opera and acid2

  • 2006-07-20

It's likely that you've already caught this one, but just in case you didn't here's a quick rundown:

During the debate - make that 'comment wars' - things tended to dissolve into Opera vs. Firefox rather than actually discussing whether Opera 9 passes Acid2. For what it's worth, my opinion based on the Acid2 documentation is that Opera 9 does pass the test. The only remaining doubt is whether one or two lines should be left when you scroll the test. If the Acid2 page is scrolled, the scalp will stay fixed in place, becoming unstuck from the rest of the face, which will scroll. The documentation only discusses one line - that's an omission, not a failure condition.

Frankly, I think the intention of the test was to see if the smiling face would render in the first place. It does for me on all systems I've been able to test. My personal suspicion is that most of the failures are resulting from buggy installations (eg. final release installed over the top of a beta) or the page is zoomed or minimum text size is overriding the test - whether the user realises or not (it's easy to forget). Or possibly some other system glitch - there are lots of variables. If Opera 9 itself failed the test, I would have expected a more consistent result across the user base.

just how big is the big picture?

  • 2006-07-15

privacy, and other lost concepts

During my postgraduate study last semester I had to use an online collaboration tool. No big deal, right? But as soon as I signed up, this system asked me to answer a personality profile; then followed up by asking for my phone number and residential postcode.

I resisted the urge to answer the personality profile with entirely neutral responses (or by channeling a nutcase), but drew the line at giving out my phone number. Frankly, the postcode was more than I am comfortable with and that only narrows things down to a couple of suburbs.

It made me ponder the Doug Bowman presentation I re-watched around the same time: Zooming Out From the Trenches (I read the notes and listened to the podcast). During the presentation he said kids today are far less bothered than adults about giving up their privacy, if it means a system works better - particularly a fun, cool system. Not that a university's course reading database really qualifies as fun and cool... but it makes me realise I'm already a generation behind!

The IT world moves so fast, it's stimulating but it can be absolutely terrifying. A sort of technical vertigo can strike if you ponder the speed of development.

internet can change the world

Bowman's presentation was a defining moment for WE05 and certainly a presentation that caught the audience by surprise. After a day of technical splendour we were suddenly presented with some really Big Picture questions. After talking about the incredible rate of growth of the internet and the rise of accessible technology, he reminded us of a huge aspect of the web's "universality" (in the words of Tim Berners-Lee).

Universal access means access for everyone.

We talk about equity of access to the internet, yet we have no real idea how to bring information access to the world's poor. One of the most tangible efforts is the $100 laptop project (One Laptop per Child), in the spirit of the wind-up radio. As Doug says during his presentation... if we could give blogs to children in the third world, what would they have to say? How would it change their lives if they could communicate with other children across their country... or even just the next village? How would that empower them?

Occassionally, we have to dare to say that yes, the internet can change the world. Not just in the obvious ways like banking online and chatting about our hobbies; but in the powerful ways summarised by the hacker adage knowledge is power. Getting information to people who need it can create massive social change. Decentralising news outlets makes it harder for regimes to control the media.

If children in the third world gain access to the internet, what will happen? To a great extent I think it's a question we can't answer and shouldn't answer. How can we possible imagine what these children want to do? Why should we try to guess? The greatest reward might actually be to find out - to watch it happen.

It's also a little scary. Not all governments want their citizens to have unfettered access to information (consider the great firewall of China). It's almost the ultimate form of content management - massive control over information flow. Giving internet access to children in the third world may have consequences beyond the caring, sharing thoughts of building a global community. It could start wars. We don't know.

So just how important is the internet, really? Here in Australia we frequently trivialise it as the domain of nerds, porn and inane chatter. We forget what it really means to have open, global communication.

Email, the web, chat... these are powerful tools. We should remember that.

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interface adventures

  • 2006-07-10

Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the stylus

Most people in IT are exposed a lot of different web-enabled devices, but we probably don't pay enough attention to their interfaces. Many web developers have a tendency to just think about desktop PCs running Windows, or perhaps they'll think about Macs too. But what about all the other devices?

I've been pushed into thinking about this over the last few days, mostly because I've been using a borrowed tablet PC while my desktop was having some niggly hardware problems. The way I've used the tablet is substantially different from any other device I've used before.

devices and their interfaces

Let's take a look at a few of the devices people are using. I won't dwell on desktop PCs of any flavour since they're reasonably consistent: keyboard, mouse, full size monitor. Walking across a university campus, you're increasingly likely to see any and all of the following devices.

laptop pc

Usual inputs

  • keyboard and touchpad/joystick/trackball
  • when docked, full size keyboard and mouse

Gotchas

  • a lot of people are slower when using touchpads and joysticks

tablet pc

Usual inputs

  • stylus and on-screen keyboard when undocked
  • any combination of stylus, keyboard and mouse when docked

Gotchas

  • forms with no submit button - the stylus "clicks" so you have to pull up the on-screen keyboard and use the enter "key"
  • precise clicks - the stylus tends to drag a little when you're trying to click, so very small click areas and close-spaced links can be irritating
  • links with no "active" style - when you're not completely sure if the click has registered (or if you clicked the right thing), you'll really wish there was an active style on the link

Notes

  • absolutely awesome for any interface which uses click+drag (play Solitaire or Bejeweled to see what I mean)
  • if the interface is sensitive enough, great for drawing
  • users far more likely to switch between portrait and landscape orientation

mobile phones

Usual inputs

  • keypad, sometimes joystick-style buttons or stylus
  • some models have extras like little keyboards and so on, but they're not especially common

Gotchas

  • apart from phones with Opera, the embedded browser is likely to be pretty limited with unpredictable support for standards, plugins, etc
  • almost none of the browsers properly support media="handheld" ....yet, hopefully
  • most phones have low bandwidth connections and/or can't load big files
  • some interfaces forget the "enter" key and can only submit forms with the stylus (or the user won't know how to find the enter key, which is effectively the same)
  • very small screens (relatively speaking)

pda and handhelds (including game devices)

Usual inputs

  • stylus which is also used to enter text with graffito or on-screen keyboards
  • many PDAs have addons like keyboards or mice, but they're not universal
  • game devices often have cross-pad devices, some have joysticks

Gotchas

  • all stylus-related limitations of the tablet pc
  • all browser/UA limitations of mobile phones
  • relatively small screens or even split screens (eg. Nintendo DS)
  • some screens have glare/backlight issues
  • some have very odd text input methods - eg. the Sony PSP takes some getting used to and URLs are a pain to enter

user familiarity masks problems

Users do find ways around many limitations, or become so used to poor workarounds that they no longer think of them as "problems". However if you have a system that needs lots of workarounds, users are also likely to simply stop using your system and go elsewhere. User familiarity should not be seen as a substitute for good usability.

connecting in the first place

Many of these devices have "wireless capabilities" but this can mean many things. Wireless LAN without security, wireless LAN with security, bluetooth, WAP, etc. A large number of devices can connect to a wireless network but won't get past corporate VPN requirements. For example there's no VPN client for the Sony PSP, which put an abrupt end to our wireless testing at work (although the PSP is actually capable of using most of our systems, so long as VPN is down at the time).

Even if you can connect, wireless networks (at least in Australia) usually aren't the nirvana you might wish for. Slow, prone to dropouts and generally not free, wireless is absolutely not "ubiquitous" and not necessarily "high speed".

so what do we learn from all this?

To a large extent, you could summarise by saying that - between all the options- users with devices other than desktop PCs have the same requirements as disabled users. That means some of the most technology-savvy, youngest and brightest users are actually the ones at risk of hitting problems. The user base also includes key decision-makers like managers, CEOs and so on who like to have the latest and greatest toys.

One interesting thing to note is that some users are essentially mouse-only users, which is less commonly considered than keyboard-only users. Most devices do offer a keyboard substitute but many of them are limited.

conclusion?

Here's the good bit. You can cater to varied devices by doing all the "right things": build to standards, don't use tables or fixed width layouts, let users choose or override style settings, keep page weight to a minimum.

It's not a new message, just a lot of new reasons for the ones we already know. Best of all, they're reasons based on the latest gear rather than any form of moral highground or expectation that everyone wants to follow Best Practice.

Standards are good for the boss's latest PDA; your kids' expensive new game handheld; and the tablet PC you kind of wish you didn't have to give back to your employer. They're not the most laudable reasons, but they sure do motivate people.

meta post: xml feed shenanigans

  • Monday, July 10, 2006

I've changed the XML feed from summaries to full descriptions. This seems more productive, despite losing data on what's getting read. If you really like a post, do me a favour and click through eh? :)

I've also switched over to using FeedBurner to manage this site's newsfeed. This is partly to compensate for Blogger's limitations in terms of feed management; and partly to make use of some of FeedBurner's features.

The old feed is still there at the moment, but not looking too pretty. So, if you're reading the old feed... I recommend updating to the new one.

opera 9 released

  • 2006-06-22

After all the betas and weekly builds, Opera 9.0 has been released! If you've never tried Opera before, this is really the time to do it.

I still recommend much the same settings and configuration changes as I did for Opera 8. Some aren't needed any more - eg. it now identifies as Opera by default. Some are more powerful now, too :)

Key points about Opera 9:

  • First Windows browser (and first multi-platform browser) to pass Acid2. Actually they achieved that with a build back in March, but now it really counts :)
  • Native BitTorrent support
  • Site-specific settings (eg. allow popups for just one site) and content blocking
  • Tab/window terminology (and keyboard shortcuts) now match other tabbed browsers
  • Rendering and scripting changes mean sites which didn't work in Opera 8 work just fine in Opera 9. This includes Gmail and Blogger, along with some major corporate applications I won't bother naming. Really the sites are still at fault, but users never cared - now things just work :)
  • MSI installer for Windows version - corporate admins be happy!
  • Widgets (although to be honest I'm not wild about them, sorry Chaals :))
  • ...and much more. See the Opera features overview for more.

If you already use Opera (or you want to know the specific rendering/scripting/security/etc updates), you might be interested to see the Opera 9.0 for Windows Changelog (or your relevant platform's changelog, obviously).

Enough talk! Go check it out :)

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meta-data is dead. long live xhtml.

  • 2006-06-18

Lately I've encountered quite a few people who still feel meta-data is useful (even critical) for web pages. They were unwilling to consider the idea that a pure ROI evaluation might be worthwhile before spending time embedding meta-data in traditional <meta> tags.

Actually I think it's time for web publishers to focus their efforts elsewhere.

invisible meta-data is dead

Invisible meta-data doesn't work. - Tantek Çelik at WE05

Invisible meta-data has failed for search engines, due to sustained abuse by unethical or just misguided web developers. Being hidden from the user's view means there is no real accountability - few people check a website's meta-data to see if it is accurate.

As the web became more popular, people started to use search more heavily; then when people started making money from websites competition started to get fierce for the top rankings on search results. When simple relevance wasn't enough, people started looking for ways to work - and then exploit - the system.

It started out with a few extra keywords, maybe a few mispellings, a few variations for good measure. Then it moved on to adding less relevant but more popular keywords... eventually sites were adding massive amounts of entirely spurious meta-data.

The search engines fought back; and now search engines barely use meta-data at all when ranking pages. Specific search tools still make heavy use of meta-data, but general web search engines do not.

most meta-data is just bad

Intentional abuse aside, a great deal of meta-data is counter-productive simply because it is bad. This low-quality information can not produce a high-quality result when used for any purpose - a problem which has quite possibly been misunderstood from the dawn of computing:

On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

To put it in more modern terms: rubbish in, rubbish out.

One fundamental problem with meta-data is that it requires a reasonable grasp of indexing to produce even passable meta-data. For a very large web site, you really need a trained indexer with an extensive controlled vocabulary (...and they're not afraid to use it, punk).

Your average web publisher is not a librarian or indexer. The chances they can produce a good meta-data set are slim to nil. To make matters worse, it is not quick or easy to properly train someone in the skills required to do so.

In a distributed publishing system, this can lead to complete chaos. Meta-data can be completely unrelated to the contents of the page. Administrative meta-data such as publish dates can be horribly out of date.

In fact, unless you have highly-trained indexers creating the meta-data for a large website, you are probably better off having no meta-data at all.

semantic markup to the rescue

A well-formed XHTML document actually contains a great deal of meta-data. Much of it is visible and a lot is self-defining - by creating the document, you create the meta-data. Then to really put the icing on the cake, search engines do use it.

From the evidence I've seen so far, the most powerful items of meta-data in XHTML are the <title> and <h1> elements - key pieces of microcontent which don't receive the attention they're due. They should define the contents of the document, providing top-level keywords for the content.

After <title> and <h1>, some the sub-headings; emphasised/strong-emphasised text (<em> and <strong>); language statement (eg. xml:lang="en"); and finally the body text. Body text does count, since it should contain the most relevant, accurate keywords anyway.

tag and release

These days we can really cap things off by adding the human keywords which might be associated with the content. Call it tagging, visible meta-data, folksonomies... the general principle is the same. Tagging gives you the opportunity to categorise your content in a useful way (limitations of the rel="tag" microformat aside). Not only can search engines read tags; but your users can read them and (where your system supports it) they can even use those tags to seek out further information on the topic.

Tags let you add the extra terms that people used to throw into <meta> tags - the related terms, regardless of their existence in the body text. Combine this with mispelled words being picked up by good search tools (eg. Google's "Did you mean...?" suggestions) and you no longer need to seed your documents with meta-data that could get you blacklisted. Why keyword bomb your content when users are being redirected to the correct term?

trust in the natural meta-data

The sum total of this natural meta-data gives search engines the ability to index and rank pages according to the content they actually contain (including visible tags to catch related terms), rather than meta-data that someone has hidden in the file. This way, you cannot have spurious meta-data without creating spurious content... which even the most casual user is likely to question, or the most time-poor developer should remember to update.

Meta-data as we knew it is dead. Long live XHTML.

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