Russ' Rants

The Death of Anticipation

2012-01-17T16:42:00.000-08:00

I came across a remarkable post recently written by Leigh, a woman with a life-threatening disease leaving a legacy for her son.

This struck me on at least two different areas: the insight into the loss of a sense of anticipation and the realization of her perspective.

Those that have attended seminars and workshops on time management will recognize the practice of prioritizing things according to their relevance were you to have only a short time to live. Leigh's blog is intended as a legacy for her son, the things she'd say to him as he grows up were she alive at the time.

Before I received a kidney transplant in 1996 I was forced to quit work at age 40, beginning a period of uncertainty about my future while on dialysis and waiting for a potential donor. A renal patient on dialysis will die without treatment, which tends to put things into perspective and allows me to view Leigh's situation differently than those that have never experienced this.

I can see that much has changed for those born in the last few decades in terms of anticipation. I've had struggles in my life that made me who I am and many in newer generations have not yet experienced real loss or periods of extreme uncertainty. Wrapped in the illusion of safety deemed necessary by an overprotective society, these young people have lost the concept of winning and losing (and the sense of a victory it entails).

I loved Leigh's example of the ever-available strawberry and the resulting lack of anticipation of its arrival to the disappointment when tasting its lackluster flavour.

We tend to value things more when rare (such as gold) and anticipation doesn't fare well with items or experiences that are ubiquitous. The experience is like hearing a joke told by someone that spills the punchline before the details are fully available.

Beware Online "Filter Bubbles"

2011-06-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

In the midst of our concerns about too much information and new technologies, Eli Pariser brings a new concern. Beware of Online "Filter Bubbles" discusses how search results may be hidden from us because of previous, often impulsive, choices. This 9 minute video is a must for all thinking people.

Of course, this will affect how I think about the content on my sites and the searches people perform.

Michelle's Selections

2011-05-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple of hours setting up my wife's new blog this afternoon.

She chose the Simple template for a cleaner look that was easier to post.

The Epicure products are fantastic and we were looking for a business that she could mostly do without me having to drive her everywhere. Check it out!

Michelle's Selections

Time for IE6 to Die

2009-03-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

Internet Explore (IE) has been used by Microsoft to control development of the web ever since IE "won" the browser wars against Netscape. They used the dominance of the Windows operating system by tying IE into Windows 95 after the fact (the judge was so computer illiterate he didn't know what "online" meant, yet he made a decision based upon that ignorance that had lasting repercussions).

Microsoft has since changed the rules with every version of Internet Explorer since (IE5.5, IE6, IE7), ignoring what they'd agreed would be the standards until IE8 (which is pending release). Finally, we have a Microsoft browser that plays by the rules and lets us move the ability to create stunning websites using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as they were intended, not just to pretty up the text.

“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.” Jeff Zeldman, standards guru

In the meantime, web designers have had to create hacks to create pages that would view properly on a variety of versions of IE, primarily IE6. I can't tell you the frustration of trying to move ahead into a design that doesn't use tables for layout only to find that IE adds extra padding or cuts off a graphic that has been floated to the right or left of text (the guillotine effect). Position Everything has a page devoted to the multitude of CSS bugs exhibited by IE.

Now, with the release of IE8, it is time to let IE6 die. There is a community effort to have IE6 finally removed.

However, there are a number of issues, many of which are listed in the article on the site related to the image on the left, Bring Down IE6.

Many people running older Hewlett Packard multifunction printers found this out when their computers updated to IE7. Microsoft had not only made IE part of the installer for all Windows programs (now if that isn't a foolish move in terms of security, I don't know what is) but HP then compounded it by linking their printing/scanning software to a particular version of a web browser. It probably wasnt' their fault alone. Microsoft probably rebuilt the engine for IE and never gave a thought to what the impact would be on the folks they'd leave behind when things changed.

So where does that leave us? It depends upon your situation. If you're catering to a corporate intranet (internal network) that uses IE6, then you'll need to fix the site accordingly. However, most of us can probably allow the site to degrade gracefully so that content is still available, but the experience is neither as rich nor pleasant for those using outdated browsers. There will be unexpected gaps where padding is added/removed and perhaps the graphics won't display as expected.

However, we've done this for Netscape 4, just like the Bring Down IE6 folks noted. Of course, Netscape wasn't the backbone of a cell phone access in a country like China either. Your decision is going to be flawed whatever it is. You'll just have to bit the bullet, either in extra costs associated with finding and fixing the bugs in IE6 or in a reduced experience for potential visitors.

Altering Blogger Templates

2007-11-13T20:15:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted for quite some time. I've been busy with several projects over the last few months and have been readjusting priorities (see my previous posts).

However, I thought I'd share a bit about the process of discovering how to make my site and blog similar in appearance without sacrificing function for either.

The images below on the right show this blog and my personal site after it was altered to fit some of the way this blog is laid out.

My blog's design is based upon the Rounders 4 template (designed by Douglas Bowman), which I altered to display my own header photo and include a few other changes.

My blog was originally a research project to teach myself how to modify the Blogger templates so that I could place similar components on Websites as were on their corresponding blogs.

In my site, I retained left-aligned navigation and didn't place right-aligned content on my site to match the About Me and Sites of the Moment content style.

Because the blog template had rounded corners, I rounded the corners of the header image for this blog. The square corners were retained on my personal site to match the layout on that page.

Later, I took what I'd learned here to update a client site and to make three of her blogs look similar to her site:

Each of these had a different Blogger template and I converted each blog into the Son of Moto template by Jeffrey Zeldman before uploading the changed template so that all the settings and content would be retained.

This arrangement gave Sheryl the ability to alter content on her blogs, yet to retain a similar look to visitors moving between the various blogs and her site.

This is one of the big advantages of running a blog—the ability for non-HTML literate users to add content as well as change how the blog looks without losing anything or knowing what's taking place behind the scenes.

Seeking Balance

2007-03-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

This morning, I was thinking about the prospect of releasing a number of long-term volunteer and minimally-paid engagements that have provided both a source of revenue (in one case) and a sense of community with writers and artists.

The thought of releasing these is difficult, but there are changes looming in my life that force this decision.

More later....

My Web Design Journey

2007-03-06T20:59:00.000-08:00

This blog is an experiment for me. I've been building sites by hand for over ten years (since 1994) and I've learned the technology as it developed. HTML was relatively easy for me to learn.

Most early websites were pretty basic. Unless you were a student at a university or had a good corporate connection, you only had access to dial-up. Images were neither as large nor as rich as those routinely found on the Web today. Sound was limited to background music using various plug-ins. Video was virtually nonexistent.

Most sites used the default Times New Roman font (determined by the browser you were using). In order to style a page, you had to use a font tag for every line on your site to redefine the font as well as its size and colour. As you can imagine, this led to some pretty horrific challenges when editing some sites.

I was never a fan of frames for layout, so I initially built my sites using tables for layout.

I began to see the benefits of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and I started adding style to the text on my pages. I quickly realized the advantages CSS presented: a single line in a style sheet could change the look of an entire site. No more search and replace to make a simple change to the site's overall look.

Soon sites such as css Zen Garden and Eric A. Meyer's Complexspiral Demo began to demonstrate even greater advantages for using CSS. By separating the layout from the content, you could change the entire appearance of your site without having to touch the content. Rather than simply styling the site text, you could change the layout.

However, it wasn't until I read HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS by Rachel Andrew and Dan Shafer that I began to really work seriously with CSS to remove layout from the content. This not only made it significantly easier for neophytes to work on HTML (most still dreaded the experience) but allowed significant changes to a site after the client saw it.

Reworking sites was suddenly much easier (as a hand-coder, working with nested tables is a bug-bear, particularly when something goes wrong). Without having to go back to the drawing board, I could redesign an entire site to have a totally different appearance and layout. As well, the conversion from a tables-based site to a CSS-based site while retaining the content was relatively easy.

If the thought of hand-coding frightens you, quite a few programs allow you to compose the content of a site much like you use a word processing program. I place these into two classes:

Web design programs like Adobe Go Live!, Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe DreamWeaver; or
Content Management Systems (CMS) like Joomla! or Blogger.

Traditionally, most of these added their own tags and peculiarities (I call it tag soup). Microsoft FrontPage, which used the predominance of Windows and Internet Explorer to set its own standards, was probably the most incompatible. Although Netscape included a few of its own "standards" its sites could be viewed on various other operating systems and browsers without totally wrecking the intended look.

Designers began to use browser "sniffing" programs to determine the brand and version of a browser visiting a site, then providing the specialized content for that browser. As you might imagine, this created a great deal of effort and cost, something smaller businesses were unable to compete with.

When Microsoft "won" the browser wars against Netscape, most of the developers began to work around the eccentricities of Internet Explorer (IE), developing for the browser that "came in the box" for a majority of their visitors.

However, Netscape then released an open source version of the Netscape browser called the Mozilla project (Netscape 6 was developed from this Mozilla project). Then an open source project was launched that created the Mozilla browser. with thousands of individuals from all over the globe working on various aspects of this browser.

At the point this was occurring, most browsers were actually suites of software, including at least the browser and an e-mail program (Microsoft's was made an integral part of Windows -- something that has since haunted them in terms of security issues), with Netscape and Mozilla including a WYSIWYG Web publisher. People now had a free program that would design acceptable websites, albeit with a lot of unnecessary HTML code.

When the Mozilla team began to work on a light browser (Firefox) it changed two important things:

it produced an excellent free browser that wasn't tied to any operating system (Windows); and
it followed the standards that everyone had agreed upon, but most had ignored.

Many web developers were tired of having to provide work-arounds and fixes for each separate version of Internet Explorer (even the MacIntosh version was different). Many began to build with Firefox in mind, some continuing to "fix" older version of IE, but many now ignoring non-compliant code.

Interestingly, when IE7 was released, it was much closer to compliance than any prior version of IE. This is likely because the web developers had abandoned catering to IE eccentricities.

More recent versions of Go Live!, DreamWeaver8 and Blogger have made serious strides in producing clean and compliant code without the security risks sometimes associated with CMSs. Even FrontPage 2007 was working on cleaning up its output.