it can be interesting
semantics = <person>, <note>, <length> – nice features
less presentation, more structure – sounds good to me
better paragraphs – finally ! The web is a about a text, so there must be some standards available for integrating the other elements with it together
images – nice idea, but i think that it can be done with css background-image attribute, also it is not backwards compatible, so it can create some problems with older browsers

It is just a small part of what they really should bring, but i think that the main idea becomes more or less clear. I found that the definition of the xHTML 2.0 by the W3c is – “XHTML2 addresses the remaining identified problems in HTML4/XHTML1″. Ok, so it is a bug-fix release ? Where are the new concepts, new features, new limits and so on ? I think that xHTML 2.0 lacks additional functionalities for the net – since the <ruby> tag there were not much addition to the web standards to improve the surfing experience, and the <ruby> wasnt really not really implemented nor used.

So far i know, some of the features are allredy being implemented in the next generations of browsers. Canvas for example is being implemented in Safari, Firefox (1.5) and Opera (8.5?). I would say that the “rich components” is the keywords to describe the general idea of the HTML 5, and i think with all that buzz that Ajax has made in the past monthes, and thousands of the applications being created based on this idea, the HTML 5 future seems to be closer to our reality. Anyway, my vote goes to HTML 5. Yesterday i have finally taken my decision in this “battle”, which will take in the years to come.

Apparently some firms like Google are starting using SVG on their pages, see this nice example about web authoring statistics.

But if i could chose i would go for a structural presentation of the xHTML and the all the “sweets”, that HTML 5 is promising to bring us. =O)

p.s.: useful links:

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Web design, development and marketing by Niko Neugebauer

Category Archives: xhtml/css