Unintentionally Blank

2008 is turning out to be the year of the browser, IE8 is in beta and passes the Acid 2 test (I’ve seen it do it myself!) and Firefox 3 is in its final beta stages (also passing Acid 2) and is expected to launch in June. But this week it is the turn of the smaller, but no less important browsers, the generally well behaved, but still with single figure percentages in the share of the market, Opera and Safari.

Who Needs Acid 2? We’ve Got Acid 3!

Earlier in the week, Safari 3.1 was released bringing web fonts and, the disputed, CSS animations. The real news, however, is in the nightly builds of both Opera and Safari, both of which claimed to have passed the very new Acid 3 test. Opera posted first on Wednesday to say that they had passed with 100/100, but were closely followed by Safari claiming 100% in Webkit too. The only confusion is that to get 100, the Webkit developers actually recorded a bug in the test which was subsequently fixed before they posted, so maybe Opera only makes 99, we’ll have to see. My copy of Firefox 2 I’m writing this with made a paltry 53/100, so even nearly there is a great achievement.

Competition Rules When Everyone Competes

Competition and tests and standards have clearly had Opera and Safari developers working incredibly hard to pass Acid 3. If only this were true for Mozilla, who don’t seem to believe in it. I understand that they are readying a final release and that perhaps the intricacies of Acid 3 aren’t that important now, but blowing it off entirely is not the correct attitude (even Microsoft changed their tune about Acid 2 from when they wrote this to the recent joy of passing).

The only sad point is that neither of the two largest browsers are focused on Acid 3 at the moment, which means that regardless of all the work the Opera and Safari teams have put in, no-one will be able to safely use many of the standards, all from prior to 2004 as set out by the rules of the test, for longer still.

Congratulations

Nothing can be taken away from either of the development teams though, congratulations to both Opera and Safari, and here’s hoping that the other two take notice of these successes and get on with supporting these standards too.

Just a couple of weeks ago I marvelled at the BBC’s new, accessible, dynamic homepage. Yesterday, Jonathan Hassell took us a bit deeper into the processes that BBC went through in order to produce such a well turned out page.

It is well worth a read just to find out about the extent of the testing that the team went through. Most developers would test their sites on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and perhaps Opera, the BBC comissioned AbilityNet to test on screenreaders Jaws, Hal, Window-Eyes, Thunder and WebbIE, all the while paying attention to other disabilities for example:

[W]e ensured that font sizes and the use of colour met our Accessibility Standards & Guidelines, and that links were not too spaced out (for screen-magnifier users), too close together or too small (for those with motor impairments).

Again, I’d like to say that I was impressed with the redesign, inside and out, and will be more than interested to see the design and the functionality spread through the rest of the site. I’m sure there is a whole load of hard work going on behind the scenes with further testing and investigation over how this may affect the rest of the site, but in the end it will all be worth it, the BBC will not only be the hub that it already is, but it will be more usable and accessible for all and a pillar on the web for web standards and accessibility.

I had a giggle this weekend thanks to a Christian Heilemann tweet. Using a JavaScript document.write to print out a <noscript> element is beyond believable. The whole thing is its own paradox, document.write wll only fire if JavaScript is enabled and <noscript> can only be seen when JavaScript is disabled, the fact that the ad script that was responsible for the script also left the tag open and messed up the rest of the site only compounds the whole thing.

Stunning!

Yahoo! announced today that Yahoo! Search is to support semantic web standards to enhance their search. This is fantastic news for anyone interested in semantic technologies as well as the general public. Why? Because Yahoo! Search is big enough to be the tipping point, the breakthrough point for semantics on the web.

The Problems That Previously Faced Semantic Technology

There are a number of ways of implementing semantics on a web site, from the original methods defined by the W3C using RDF and OWL to microformats, built on (X)HTML, technology we already have and use. The issue is that there seems no real reason for anyone to use these standards; sure, marking up content so that machines can understand it is all very well, but what’s the use if there are no machines reading it?

Up until today only a few technologies supported certain standards, the Operator extension for Firefox supports microformats, as will Firefox 3 when it is released, but none of these are big enough or important enough for the mainstream. Adding semantics to a website is a lot of hard work if no-one is around to use it.

Time For The Big Guns

This is why Yahoo!’s announcement is so big. Now there are machines reading that data and using it and enriching the web with it, do you, as a developer or site owner, want to miss out on that? Yahoo!’s search is to use microformats initially, to improve their understanding of the data to return more relevant results (and, from the looks of their example with LinkedIn add more detail to their search results). So, will other search engines, I’m looking at Google and Microsoft here, want to miss out on the wealth of data that they aren’t collecting and Yahoo! is?

Now it will be beneficial for developers to include microformats and other semantic data as Yahoo! is reading and using it. It will be beneficial for other search engines to get in on the act, as they don’t want to lose market share to a more relevant Yahoo!. Furthermore, it will then be even more beneficial for developers to include the information as everyone watches what Google is doing! Then, with the wealth of semantic data going around, startups and other small web companies will be able to leverage the data for their own uses producing a whole new wave of technologies: web 3.0 anybody?

The Semantic Web Is Coming And Everyone Wins

What could be better, a reason to include semantic technologies in your site, better search results, new, intelligent services? I can only say thank you to Yahoo! for supporting this and giving it the much needed boost.

Just over a week and a half ago the BBC launched a new home page and I just wanted to say how impressed I was with all of it! Not only is it a huge departure, in my opinion, from the previous homepage, incorporating web 2.0 style drag and drop and customisation, it is also a magnificent piece of coding.

Why?

Well, please don’t call me an asshole, but the page validates as XHTML (even the Flash clock in the top right hand side, more on that in a later post). Not only that, it also, unlike some big websites, works without JavaScript enabled (though it makes excellent use of my current favourite library, jQuery and the effects plugin Interface). With accessibility in mind, the two features above are a good start, also all images had relevant alt attributes, form inputs have relevant labels, there are links for accessibility help for the whole site and display options to change the colour scheme and size of the text. I even visited the site on my mobile, using Opera Mini, and everything worked very nicely.

I Am Impressed

Back in 2003, Molly Holzschlag rubished the BBC for their site’s conformance to standards after reporter Andrew Sinclair claimed “Some get it right: the BBC website is considered to be one of the best for people with disabilities”. It has been a long time and I don’t know what version of the site she looked at then, but the new home page should change her mind now.

The BBC has changed up its home page, the main page and flagship of their whole site, and they have done it very nicely. The rest of the site is still the same, but I would like to think that, after launching the front page, there is a lot of work going on in the background to bring the rest of the site in line. For web standards this is pretty huge, I am sure a lot of sites look up to the BBC for guidance and inspiration. To see such an important, highly trafficked and well respected site come out with a valid, accessible home page shows everyone that it can be done.

What do you think of the new BBC home page?