Wheelz Online

I’m sure if any of you are techy then you will have knows about Microsofts plans for IE8. In a nutshell, what they decided they were going to do was to have IE8 display, by default, the same as IE7 and if you wanted it to be displayed in IE8 mode you had to use a meta switch. This pissed off most of the web development community as it seemed that by default we would all be stuck in web circa 2007 unless we coded a switch in.

Well now it appears that common sense has prevailed in Redmond and now unless you specify otherwise IE8 will render pages using the IE8 standards mode. For more information check out this post on the IE site

Finally today I have to put up this advert I saw online. It gave me a laugh as its probably totally true in reality.

I guess some of you have read about IE8 and Microsoft?  Well in a nutshell, they are going to add meta switches to it for diffent websites to show how they should be at different times of creation.  As we all know (well web dudes anyway) each browser and version shows the web in a different way so if someone created a website to look good in IE6 then it would be broken in IE7 etc.

Well I found this posting that sum the last few months up great.  Check it out.

I’ve now been working in the web development sector for about 10 years in one form or another and it sends shivers down my spine everytime I hear the phrase web 2.0.  I’ve still to meet 2 people who think that web 2.0 means the same thing to them.  I get statements like

“Well, its Facebook and Wikipedia isn’t it?”  or “it means being able to find things easier”

Even my definition of making the web more of a social and community led area is probably wide of the mark, but terms such as the semantic web probably fit in there somehow.   In 2006 i attended @media in London, UK and the term ’semantic web’ was first spelt out to me.  It seemed at that point that it was the ‘big thing’ in web development to be able to tag up information on a web page which a computer would understand like if you had a book you could tag up the authors name so that a search for ‘authors’ would bring that name up for you.

I was horrified this morning when a colleage sent me a link to an article about Web 3.0, you can read it here.  The author refers to a talk by Tim Berners-Lee given a last year.

“A user could click on a link and immediately transfer the time and date of the conference to his or her electronic calendar. The location - address, latitude, longitude, perhaps even altitude - could be sent to his or her GPS device, and the names and biographies of others invited could be sent to an instant messenger list”.

I’ve seen this things like this already in the use of  Microformats where a person can sign up to a conference and it appears in their Outlook calender with dates, times, where it is etc.  I would argue that what the above article is saying is the new Web 3.0 is actually just the maturing web 2.0 which we are already working in.

When I first got into web development, my manager at the time gave me a book by Jakob Nielson.  It was something about usability.  I read it from cover to cover back then and I thought I had learn’t a lot.  As time has gone by, i’ve kept an eye on what he writes on his website and it seems to me that he’s more and more out of touch with the living world.  I first noticed this when i read a long article saying that pdf is the devil, and as time goes by I pay less attention to his ramblings.

But wandering around the blogsphere today, i found that he had written ‘an article’ on the evils of blogs and how people should all write interesting and thought provoking articles instead.  I’ve only one thing to say to The Jakob.  Sod off…  I don’t particularly want to write articles and most of the blogs i read would be worse off if they contained articles rather than entries of peoples thoughts and ideas.  So I say today that I give no more attention to him than many other know-it-all’s of the web development world.  Jakob your out of touch now.

Last week i undertook my first presentation role.  I spent an hour showing off the benefits and applications that Adobe’s Acrobat 8 can do for online learning.  Now, i’ve worked in online learning for nearly 5 years now and won many awards for my work during this time.  But the thing I’ve always struggled on is getting the ‘powers that be’ to let me incorporate PDF into the technologies used.  I think the PDF format still suffers up to a point with its perception of inaccessiblity which it used to have.

But since 7 and defiantly 8 now, PDF is a very accessible medium and I think after my presentation I’ve got them to accept it.  So now all I have to do is to put what it can do into practice.  What do you think about PDF, I would be interested to hear.

I’ve just come across this story which I can only presume is from the US. Apparently the person who owns an onine business is theatening to sue a blogger because his site appears higher on Google for a search term. Hello???? It seams to me that rather than going around suing people, perhaps he would be better looking at his website and making it more search engine friendly? If this case goes to court and heaven forbid, he wins what is to stop anyone suing anyone who appears higher than them on Google?

I like new things.  I also like it when I find out something new that I can do.  One of my jobs here is to look after the company website.  This is cool, but not having much time to play with it, its fairly poor in terms of what it does.  This brings two questions.

1. Is it my responsibility to write all the text for the site, or is it just my job to make it work and look neat and tidy?
2. Is there anything which can make it look nice?

In response to the first, I think that the best people to write the copy for what goes up online are the people who actually know what it is they want to do.  I wouldn’t ask a race driver to write copy about how to wire up a car for a DIY manual would I?

On to the second point.  One of the annoying things I’ve had over the last few months is the “contact us” page.  I needed a map as we aren’t in the best place possible.  my boss decided that he wanted an OS map but didn’t want to spend for it.  So nothing got done.  Well I got tired of waiting today so started to look at other stuff.  I came down on the idea of using Google Maps.  How Cool is this??? Their api is outstanding.  In 5 minutes I was able to add the map and mark up where we are.  This is infinatly better than using a static map as you can look at photo’s move around to find a way there.

This has got me thinking what other delights there are out there in the api world.  If you have any recommendations, please leave them for me.

I’m a Dreamweaver Certified developer and have been for the last 7 years.  In 2005 I was heartbroken when I heard that Adobe was to buy Macromedia.  Horrid visions of what they would do flicked through my head like little nightmares.  Well, its been almost a year now since the two joined forces and I’d just like to share with you my feelings towards it.  Is it me or does this seem as though what really happened was Adobe payed loads of money to Macromedia to in effect be ‘taken over themselves’?  As far as I can tell, lots of the top jobs have gone to MM people and also Adobe have started listening more to the people like you and me who use their products.  Case in point.  I HATE the IDE of all the adobe products.  I don’t like the fact that they are all floating panels that hang over your work so you have to keep moving them out of the way to get to things.  MM on the other hand have docked all their panels in a nice way.  I went to one of Adobe’s Fully Loaded tours the other day and sat in on a presentation of Production Studio.  They’ve gone with the Dock strategy now..  I just hope they roll it across to the Creative Suite packages when the next versions come out next year.

I’m still a little nervous waiting for the new versions but at least i’m not having those nightmares anymore.

Last year I attended @media 2006 in London, UK; a geek-fest of some of the best minds in web design and many many interesting seminars ranging from Web Accessibility to CSS to Microformats.

Today i recieved an email teasing me with some names of the speakers who are attending @media 2007.  Will I be there?  You Bet.

I’ve been building websites for almost 10 years now and I love it, that buzz you get when you launch a new website and people start using it.  Over the last 5 years i’ve got an even bigger buzz as the work I’ve done it concerned with online learning.  When a young kid emails to say how good and easy a site was for them to learn things I know my job is worth doing.  Over that time I’ve also learn a few languages, the main ones being (X)HTML (inside out by now), CSS, PHP,  Javascript and before that vbscript inevitably Visual Basic.  This has pretty much let my build whatever I have needed to build.

But I read an article on the web today about 10 Languages you should learn right now…  I find this quite irritating as I can see the point of the article but unless you are planning on pimping yourself around every few months, I cant see the point in straying away from what you know.  Yes I would like to learn C# when I’ve got a bit of time, but its not going to hinder my job prospects because I have a grip on VB.net  The main problem I have with this article is not that they are stupid languages to learn, but its young kids who are thinking that they would like to become web designers but getting freaked out by reading that these are the languages you should have to be able to do it.  I don’t know Rails but I certainly am not laying awake at night worrying about it.