Anthony Milner

I just got back from my first Web Standards Group (WSG) meeting. The WSG is essentially a forum for web developers and designers to discuss issues, share knowledge and promote web standards. It was held at The Australian Museum and drew quite a large crowd. I noticed a lot of familiar faces from WD06 and I’m beginning to detect a bit of a tribal thing going on here. Its all good though, in fact its really refreshing and inspiring to be in a room full of passionate people keen on learning and sharing their knowledge (make mental note, must do this more often.)

There were two presentations; The Web – A Blind Perspective by Lee Kumutat of Quantum Technology, and The Mobile Web by Dominique Lee from Ninemsn.

Lee demonstrated how assistive technologies help her to navigate the web. I’ve seen this before whilst working with a friend and accessibility consultant Tim Noonan and it always leaves me with a such a strong sense of the importance of building accessible websites. When you actually hear bad markup being converted into speech it gives you a really clear picture of the challenges blind people face when surfing poorly designed websites.

Lee said her three biggest usability bugbears were:

1. A combination of image maps and dodgy JavaScript making site navigation impossible e.g www.uts.edu.au
2. No heading markup. Correct use of heading tags paint a picture of content hierarchy
3. Unnecessary and long winded alt tag descriptors

Dominique Lee from Ninemsn will not part with her mobile phone. She loves it…a lot, so then I suppose she’s working in the right field. Dom and her team are building content for the mobile web. What was that? The mobile web. Yes, and would you believe just quietly that my 3 mobile phone can surf the web (proper i.e outside planet 3) albeit a little expensively ($10 per month for 50MB). 

The three mobile web homepage is interesting. It has a link to Google search, Ninemsn, Yahoo, Amazon mobile, eurosport, Slashdot, Wired and My Career. You can also recommend a site or enter your own URL. Pretty cool really.

I excitedly signed up just so I could check how this blog renders in my mobile phone, but it failed to load

What was also interesting about this talk is the lack of knowledge in the room (and this room was full of techies) about development practices for the mobile platform. Standards, browsers, development etc…you could almost hear a pin drop. It reminds me of the wild west a.k.a the 90’s. Clearly there are huge opportunities to build light weight websites for the mobile platform and once the price and speed barrier falls it should take off. Dom gave us some staggering stats and forecasts; currently 2 billion mobile handsets int he global market and by 2009 mobile to replace PC as dominant form of web access. Exciting times ahead.

According to the IE 7 blog site the final release of Internet Explorer 7 is coming this month. I’ve been using the Release Candidate for a while and its nice but…as usability expert and publisher of “Don’t Make me Think” Steve Krug says, “Conventions are your friend” and unfortunately the IE7 team have moved away from some browser conventions which will probably confuse and piss people off a bit. That said I think there are enough improvements to balance the frustration.

The good bits

• Tabbed browsing – A nice feature (Firefoxies et al have had this for a long time) which allows you to open multiple browser windows in a single instance of the browser. I always force a new window (shift + click) with new links especially from a set of search results which makes it easier to come back to the original information. I discovered today that (CTRL + click) does the same things with the tabs….nice.
• Quick Tabs – At the left most side of the tabs is a quick tab button that gives a very cool snapshot of all open windows, kind of like the ALT+TAB in XP but much larger.

The not so good bits

• Padlock moved – The SSL padlock logo is my security blanket when I have a credit card in hand and its been moved from the bottom right up next to the URL bar. I guess this reflects it importance but that location is a bit of convention going back to early browser days.
• File, Edit, View menu gonski – This is a Vistarism and its going to take some getting used to. I struggled to enable it (right click the chrome and select menu bar) and it no longer sits at the top of the screen.
• Refresh and Stop – I use these often and they are now next to the URL bar and they are small. The URL cannot be easily resized like it used to be so I am doing mouse marathons to get to it.

I’m only using a Release Candidate so hopefully Microsoft get a lot of feedback and make some changes but I’m not counting on it. It reminds me of the move to XP. I initially hated the new start menu interface and loaded the classic start menu but I caved soon after.

Online shopping implementations often hit a few bumps at the payment gateway integration stage. It usually starts with lots of paper work between banks, payment gateway providers, and the customer, then we have to deal with API’s, security, transaction receipts, audit trails, delayed transactions, duplicate transactions, refunds and finally the ticket clipping at every turn and that’s just the from the web developers perspective.

The end user on the other hand has to deal with security, scams, fees and that little thought in the back of the head that says “is this safe?”.

That’s why I got really excited when I read about a low cost alternative which requires no credit card and very little integration.

It works like this, you’re at an online shopping site, you find something you like, add it to basket and then proceed to checkout. Instead of entering credit card details you are directed to your online banking site where you can login and pay directly from your bank account. Payment is instantly debited from your account and the merchant is immediately notified that the payment has occurred. A credit card is not required. It uses the pay anyone feature of most online banking websites in conjunction with a service provider which “connects” your bank payment receipt with the website provider.

Apparently the introduction of this system was a parting wish of the former Reserve Bank Governor, Ian Macfarlane.

Of course banks are not going to like it much because they make money from charging merchant fees on traditional credit card based payment gateways but it’s great for the consumer. This payment method has already gained traction in many parts of the world and is starting to get some momentum in Australia. Poli, a cute acronym for Pay Online, is a joint venture between Melbourne based Centricom and Unisys, and as far as I am aware are the only providers of this service in Australia. The Centricom site says that the Poli system it is being used on the Dodo World website but I encountered some ineresting usability issues which prevented me from getting anywhere near the checkout, but that’s a story for another posting.

In theory it all sounds pretty good but as is the case with all new technology there will be obstacles. Firstly, consumers just love their frequent flyer points which are accrued through credit card usage and I don’t see this love affair slowing anytime soon. Secondly, most providers such as Poli require the end user to download a badboy i.e. an ActiveX control. This means no support for Firefox and a perceived security issue i.e. does the ActiveX control store my banking username name and password?

Despite the hurdles it would be fantastic to see an alternate solution gain momentum in Australia because it would utlimately make online shopping a lot more accessible, especially for people who either do not have or do not want to use a credit card…and that’s got to be a good thing.

Have you ever eaten trifle? A trifle is a dessert starting with a layer of cream then a layer of fruit and jelly and then finally a layer of sponge cake soaked in port…yum! I love analogies and today I am using a trifle analogy to explain progressive enhancement (PE) in web development and design.

Jeremy Keith gave a really good presentation on this concept at the recent Web Directions conference in Sydney. PE is a very simple and effective strategy to follow to ensure that we build accessible and search engine friendly websites.

The foundation of any website is its content, if a user can’t read the content then we have a problem. If there is a really cool widget on my site which earlier browsers or secure organisations do not support the user could get partial content or even worse the page fails to load.

Progressive enhancement is a layered approach which ensures that your site first and foremost presents accessible content (cream), adding an external stylesheet gives it a beautiful look and feel (fruit and jelly) and finally enhanced behavior is provided by adding unobtrusive externally linked JavaScript (sponge cake soaked in port – when I was young my Mum would not let me partake in this layer in the same way that a bank may disable JavaScript on the desktop).

This approach ensures that everyone can view the content no matter what their configuration with the added bonus that search engines only consume the cream.