Web Coder Plus

Molly.com has a great little post on Web Standards and The New Professionalism, a look at how anyone who still designs web sites with nested tables shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves a web professional.

At the end of the post, she says:

Today, I want to express that I believe that this new professionalism means taking responsibility for the education of ourselves and each other, and ensuring that reversions like Disney Store UK never happen again.

I guess it’s a nice sentiment, and in the first world you can expect almost everyone to be using browsers capable of rendering standards compliant pages properly. Down here in South Africa, things aren’t quite as nice. A year ago, I was chatting to a web developer friend of mine, and the subject of web standards came up. I asked him why all his web pages still used horrific sets of tables and other nastiness, and he replied that using CSS just wouldn’t work on most peoples browsers. I laughed and pointed out that IE 5.5 was currently holding less than 5% of the market and anything lower was so unused that it wasn’t worth thinking about.

Well he pulled out the stats of one of his clients, and while he was exaggerating when he said “most” peoples browsers, the numbers were nevertheless worrying. 5% were still using Netscape Navigator 4! Even more still using IE 5.0, IE 6 only just having passed the IE 5.x’s in overall share. FireFox, Opera and other new browsers didn’t even make a full percent combined.

I’m glad I don’t make web pages for local reading here, and if I did, I think I’d just have to live with alienating 20% of the public.

Seems Google’s new service is struggling to hold up against the massed onslaught generated by a mention in Matt Cutts’ blog, SlashDot and many others. Currently I’m struggling to get the administration panels to even load, which is unusual for Google, who’s massive bandwidth and good programming result in web applications that are usually very fast, even for those of us doomed to the slow international bandwidth down here in southern Africa.

Then I guess most of it wasn’t created by Google; but by a company who, since they were charging $199 a month, didn’t have to worry too much about a massive influx of new users. Given that this uses so much flash, I’m not really surprised; hopefully they manage to get some sort of load balancing into action soon.

Update:Well it’s now 20 hours since I added the stats code and still no stats to look at. Though it seems they have managed to do some load balancing (or just found more powerful servers), since at least I can now look at my lack of stats quickly. Ah Google, suckcess can be a pain. I’m sure this will turn out to be a brilliant service, but right now it’s just managing to be a useless one.

Penny Arcade is my favourite online comic by far; but, sad to say, the HTML behind their site was still firmly living in the 90’s. Well today that has started to change. I loaded up their site, and it looked completely different and more importantly, it loaded up in a fraction of the time. I viewed the source, and not a single table in sight, and the beautiful neatness that can only come from attempting XHTML compliance.

While the page still doesn’t validate properly, it is definitely a step in the right direction. I do have a sneaking suspicion they upgraded their server at the same time, which could also account for the new blazing fast speed, but the massive shrink in unnecessary markup definitely helps. It’s always nice when you see a extremely popular web site take those first steps towards proper web standards.

Matt Cutts has a post about the new Google Analytics. When Google bought Urchin, I immediately went to their site, assuming it would be free (yes I’m a cheap bastard, but I don’t receive enough visitors to warrant paying $199 a month for a web analytics program). It wasn’t and Urchin appeared to continue with a normal paid model. Well now Google has re-released it as Google Analytics and it is free for web masters with up to 5 million page views per month. Even then, after 5 million page views it is free to Google AdWords members.

Well it is now installed on Web Coder Plus, and I will be giving it a look over the next week. I’ll post more, with the Google Analytics tag, after I’ve played with it for a few days.

Well, 9rules Network: Round 3 is here, and I’ve decided to enter.

In the past, as I found new sites that I enjoyed, I often noticed that they sported the little 9Rules logo somewhere on each page. They were always of great quality and well worth the read, so I browsed over to the 9Rules site. I have to say, while there are many blogs there of subjects that don’t interest me, I’ve never seen a blog with them that isn’t good.

So anyway, I hope Web Coder Plus gets the nod of approval, though apparently I will have to wait until the 30th before I know for sure that I haven’t been selected, hopefully a lot earlier if I have.