The Email Standards Project

Many years ago the Web Standards Project (or WASP) fought the fine fight to pressure browser manufacturers into complying with some sort of standard version of HTML. Prior to that we almost had to build separate sites for Netscape and Internet Explorer - it was horrible.

We have come so far with browsers, but unfortunately most email clients are, well, a long way behind. If you have ever tested an HTML email in a few different clients you'll know the frustration.
Yesterday's launch of the Email Standards Project hopes to remedy this situation. Some people love it, some hate it, but HTML email is here to stay. And if we could have the proper standards support in email clients then it's probably fair to say that a lot of those opposed would change their mind.

We have a long way to go, but at least now we have a vehicle!

Using Radio Buttons to Combat Form Spam

There has been a lot of talk lately (and rightly so) about the disadvantages of using captcha to stop comment spam.

I'm not a big fan. They're often hard to read even for someone with reasonably normal vision.

"Is that a zero or the letter O?"

"Upper case C or lower case c?"

Others have suggested some sort of simple logic question, like asking "What's 1+1" and having the user enter a '2' in a text box.

That might be better, but it also requires some thought.

So I noticed that on Slideshare they prefix a captcha device with the question, "Are you human?"

And it got me thinking, can bots deal with radio buttons? Can we ask a question like this?

[syntax,human_form.htm,html4strict]



I must admit I haven't done any research, but I'm thinking:

1. If a bot doesn't understand radio buttons it will skip the question and fail


2. If it does understand radio buttons, it will probably choose the first option and fail


3. It's an extremely simple question for a human to answer and should be completely accessible.

Point 2 is probably the most contentious. I'm making a big assumption there.

Has anyone else tried this? Can anyone spot any obvious disadvantages?

Really Bad Powerpoint

I was at a meeting recently where a teacher gave a presentation about some stuff the school was involved in. And, of course, she used Powerpoint.

Very badly.

I'm sure you have all seen it. Several paragraphs of text per slide. Cheesy animations (and different animations for each block of text). The "handouts" get handed to you as the presentation commences, so you and up reading the handouts during the presentation. And then you feel a little guilty, so you start listening to the presentation, only to find it contains exactly what's on the handouts anyway - nothing more.

Yikes - if this is what teachers do then I'm really sorry for my kids.

It reminded my of an eBook by Seth Godin called Really Bad Powerpoint. (Links to a PDF file.) Well worth a read if you ever have to give a presentation.

And then today I read a comparison between the presentation styles of Uncle Steve and Uncle Bill. (Jobs and Gates if you're not sure.) Which reminded me of Seth's eBook again - especially if you look at the comparisons between the 2 sets of slides used in the example.

Now, I know public speaking is hard - and I'm trying not to be too critical of the teacher here. But please! Put some more thought into your presentations!!!

A Blatent Grab At A Freebie

Well, day one of Web Directions South 07 is over. And they announced that they would be giving away some prizes to anyone who blogged about it overnight.

I've had a few beers and am not in the right frame of mind to write anything deep and meaningful - I'm just submitting this post on the odd chance I might get a freebie tomorrow!

Well, you never know...

2Clix Lawsuit Dropped

Just a quick follow up to a previous post - the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the lawsuit has been dropped.

I think this is the most important lesson:

"Ironically, the negative word of mouth and worldwide media coverage criticising 2Clix for trying to silence its critics seems to have damaged the firm's reputation far more than the forum threads that were the subject of the lawsuit.

We Just Have to Work With What We Have

Roger Johansson recently posted a bit of a rant about how much he hates HTML email. He also wrote how if anyone thinks otherwise they're weird/wrong/stupid:

"Some people even like receiving HTML email." (I have replaced his italics with my bold.)

Okay, so I'm weird, wrong and stupid.

But the thing that gets me the most is this:

"I still don’t do HTML email though. As long as support for Web Standards in email clients is as crappy and unpredictable as it currently is, well I’m sorry, but I’m not going back to nested layout tables and spacer GIFs just to create an email. Until the situation improves I’m happy to hand over the job of creating HTML email to somebody else."

Well, I'm sorry too, Roger, but in the real world we just have to work with what we have. Were we all evil in the 90s for using tables and spacer GIFs for layout? No, we weren't. We were just doing the best we could with the available technology.

Imagine saying back then, "I'm not developing any websites until browser manufacturers improve their browsers."

Yep, right.

I'm not saying we should be happy with the status quo either, and David Greiner's excellent post on why we need improvement in the area of standard support in email will hopefully shake a few things up.

I'm sure the day will come when we have decent standards support in our mail clients, but in the meantime those of us that flirt with reality have to deal with HTML email. That includes using layout tables and all sorts of other 'evil' measures.

But we just have to do the best with what we have.

Firm sues forum to silence critics

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that software maker 2Clix is suing community site Whirlpool for comments posted on its forum.

This could set a nasty precedent. Does that mean that nobody will be allowed to criticise anything online for fear of getting sued?

Do we have follow America's lead in getting lawyers involved in everything?

Anyway, here's the story.

Simple Live Chat on Your Website

Installed Plugoo last week on our client login area - it allows visitors to your website to contact you via Messenger, without them knowing what your actual messenger signin is.

Actually, they don't even know what IM software you're using!

It's all pretty seamless and appears to work quite well.

The only real gripe is that if you embed the object on the page, once the visitor navigates away from that page the conversation ends. Makes continuity a bit hard. I've overcome this by placing their object in a hard-coded popup window, and made a little 'live help' button instead.

Hat Tip

ACCC Sues Google

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has decided to sue Google over the sponsored links on its site.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

"The ACCC also alleges Google engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct by causing the Kloster Ford and Charlestown Toyota links to be published on the website. [In ads placed by used car rival, the Trading Post]

And then:

"Google also failed to adequately distinguish sponsored links from 'organic' search results, the ACCC alleges.

Geeze - don't worry about the price of fuel in regional areas compared to capital cities. Don't worry about Woolworths (supermarket giant here in Australia) squeezing out smaller operators. Don't worry about issues that affect everyday people. Tackle something for cheap publicity instead.

If the ACCC doesn't like ads placed on Google by the Trading Post, shouldn't they be chasing the Trading Post?

Oh, but there are no headlines in that, are there?

Web Directions South: I'm There!

Missed out last year, but the 04 and 05 conferences were both excellent. Inspirational.

So I managed to convince the 'boss' to let me loose again this year.

They have split it into 3 streams this year: Design, Development, and Management & Strategy. A designer I am not (kinda wish I had some 'skilz' there though) but I like some of the stuff in the Development stream and some in the Management & Strategy stream. Hope I can chop and change a bit.

I guess I'll find out in due course.

Internet Explorer Cannot Download / From Help

Funny bug in Windows Vista - apparently caused when Dreamweaver 8 is installed. If you try to get help from within Windows, this happens:



There is a pretty painless fix, found here.

Safari For Windows

Apple have released Safari (their web browser) for Windows.

Why would you want to use Safari instead of Firefox?

I don't know... but now you can.

Getting Nokia PC Suite to Work on a New Toshiba Notebook

Got a new Toshiba A200 notebook on Friday so just spent the weekend setting it all up. All went pretty well until I got to setting up my Nokia 6111 to sync with Outlook - a very handy feature you can do with Nokia's PC Suite.

Except it didn't work.

After much digging I found that Nokia's software won't work with Toshiba's bluetooth stack in Windows Vista. It found the phone, but no amount of persuasion would make it pair with the computer. You need Microsoft's bluetooth stack.

So here's the fix:

1. Go to your Control Panel in Windows and uninstall the existing Bluetooth by Toshiba.


2. Reboot


3. Go to C:\TOSAPINS\Bluetooth-Monitor\BtMon3Inst_v301.exe and install that.

This process has removed the Toshiba bluetooth stack and installed the Microsoft one.

Easy...!

Microhoo?

Microsoft to buy Yahoo? So reports the Sydney Morning Herald:

Yahoo would plug a "strategic hole" at Microsoft that was not filled by the purchase of AQuantive, announced last week, Mr Noto [a Goldman Sachs analyst] wrote in a note to clients.

AQuantive, which creates web ads and measures whether they reach the target audience, does not give Microsoft the roughly half a million advertisers required to compete against Google, Mr Noto said.

Windows Live Search obviously isn't being used for search as Microsoft had hoped. But one has to ask: would this be a good thing or a bad thing for Yahoo? And does Google care?

Measure Map and Google Analytics

Google updated their Analytics statistics tool during the week - and what a huge improvement. Analytics always offered heaps of data, it was just presented in a very dull way.

You can really see that their purchase of Measure Map, a blog-specific statistics tool, has inspired much of the Analytics overhaul.

Below is the menu from Measure Map on the left, and Google Analytics on the right.



Now, they are obviously different as they serve different purposes, but the revised Analytics layout is much fresher - benefiting from the great work Adaptive Path did with Measure Map.

If you haven't already, sign up for an Analytics account. It's amazing what info you can get, and now how easy it is to access! (And have nice reports automatically emailed to you every week!)

Do This.

NetOffice Light: Status Report

Set up an account at Sourceforge this week, so we now have a place to work: http://sourceforge.net/projects/netoffice-light/. If you have any specific requests, post them there.

As I have mentioned previously, our first step is to remove all the existing javascript. Yep, all of it. I'm a big fan of progressive enhancement and so we'll be looking to have everything working without any javascript. Sure, it won't be as fancy, but if you don't have javascript enabled for any reason, you'll at least be able to use it.

We'll then add the fabulous jQuery library which should take care of pretty much any scripting we need. (With the exception of the editor toolbar of course.)

We'll also get rid of all the layout tables and convert it over to a nice, tidy, CSS layout. There will still be plenty of tables, but we'll get them all sorted with class names so it shouldn't be too hard to write your own skins or themes.

So our first release will be very much the same (function-wise) as NetOffice 2.6 - but a 'plainish' version that we'll make available, so any designers out there that feel the urge can start preparing skins.

WAMP - No More Messing Around

Thanks to Schmeegs for this - a very simple, straight-forward was to get Apache/MySQL/PHP running on your Windows box.

EasyPHP. Worked straight away for me without having to do anything!

Any if you do need to customise it, a little interface makes that pretty simple, too.

The Big Upgrade: XP to Vista

My little box of goodies arrived from Microsoft yesterday so last night I upgraded my notebook to Vista. So far, so good, mostly.

There was bound to be a few issues, and here are the ones I faced:

1. It takes a long time. I started at about 9pm and gave up waiting at about 12:30. A clean install is supposedly faster (but that means reinstalling all your software) so I elected to go for the upgrade. Put aside half a day. (Or overnight!)


2. Avast Antivirus needs to be uninstalled. On their website they say it works with Vista, and it does, but you have to uninstall it and then reinstall it after Vista has loaded. You can use the same install file though if you still have it.


3. Missing printer driver. The drivers for my Fuji Xerox Document Centre C250 just vanished during the install. I reinstalled the XP drivers (as the Vista ones are still a few months away apparently) and I can do basic printing, but nothing fancy (like double-sided for example)


4. iPod/iTunes. Aaaaaargh! You have to a bit of tap dancing to get this to sort-of behave. And even then iTunes keeps freezing. And I can't play my purchased songs, even after downloading their so-called 'patch'. Don't get me started on that!

Other than those things it seems to be doing pretty well. My notebook is nearly 2 years old and it's coping resonably well - I even get the Windows Aero fancy bits!

One of the coolest things though is the gadget sidebar. It comes with a few basic things you can add, but there are already heaps more you can download.

That's about it after day 1 - we'll see how she behaves over time...

The "Client Site" in NetOffice

Getting ready to release our first version of NetOffice Light, and I was initially planning on removing the Client Site functionality altogether. This brought about a few protests - so I'm asking anyone who does use that function:

1. What parts do you use the most?


2. What parts do you use the least?


3. What's missing?

Specifically relating to the Client Site part of NetOffice. Thoughts anyone?

Legal MP3s from EMI?

I recently posted about a few issues I have with online music purchases, and it seems there may be a growing tide of sentiment that things must change. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, EMI is looking at the idea of releasing their entire catalogue in plain old MP3, instead of using the ridiculous copy protection systems in place now.

EMI have a different reason than mine - songs you buy from iTunes are only any good if you have an iPod, and songs you buy from any other online retailer you can't play on an iPod. Obviously, Apple have a bit of a stanglehold on the online music market at the moment.

The other thing is that copy protection does not stop piracy.

If I really wanted to copy something I have bought from iTunes, I can burn it to an audio CD, then re-rip it back to my computer as MP3. All this copy protection nonsense hasn't really stopped anything. It just inconveniences people trying to do the right thing.

Just as an aside, since my initial post on the subject I have bought 3 CDs, and nothing from iTunes Music Store...

One Media Outlet Thinking Outside the Tube

I've had a few experiences with the local newspaper in the past that emphasises how short-sighted some of the established media can be. From being defensive and difficult to get along with, to being outright nasty. (I might go into that another time...)

So it was refreshing to see this story on an Australian TV network using a little forward thinking.

Channel 10 has embraced YouTube, whom some might feel to be a potential rival, as a new opportunity to broadcast content.

From the article:

"Unlike most television organisations, we don't regard YouTube and Google as the enemy. We think that they will be great distribution partners," Mr Smith said. Ten last year offered clips of local comedy Thank God You're Here on YouTube.

"One of the reasons we put stuff on YouTube last year was that it was free, incremental traffic," Mr Smith said.

Ten treated the YouTube videos like a broadcast, including ads for the show's sponsors in the clips. "The fact that we put it out on YouTube means that there were tens of thousands of additional eyeballs watching those things for free."

The lessons here? Just because you don't understand something, that doesn't make it an enemy. And perhaps look for ways to leverage something new to your own advantage instead of dismissing it.

Outlook 2007: One step forward, 20 steps back

Well, just when we had warm and fuzzy feelings towards Microsoft for the improvements in Internet Explorer 7, they go and flush it all down the loo.

If you have to create HTML email, you'll be pleased to know that Outlook 2007 won't use IE as it's rendering engine any more. It uses... wait for it... Word! And we all know how good Word is at rendering and creating HTML! (Not!!!)

So instead of getting improved standards support in the next version of Outlook, we take about 20 steps backward instead.

Sheesh... what are they thinking?

Read more here.

Digital Music Downloads - Not Forever?

There have been a few stories lately talking up digital music downloads (iTunes not coping with demand, music charts being changed to reflect the nature of digital downloads) but I'm not so sure about it any more.

I have downloaded a couple of things from iTunes: Engima's Voyageur was virtually impossible to buy over the counter, and I also grabbed a couple of Neil Diamond's tracks as it was convenient just to get the few I was after and not have to buy a whole album.

Convenient? Yes. Fast? Yes. However:

1. I have paid for these tracks but I've only got them at 128 kbps. The quality will never be any better than that. Okay on cheap equipment, but I recently shouted myself some quality headphones and now I can tell the difference.


2. Recently I reformatted my hard drive. Sure, I backed everything up, but iTunes would not play these purchased songs until I "authorised" my computer.

Now there's a trap - the songs can only be played on "authorised" machines - and I can only authorise 5. Actually only 4 now, as I didn't de-authorise before reformatting last time.

Now, if I lose a hard drive unexpectedly, there goes another machine. And what if I want these tracks on a work computer and a home computer?

I dunno - I think that in a few years' time I won't be able to play these tracks anymore. Might have to burn them to an audio CD and re-rip them back into iTunes.

Second thoughts, just fire up amazon.com and buy the CD...