Tag: web

Yahoo has its own styleguide out, along with some great resources for writing content for the web.

It includes everything like basic web-friendly content advice (“Write strong headlines”) to the nuances of international grammar differences:

When referring to your own or another company, use the third-person singular pronouns it and its. In the United States, a company is treated as a collective noun and requires a singular verb and a singular pronoun. Referring to a company in the plural (they, them, their, theirs) is chiefly a British convention.

At least now I can cite a slightly less stuffy reference than ALA or Chicago.

Lots of juicy potential in this one, but as Adam Singer notes, it’s highly reliant on cross-browser implementation.

A good overview of what HTML5 provides, which browsers support which features, and a fairly even-handed comparison between Flash.

HTML5 is the new buzzword, following in the footsteps of “web 2.0,” but here’s to hoping we actually allow HTML5 as a term to keep some real meaning.

A graphic of the privacy settings available in Facebook.

To be fair, privacy and settings are parts of the product that I’m sure are underfunded. They don’t drive any growth or revenue, so they probably just have a very basic and cluttery framework.

The big question is whether or not they can take the next step without really addressing these types of issues. I think they probably can — while many people gripe, the number of people willing to kill their Facebook accounts over difficult settings is likely pretty small. That’s clearly where Facebook is putting their money and resources right now.

If you use an auto-complete or type-ahead-find feature in your input boxes, you should be considering accents. This has a nice overview and some sample code.

In case you haven’t heard about it, ChatRoulette basically randomly pairs you with someone else in a video chat. It’s attracted a lot of attention, a lot of curiosity, and its fair Interwebs-share of weirdos.

Danah’s piece is basically what I wish I’d written:

And so I simultaneously am amused by ChatRoulette and depressed because I realize that so many folks would prefer to keep themselves and their teens/college-aged-kids sheltered rather than giving them a way of thinking about systems like this and teaching them to walk away when things get weird. And this deserves a Le Sigh Royale.

The best way to protect your kids from weird situations is to let them learn how to get out of them themselves. Sure, there are weirdos on ChatRoulette, but there’s an interesting opportunity for social growth too.

A very thorough guide to the new styleguide the BBC is using online, covering not only the results, but a bit of the process too. Jealous? I am.

Sage wisdom from The Emmerblue about how to address your next cover letter. Hint: the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Borne from a hackathon project, Facebook’s engineering team is now throwing their PHP through their new HipHop framework, which effectively transforms the easy-to-write PHP they’ve always used into much faster C++.

This is pretty huge for a site like Facebook — it allows for the productivity of writing in a scripting language (PHP may not be quite as productive as Ruby or Python, but it’s miles better than Java), with the speed of a compiled language.

After all, for a site that relies on users viewing many dozens of pages per day, largely while procrastinating, speed is user experience priority number one.

A fairly wide-ranging conversation with a Facebook employee about infrastructure, privacy, security, and culture. A lot has changed since the beginning, and none of this should be terribly surprising.

When I visited the new Facebook HQ a few months ago, the receptionist shared a couple stories of people trying to force their way in there, so there’s an element of physical security that is becoming increasingly important around there.

Hah, indeed.

Great circular visualization. As for the numbers themselves, they’re from W3Schools.com, which clearly has a standards slant, so take them with that grain of salt.

Matt Thompson on an Omaha paper’s acquisition of WikiCity:

WikiCity in its current state strikes me as a textbook example of a site built by robots. Such sites tend, in my experience, to appeal mostly to other robots. Contrast it to Wikipedia, whose every page was built, word by work, link by link, on the actions of individual people. Or to Everyblock, whose pages run on powerful algorithms, lovingly engineered and hand-polished by a brilliant and careful team of makers. These are large sites built on millions of niches, but neither were built that way to start.

It’s certainly hard to scale up, but it’s true that it’s even harder to scale down. I don’t think it’s impossible, but the idea really has to be killer to work if it’s been designed for a large-scale from the start.

A great resource for those whose feet are wet, and are looking for a good way to dive a bit deeper.

Seth Godin:

Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend. By the time there is a case study in your specific industry, it’s going to be way too late for you to catch up.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard a client ask who else in their space has used a specific design solution…

A nice and unexpected story, bringing to light some of the silver linings of the “we live in public” age of the internet:

Our lives are being documented, in ways large and small and trivial and important, and it will all be waiting out there for anybody who has the inclination to find it. People rightly worry about the implications of all this — about what it means for privacy and for history — but right now, remembering Art and the birdhouse and what it was like to be part of a young couple on vacation in a strange and dangerous land, I can only be glad for it, thankful even, and hope that someday, someone will find this tiny story — last modified in November 2009 — and think fondly of me.

Ev Williams:

The larger point, though, is that this feature should make Twitter a more powerful system for helping people find out what’s happening now that they care about.

A good explanation behind a new feature that will quickly affect millions of people, especially important since the new retweet mechanism has a little quirks worth understanding.

A little late to this, but the guys at Steepster, a tea review site, have a fantastic post about how they overhauled their ratings system:

It turns out that the average rating for products on sites with 5-star scales is around 4.3. To us, this says that we need to dive deeper — zoom in to a level where it’s clear what the difference is between a really great tea and the best tea you’ve ever had.

There’s a lot of great thinking here. Rating scales are like identity systems in apps — easy to overlook them, but it can have a huge impact on the final product.

Dustin Curtis:

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I wrote an article expressing my displeasure with American Airlines‘ hideous online presence. I also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To my surprise, the head of user experience at AA.com emailed me an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations. You should read my original article here and the response from Mr. X here. An hour after I posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.

One one hand, he violated his NDA, which is generally a bad thing and sometimes worth termination. On the other hand, the fact that what he said was even covered by an NDA is a bit absurd. The biggest secret he might have revealed was forthcoming transparency into fares and sales policies — and that’s only a shocking announcement if you often fly AA.

In any event, the firing of this guy is sure to hurt AA more than his post could have.

Mark Pilgrim traces the conversations that resulted in the IMG tag, with lots of interesting conclusions and observations mixed in. I won’t give away the ending, but here’s one important takeaway:

HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.

A good look at the problems Google Wave really does solve — primarily centering around business email:

I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer. Google calls wave an “online tool for real-time communication and collaboration”. The way Google should have advertised Wave is: “it solves the problems with email”.

The article also discusses a few key shortcomings with conventional email. Would you solve them the same way?

Alex Russell in response to PPK’s new mobile browser tables, which reveals wide disparities between various versions of mobile WebKit:

The important takeaway for web developers in all of this is that WebKit is winning and that that is a good thing. The dynamics of the marketplace have thus far ensured that we don’t get “stuck” the way we did on the desktop. That is real progress.

From CXPartners:

We can offer three design tips to ensure content below the fold is seen.

Less is more – don’t be tempted to cram everything above the fold. Good use of whitespace and imagery encourages exploration.

Stark, horizontal lines discourage scrolling - this doesn’t mean stop using horizontal full width elements. Have a small amount of content just visible, poking up above the fold to encourage scrolling.

Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars - the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page. iFrames and other elements with scroll bars in the page can break this convention and may lead to content not being seen.

Nate Eagle on the PBS Design blog:

There’s nothing terribly difficult about hitting cmd+click for me: I’ve got two able arms with able fingers attached to the hands that join them, but Twitter’s completely right that I always want its links to open in new windows and that I appreciate not having to think about it. Twitter’s my base, man: I want to have my place saved while your picture of your adorable bull-dog loads in another window.

The answer? Inconclusive, but I can identify with Nate’s indecision.

Written in 2002:

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

Funny read. I think a lot of this will even out as the industry becomes more mature, sheds some of its silly social media expert influences, and begins to have some recognition of authority. That day can’t come soon enough.

The Most Excellent and Right Honourable Doug Avery tries to clear up the mysterious Save for Web color shift:

This comes down to a matter of taste. As you can see, Row 4 [sRGB, no embedded profile] produced great, predictable results as long as you remember to turn on Color Proofing while you’re viewing things (and in CS3, it’s off by default every time you start Photoshop). This indicates that sRGB is workable, you just need to be careful that you understand what you’re seeing.

I still prefer the monitor profile [no embedded ICC profile] (Row 8), it simplifies the entire process and makes my results even more predictable. It also might makes things easier if you’re in a hurry and need to mix screenshots into a comp without the colors mis-matching.

Click the link, view the poster, pick your poison, and never have an issue again.

Now it looks like BlackBerry devices will be using WebKit too. It’s quickly becoming the default platform for smartphones, and a behemoth among all mobile platforms.

With URL shorteners like tr.im on shaky ground, lots of folks are starting to roll their own URL shorteners. We’re using spkr8.com for speakerrate URLs.

If you’re doing this yourself, you should be using the Short URL Auto-Discovery protocol, and you should start using the bookmarklet to find those custom short URLs yourself.

This should be a very influential announcement when it comes to widespread support for IE6.

The reason they dropped support had less to do with the well-known deficiencies IE6 has with respect to CSS and PNG support, but more to do with the more recently-available APIs such as offline web application support.

Even if you don’t actually use many of these yourself, you should understand how each of these suggestions work.

It includes mostly developer-centric suggestions, like CSS optimizations and caching methodologies, but also includes some of the more design- and UX-related strategies for making sites appear faster:

When designing your website or web app, keep in mind that users come to your site with a purpose. The faster (and easier) they can accomplish what they came to do, the better. If users encounter a lot of difficulty in getting to your content, they will leave your site for one that lets them accomplish their goals faster.

Anil Dash is excited about the potential for PubSubHubs and Web Hooks to really enable some legitimate push on the web.

Pushbutton-enabled applications will improve upon the current state of affairs by proactively delivering not just the notification that there’s a new message, but the content of the message itself. And instead of requiring all those applications to come to your site to read the update, it uses a hub server in the cloud to pass along the message directly to all the receivers that are interested in it.

I don’t know if I’ll be calling the stack “pushbutton” any time soon, but it’s been fun to watch web hooks the last few months. I see this as being most useful in the shorter term for linking services together, rather than direct consumer plays. Definitely keep this on your radar.

Some of the numbers are finally reasonably high (54% use the internet on a typical day, for instance), but others seem a bit lower than expected. Just remember that the question asked if someone did each of these on a typical day, so many could have thought “buying a product” atypical of a day, but typical of a week or month.

Looks like the years of Google OS rumors have finally turned out to be true. As predicted by most, the web is the platform:

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

A lot of this has been made possible by new HTML5 features, like application caches, web app protocol mapping, etc. The network appliances failed years ago, but this makes the prospect much brighter.

HTML5 isn’t all about new elements, it’s also about new APIs which can be of great use to web applications. Canvas, local storage, and mutable DOM prototypes are among these.

While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems (soon to be Oracle) duke it out with their own technologies to implement multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to eat these vendors’ lunches, offering Web experiences based on an industry standard.

I think this is still a long way off, but we can always be hopeful.

Mike Davidson resurfaces a problem that just can’t seem to go away: WYSIWYG editors suck.

I could go on and on for another hour about details, but after going through all of the WYSIWYG editor machinations we’ve gone through, I’m left wondering why the web development world still hasn’t figured this out yet. We can write an entire e-mail application, a replacement for Excel, and whatever the hell these things are, but we can’t replicate a toolset we’ve had in MacWrite since 1984?

I agree with him that the WYSIWYM Editor seems to get the closest, besides WordPress’s hacked TinyMCE, but someone has to solve this problem and productize the results.

I just went to track a package on UPS.com, and noticed that it’s undergone a bit of a redesign. At first glance it looks like they’re trying to simplify the layout, feature new offerings and service updates more prominently.

It could use a lot of polish, visually, but I don’t think it’s necessarily that bad structurally. Then again, I don’t use UPS.com all the time, so I’m not in the best position to judge.