Firefox: the new and better web browser ?

Cross posted from the Accessify forum, a classic:

Monday afternoon my boss indicated me about a problem with the company website I builded. It seemed it didn't showed up like it should in Firefox, some kind of new web browser. So I did what was expected, downloaded the new web browser and looked full of expectation to the screen. And indeed the stylesheet didn't work as expected, checked out some newsgroups and the problem was known. It seemed that I was using a stylesheet that was not in accordance with the standard stylesheet specification. So I ran it through the W3C stylesheet verificator, no problem there except the gradiant specification, which is specific to IE. So why is it not showing correctly, well because there is no support to specify the width of an A tag.

Now, when I should be building a new and better web browser than the most used web browser in the world, I would make sure I at least supported the features of that web browser. I have a message to all that coders on Firefox, before you start shouting at IE, first try to write a product that is as good as IE, then you can build new features in it.

This is the problem with all kind of open source products written by a bunch of people hoping to defeat the biggest software company in the world. They concentrate on destroying the competetion instead of first building a product that as the same features and then improving it. They look like poor "Civilization" players, going to battle with a stick while the enemy is using nuclear force.

And you guys that are giving the software away to make my life easier, remember this : because you wrote a web browser that doesn't support the features of IE, I need to rewrite the website. And don't argue that IE doesn't support the standard, if there are new features then the standard is lacking and that can't stop progress.

Back to the drawing board, Firefox coders !!!

From http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/wimdc/archive/2005/07/28/131532.aspx

Microsoft Betas

Looks like the guys over at Microsoft have been busy.

The beta versions of Windows Vista and IE7 that have just released should be interesting to developers and IT professionals. For this reason, the beta is available to MSDN subscribers and a pretty small set of pre-enrolled beta test participants. Our goal is to get feedback from this group, do a bunch more work around quality (performance, security, reliability, etc.) and some features (e.g. additional standards support beyond what’s in beta 1, additional functionality around tabs and RSS, etc.), and release Beta 2 much more broadly.

Most interestingly to web developers are the "benefits" we will get by using IE7:

• New tools to take you directly to the information you want through support for Web feeds (RSS) that includes automatic discovery of web feeds (RSS) on Web pages, basic Web Feed (RSS) reading capabilities, and basic support for saving Web feeds (RSS) as a new kind of favorite.

• Platform enhancements for developers to improve compatibility and manageability, including improved support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as well as transparent PNG support.

I won't hold my breath...

Tutorial: Serve a PNG to anything but Internet Explorer using CSS

Whilst making the latest changes to the seemingly perpetual redesign of my portfolio / company site I became even more annoyed with the problem that Internet Explorer has with PNG files.

I am sure that this isn't news to anyone but for completeness sake the problem is that PNG images with alpha transparency have a shocking grey background in Windows versions of IE. This is because IE doesn't natively support alpha transparency.

Anyway, the new design looked good in anything apart from IE (Whats new?) and I remembered something that I had read about 6 months ago in the excellent Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm.

In one of the chapters Mr.Cederholm explains that he serves a different logo to people viewing with styles and those that use styles:

One reason for swapping an image with another image would be to serve varying site logos - one for browsers that handle CSS properly (Referenced with the background property) and one thats served to old browsers, handheld devices, screen readers etc.

Dan goes on to show an example of serving a "lo-fi" and "hi-fi" logos using a form of image replacement.

This wasn't exactly what I was after as IE thinks it displays CSS properly and would substitute in the background image, thus defeating the object, but the principal was a good one.

What was needed was a way to use this method (swapping out an image and replacing it with a background image) that IE wouldn't be able to get it's mucky fingers on.

Enter the CSS child selector.

PPK over at Quirksmode.org explains child selectors much better than I can but basically IE doesn't understand them. And in true Microsoft style, anything they don't understand doesn't exist.

Therefore if we use child selectors in the CSS we can "Filter" out IE and only serve the PNG image to browsers which understand alpha transparency.

Put together what we have learned from Dan Cederholm and PPK and we have our solution. We can now serve a PNG to everything except IE using just CSS.

Check out the accompanying demonstration page and don't forget to view the source for the tutorial notes.

I Know that I am by no means breaking new gound here, but I just though I would try and promote this as a method as it wasn't easy to find anything that explained to me what I wanted to know. I guess this is why Simplified Standards will be such a hit when it launches in the near future.

I also know that this solution probably has things wrong with it (please let me know), what solution is perfect?, but it does the job quite well in a way that will be familiar to people who have used any popular image replacement technique.

Pay Peanuts and Get Monkeys

I saw an advert for a job today that caught my eye for all the wrong reasons.

VLE Developer and Technical Support Assistant

Required for September 2005, a suitably qualified person to expand and maintain the school’s VLE in conjunction with teaching staff to create exciting on-line resources for use across all key stages. You will also assist the ICT Technical Support Team in maintaining and administrating a large network and VLE. This is a permanent post, working 37 hours per week, term time only.

You should have knowledge of Macromedia products, HTML, JAVA and be interesting in learning new authoring packages designed to support teaching staff in creating on-line learning.

Salary: £11,286 - £13,458 pro-rata (£9,983 - £11,905)

Now this starts some alarm bells ringing in my head.

First of all, I create learning materials as part of my job. So I know what would be required to create "exciting on-line resources".

This is one of the only times that I would recommend Macromedia Flash. Don't get me wrong I love Macromedia products and I am a Macromedia certified professional, but in general Flash should be kept in a bottle under the sink and not on web sites unless there is a very good reason.

In this case to do their job properly, someone who is creating "exciting on-line resources" should be using Macromedia Flash.

This is because:

• It lends itself perfectly to this concept with great potential for animation, interactivity and the ability to have the materials personalised and used to track progress through the database functionality Flash has.
• There will be a clear picture of the demographic and any accessibility issues can be dealt with on a per pupil basis which is a much better situation than you could hope to get on the net in general
• There will be a certainty about the platform that it will delivered on so cross browser compatibility becomes less of an issue.
• There shouldn't be a bandwidth issue as it will probably all run over a LAN (well it will if it is set up like the VLE we use, which in this case I know is true)

I don't want to go into the intricacies of learning materials but as this is a small point in the grand scheme I will skirt the issue and save it for another day.

Any Flash developer worth their salt would be paid considerably more than the salary that this job is offering.

Unfortunately for whoever takes this job, this is not the only thing that they are expected to do.

The successful applicant will "also assist the ICT Technical Support Team in maintaining and administrating a large network and VLE".

This basically means that you will be a makeshift technician and general dogsbody aswell which is obviously a job in itself.

Unless there is exceptional circumstances people always start at the bottom of the scale they are allotted. So it is more than likely that the lucky applicant will be paid the princely sum of £9,983 per year.

That works out at £831.91 per month before tax.

Take away the 20% for the income tax and you are looking at £665.53 per month.

Then you have to take away the national insurance contribution which would be around £45 a month on that salary, leaving our grand total at £620.53

And to think all you have to do for your £620 a month is work 37 hours a week as a technician and create any quality VLE materials that are needed by all the subject areas (FYI: There are on average 12-13 subject areas in a secondary school).

Is there any wonder that, in general, secondary school web sites and VLE materials are rubbish?

A secondary school would never dream of throwing out a prospectus that obviously had no time and effort invested in it but they seem more than happy to do this with their VLE and their website.

I would rather see no website at all than a website that obviously has been given to a HTML virgin who works as an IT teacher, teaching the kids to build web sites with Microsoft Publisher (I know for a fact that this actually happens. Even through the school this happens in has a Macromedia Studio MX 2004 site licence provided to them for free by the people who own the VLE)

In my opinion what is needed is more technical expertise at an LEA level to make sure that the people appointing the staff know what jobs like this entail and then make it one job, not two as in this case, and for christ sake pay the going rate.

It is obvious that the people who wrote the job spec for this thought that the VLE would not fill the 37 hours a week you work and decided to pad out the role by getting some cheap help for the school technicians. Lets face it any help for the technicians is always appreciated.

This proves the point that the people that wrote the job spec have no idea what skills are actually needed and what time and effort needs to be put in to make the job worthwhile doing.

The scary part will be that this job will be filled with someone with no clue about how to be a web developer. They will fire up their copy of Microsoft Frontpage pick the most garish template they can, save the lesson plan from Microsoft Word and do file > save as > whatever.html and the jobs a 'gud un.

But as I said right at the start; If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.