Unintentionally Blank

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?

It’s all go in the developer community this week and Microsoft are at the centre of it all!

Version Targeting Missed The Target

First, on Monday, Dean Hachamovitch posted about Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8. The point of the post was to change their mind over the version targeting idea, no longer will the default mode for Internet Explorer be IE7’s rendering mode. Standards support has now been seen to be of top priority, as is working like the other browsers. This is also in response to the feedback from the community.

Not my feedback, of course, I eventually decided I approved of the original idea so that web site owners who had no idea what web standards were wouldn’t be battered by another round of breaking sites like when IE7 was released. One of the more important lines from Dean’s post seemed to me to be:

[T]his choice creates a clear call to action to site developers to make sure their web content works well in IE.

Now it is up to everyone who owns a site to make sure it works in IE8 or add the meta tag to ensure IE7 rendering. It’s a big job, but we can start now!

IE8 Beta 1 Released

Yes, it’s here! IE8 Beta 1 is available for download now! I’m writing this on a Mac at the moment, but I look forward to getting my hands on it, testing my sites and experiments, testing the web in general. Things to look forward to, as developers, in the new IE are:

• Full CSS 2.1 support
• Better scripting performance (though, according to comments on the IEblog article, this hasn’t been optimised for this beta, so will seem slower)
• Early support for HTML5
• Built in developer tools

…and much more!

A Bright New Future

So, I don’t mind that the IE team changed their mind. It means less thinking for me, as I don’t have to add meta tags or HTML 5 DOCTYPES, and it means that progressive enhancement lives on as we know it. The issue of multiple rendering engines (IE 6, 7 and 8 to start with, it sounds like) and the weight and complexity of it will still be a question but one that should be answered soon. Finally, it is nice to see the product of all this work and debate and get to grips with it. I will try not to turn this blog into a report on IE8’s wins and losses (like Jonathan Snook’s Twitter stream earlier!) but I am fascinated by the arrival of the newest version of the world’s most popular browser.

All in all it is a bright future for web development and this first beta is a peek into that future of standards support across the board. Let’s hope it is a good peek.