Webteam Blog: General Web News

Apple today released Safari 3.1 for free download for both Mac OS X and Windows at http://www.apple.com/safari/.

Safari 3.1 has all the features of a modern web browser (tabbed windows, popup blocker, enhanced security etc) plus supports the latest innovative web standards.

The New Zealand Government Web Standards team have launched a web standards wiki at http://webstandards.govt.nz/.

The wiki is a one year pilot intended as a collaborative space for anyone interested in New Zealand government web standards (or web standards in general).

New Zealand Legislation has gone live, providing free public access to up-to-date versions of New Zealand legislation.

AOL has announced that Netscape Navigator will no longer be supported after 1 February 2008, and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.

Twenty-five years ago (at 11:44 am. on September 19, 1982), Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes
-- a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis
-- as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.

The full story is available on the cnn.com/technology website: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/18/emoticon.anniversary.ap/index.html

"...IBM believes that virtual worlds are going to be the next big evolution of the web and if this happens...it's not right for blind people to be missing out on what the rest of us have available."

Read the full story at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6993739.stm

From this week' s Sitepoint Design View:

A png trick in Fireworks that enables the creation of pngs that use alpha transparency for more than one colour, while preserving transparency in older browsers.
See: PNG8 - The Clear Winner

5 full-on days. 9 hands-on workshops. 19 kick-ass speakers. 24 must-see presentations.
Truckloads of design, development, user experience, web standards, content, community, innovation & inspiration.

http://webstock.org.nz/

The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, in partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book, has published an interactive, publicly commentable edition of the the Ithaka report, "University Publishing In A Digital Age." The report is presented in CommentPress, an open source theme for the WordPress blog engine that allows paragraph-by-paragraph commenting in the margins of a text (source)

Blackle is an interface to Google which is designed to conserve energy by displaying the screen as black instead of the normally white looking Google.

The creation of this interface was in response to the ecoIron post which claimed a black Google interface would save 3000 Megawatt-hours a year globally.

It remains to be seen if the argument for sustainability triumphs over concerns about the readability of white text on black.

Apple® today introduced Safari™ 3, the world’s fastest and easiest-to-use web browser for Windows PCs and Macs. Safari 3 supports all modern Internet standards so users can view websites as they were meant to be seen, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and Java.

A  free public beta of Safari 3 is available immediately as a download at www.apple.com/safari.

Information sourced from http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11safari.html

Determining the colour contrast between foreground and background colours is a time consuming task, but is greatly aided by colour contrast analysers.

The problem with colour contrast analysers is that they don't automatically go through all of the possible colour combinations in a document; instead, it requires a judgement call by the person evaluating the page to decide whether colour combinations look like they may be problematic, and then to enter those colours into a colour contrast analyser.

Download the Colour Contrast Analyser Firefox extension.

from (Mozillazine) The Mozilla Corporation released Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.12 last week, which is expected to be the final release of the Firefox 1.5 line. The Mozilla Developer News weblog has a post about Firefox 1.5.0.12, confirming that there are unlikely to be any further Firefox 1.5 releases and recommending that all users upgrade to Firefox 2

Grade your website with 31 free online tests from this list at Aviva Directory.

From the BBC :

"Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design, web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has said.

...sites peppered with personalisation tools were in danger of resembling the "glossy but useless" sites at the height of the dotcom boom.

Research into website use shows that sites were better off getting the basics right."

27th April - Kathryn Ryan speaks to Craig Neville-Manning - the New Zealander who heads up Google engineering in New York on Nine to Noon (National Radio).

from Computerworld: Weka, a public-sector disability information website, is to be reorganised to improve content management and accessibility and usability of the site by the disabled. The revamp could provide an example of adherence to accessibility standards to other government sites.

from Microsoft : Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. Silverlight integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight media capabilities include fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality audio and video to all major browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Windows Internet Explorer running on the Macintosh or on Microsoft Windows. By using Microsoft Expression Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio, designers and developers can collaborate more effectively by using the skills they have today to light up the Web of tomorrow.

Have you ever watched your status bar while you wait for a page to load and wondered why several files seem to be downloaded before you see anything at all on your screen? Eventually the page content displays, and then the images are slotted in.

The files that keep you waiting are generally the CSS and JavaScript files linked to from the <head> section of the HTML document. Because these files determine how the page will be displayed, rendering is delayed until they are completely downloaded.

Read the full post Faster Page Loads - Bundle Your CSS and Javascript  on the Sitepoint website.

Jakob Nielson writes: Not all design decisions are a matter of website survival. Of course, it's important to get the big things right, or you won't have any users. But getting the small things right enhances usability and fosters user comfort. A perfect example here is the breadcrumb trail.

Via ReadWriteWeb: The Apollo team from Adobe is ... presenting the Alpha version of their new runtime environment - which is aimed at empowering web developers to create desktop applications. Apollo is a lightweight virtual machine that runs on the desktop and acts as an interpreter of HTML, JavaScript and Flash - much like the browser does today. The difference is that applications that run on Apollo can work in an offline mode, while you are not connected to the internet.

From Microsoft Research comes Asirra - a different kind of CAPTCHA: 
"Asirra is a human interactive proof that asks users to identify photos of cats and dogs. It's powered by over two million photos from our unique partnership with Petfinder.com. Protect your web site with Asirra — free!"

The conference (with papers avail as PDF) aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas (e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster discussions about ongoing research on weblogs and social media. We invite participation from academia and industry.

The State Services Commission New Zealand have released the Government Web Standards v 1.0, replacing the previous Government Web Guidelines v2.1, first issued in February 2004.

The standards have been revised to make them more usable and to ensure they can be measured and tested, making them more effective for Government agencies.

The Government has directed the Public Service departments to comply with the standards. State sector organizations are being strongly encouraged to follow suit, and local government and private sector are also invited to adopt the standards.

Read full press release.

Recordings of the presentations at the recent Webstock Mini held in Wellington are now available.

Andy Budd has a first draft of some new usability heuristics available for comments:

"Heuristic evaluation is a technique that involves analysing the usability of a website against a set of general usability precepts. ...
Since Mr Nielsen first created his heuristics back in 1990, the web has changed on a lot. Many of the underlying principals remain the same, but their relative weight has shifted. So using these heuristics as a starting point, I set out to create a set of web application heuristics that better reflected the current landscape."

(from Computerworld) - Microsoft will soon submit to the ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) a new photo format that offers higher-quality images with better compression. The format, HD Photo — recently renamed from Windows Media Photo — is taking aim at the JPEG format, a 15-year-old technology widely used in digital cameras and image applications.

An opinion piece from Andy Rutledge "In spite of the widespread acceptance of Web standards by a specific segment of the design and development community, hosts of professionals – those out there right now creating the Web – are working in direct opposition to these standards. A significant reason for why this is happening and how those not working with Web standards justify their activity boils down, I believe, to something regrettably simple: nomenclature."

Office workers glued to their computer screens are at greater risk of potentially fatal blood clots than long-distance air travellers, a world-leading New Zealand study has found.

Story Here

"Recognizing the importance of an open forum for the development of the predominant Web content technology, W3C today invites browser vendors, application developers, and content designers to help design the next version of HTML by participating in the new W3C HTML Working Group." - http://www.w3.org/2007/03/html-pressrelease