Anthony Milner

Nigel McFarlane was an open standards advocate long before it was cool. In fact he spoke at the ATP in 2001 to promote CSS and met with John and I at Elcom after the talk. He explained to us the concepts behind CSS and its compatibility across different media devices. At the time our focus was e-tax security and we compartmentalised his comments into a “look at this later space”, hindsite is a wonderful thing, CSS became a major part of accessibility compliance and adaptable UX’s. Sadly Nigel passed. He was clearly ahead of his time and this competition, the McFarlane Prize is run in his honour. It awards sites that display best practice standards compliance.

This year’s finalists…

EQASRM by Angela Bonfato Creative and Spoon Media
Occupational Psychiatry by August
SitePoint Design Contests by SitePoint
Solution Central by Propeller Graphic Design & Marketing
The Wyllie Group Developed by Spoon Media

And the winner……

Andrews Must Resign by Michael Koukoullis

Congratulations.

It’s not every day you get to learn about IE directly from the platform architect of IE so this was definitely a highlight.

MS championed standards in the mid 90’s. Chris Wilson worked on the Windows and Mac versions of Mosaic and has been involved in the development of every version of IE. He provided experimental support for CSS in IE3 which was a critically important step in the evolution of CSS.

Notes from his talk….

Challenges that we collectively face in moving the web forward…

Not here to talk about IE next features, release date or name

Where did we start – the original vision – it should be really simple to create and serve content

Web was driven by the need to interconnect i.e. hyper linking, not folder structure

Another Web 2.0 definition [I like this one]…

caring about the quality of web UI

Social experiences make the web immersive, we’re connecting people to people, not just information

3 types of people – Web developers, browser vendors and users

Wed dev is painful – non standards compliance developing for opera, ie6 hacks, ie7 breaks

The deployed browser base is a problem – Browser share is inconsistent – no consistent target to develop for.

Life as a Browser vendor is pure bliss NOT

Security is hard and will always be the top priority. Exploits target complex interactions

Trustworthy browsing means protecting the user against fraud which is why they built in a phishing filter to IE7

Don’t break the web – you can’t shut off access to legacy content

IE has over half a billion users. If we break the web and it affects 1% of users this equates to 10000 packed auditoriums that we’re sitting in.

Developers got used to the IE6 broken behaviour and baked it into the pages which caused a lot of problems when upgrading. People assumed IE 7 was broken but actually the hacks were breaking it

The big questions is “how to support standards without breaking the web”

Where is our common ground between the competing user base – Leave the web better than we found it.

Define “better”…

1. Secure
2. Stable
3. Interoperable
4. Performant
5. Powerful (features and functionality)

Secure is difficult in a world of complex relationships and trust interactions

Security is everyone’s problem

There are increased attack vectors with AJAX – code sharing, proxying and script inclusions requires trust

Have a security model for your code

Privacy – Aggregation of user information without user consent is a problem (privacy is not just cookies)

Syndications and mashups are catalysts for privacy issues – Apps and services need privacy models

Stability – if web apps don’t work consistently across all browsers people won’t depend on them

Compatability rules – if a page works in 1 version of a browser it must work in the next version.

To hit 90% of the market you need to test on IE6,7 and FF 2.0 and 1.5

MS supports browsers for 7 years after release.

Standards mode is increasingly popular 50% of the top 200 websites in the US run in standards mode

Quirks mode no longer protects compatibility because a lot of the web is in standards mode

Interoperable – the standards need to reflect reality and ambiguities need to be stamped out. We need to work together to define standards.

The goals is not to have a standard, the goal is to have interoperability

MS is working on the next version of IE and MS are committed to standards

A big part of the investment in IE7 (after security) was standards

MS recognise that their underlying assumptions of what the web is being used for needs to change in a web 2.0 world

With IE.Next there is a huge investment in a layout engine using the CSS 2.1 standard

Web 2.0 is evolution not revolution – don’t break the web | we must be backwards and forward compatible

The Goal

leave the web better than we found it

AGIMO (that stands for Australian Government Information Management Office) have released a new and updated web publishing guide. AGIMO is an Australian Federal Government agency that “fosters the efficient and effective use of information and communications technology (ICT) by Australian Government departments and agencies”. The new guide replaces and consolidates a number of AGIMO resources, namely:

• Guide to Minimum Website Standards
• Online Information Service Obligations
• Australian Government Design: Guidance for the Online Environment (Branding)
• Guidance on Departmental and Ministerial Websites
• Australian Government Web Guide

The web publishing guide together with the existing AGIMO Better Practice Principles, Guides and Checklists are a fantastic resource, not only for people working in or for Government agencies but also for the wider web design and development industry.

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.