Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress.
Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008
This move some how reminds me when Steve Jobs announced he will drop Power PC's and use Intel, every body was waiting for the G5 PowerBook etc... so what to do is to sacrifice something to gain other alot of things.
As an HTML/CSS coder I understand how much pain they pass through to get there interfaces work with IE 6, and I understand to achive some experiences they don't have other choice than to drop IE 6 support.
It will be nice if there interfaces doesn't crash on IE 6 only some options and additions don't work, but if there's no way but to crash the interface onIE 6 they don't have other choice, only a message stating the cause of the problem and showing the links of IE 7, FireFox & Safari, will be nice, I'm sure 37signals understands that perfectly.
]]>Living web sites that grow, develop and evolve to suit the taste of the people that read them are now finding their way on to the internet.
Roger Highfield - Web pages have 'come alive and started breeding'
According to the article scientists at Creative Synthesis are evolving a software that tracks the behavior of a visitor and what attracts him and what's not to improve the site experience for each visitor, by every refresh of a page features changed.
This is an awesome new technology that can enhance user experiences very much, can you imagine, tracking a visitor day by day, see what he uses the most what's not, and focus on what he needs the most, The more you use the site the more it gets to know you and adapt more to your needs.
Once the blog went live, control of the design was out of their hands.
Roger Highfield - Web pages have 'come alive and started breeding'
That is really awesome, I didn't see real application of that yet but if it is applied nicely, it will be a revolution in user experience, I mean by applied nicely not to surprise the user by every refresh with different navigation position, links switched, headers or links colors changed, etc....
The transition should be done gradually so the user adapt to it smoothly, I guess people at Creative Synthesis are smart enough to already know what I'm saying, and I hope we see an application of this technology out in the wild, see how far will it get.
]]>A war between Idealists
& realists
running on Mars, who will win?
There first project is great, its objective is to move old books that contains old, harmful information about the web from the libraries shelves to the archives, go on make your mark.
And don't forget to add there button to your site. linking to http://streetteam.webstandards.org.
That's all for today, C U soon.
]]>
Just found this cool app through Mac Tricks And Tips: Top 100 Essential Mac Applications it's cssedit, it's really superior in editing CSS, giving you the pleasure of watching the results at real time, you can click on any of the objects of the page and inspect which CSS rules are ruling it and start editing it through the code or by playing with the visual controls at the side, I think it's browser is running on safari engine, I hope it only have the ability to show you the real time results on more than one browser side by side at the same time.
Give it a try you will not regret it, the application costs $29.95 but you can try it for free, you will not be able to save files with more than 2500 characters, sorry windows users this app is for macs only.
]]>Abdelrahman send the whole web greetings from the disconnected part of the world and hoping to see you soon after some body plug the cable.
Update (30/1/2008): Abdelrahman can see some sites, but most of the sites are not working out there.
Update (31/1/2008): Hello it's me, I can access the net now, maybe they did any temporary solution, or maybe it's only because I'm accessing the net from office, yesterday I was trying to access from home, the news here and there about the problem.
]]>There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption.
I mean if I am using an application like latest news on my igoogle homepage, I shall be able to pull it out and place it on my desktop. I would surely like those apps that I use daily to be on my desktop working when I boot up my machine. Also, if I do some work on my computer and want it to be accessible from anywhere else, then I generally use email to save it over the wev. Now, what would be cool is that if I save that file on my desktop, then it automatically gets synched with a database on web and thus becomes accesible from anywhere. Thus, difference between storing one's file on desktop and storing it on web is blurred.
Mayank - Is Integrated Platform Web 3.0?
He also mentioned an approach towards it which is prism from Mozilla Labs, which is a great approach, it could convert your web apps like Facebook for example to a separate application with it's own shortcut on the desktop and no browser bordering it.
That's cute this really is the future of the web but I was thinking, why don't operating systems themselves integrate web apps in there systems just like desktop apps? why don't they show them just as desktop apps, just as you explore your hard disk to click on anything.exe or anything.app (for Apple users) we should explore the web just like our hard disks and click on anything.php (or maybe a new extension is created for this issue ".web" for example) and this application open just like any desktop application free of browser borders and has it's own icon, this truly maybe web 3.0
It's weird yesterday, we was impressed that web apps are replacing desktop apps in their functionalities, today we want web apps to really replace desktop apps in there place and get out of browsers borders.
Maybe Apple or Microsoft need to apply this quickly before OS's themselves become web apps.
]]>You could deceive search engines and get indexed in a place you originally shouldn't be in, by buying fake back links or using headers just for the search crawlers to see and visually hiding it from visitors, that's just 2 tricks there is dozens out there.
Every day search engines upgrade there algorithms to become smarter than bad SEOs, on the other side SEOs create new tricks, if search engine discovered bad trick in a website it may lower its rank or even totally remove it from its database.
I hear some people saying "but showing in the first page of a specific keyword search results is vital to our business", there is always a proper solution. Ofcourse you know these: Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing & Microsoft Ad Center if you don't like pay-per-click plans try TLA to pay-per-month, I'm confused why people pay all that money on SEO while they could pay it on Ads.
Any way I don't know much about bad SEO as I never care to learn it, people always ask me, "Do you know about SEO?" if I answered yes, just the next question "how many back links could you get us ... you know the rest" so whoever ask me I answer "no", but I always wanted to explain to people what SEO really is.
SEO is not a thing to think about, you just have to start writing your clean markup using HTML tags only as they meant to be used, just think of the visitors, what title of the page they should see, what is the biggest first header <H1> better for your visitors to understand the content of this page, as you explain to your visitor the content of your page by its title and headers even regular paragraphs, also the crawlers will understand clearly where your page should be indexed on the search results, if you don't like this place you have to pay and buy an Ad plan.
So to simplify it Good SEO in two points :
<table>, don't use <div> unless you see it's really a division of the page like side bar, ads bar etc... , it's even better if you can free the main header of any wrappers.<H1> and maybe a brief explanation about your site wrapped in an <H2> about the content of your site in a brief informative words.It's always a good idea to start marking up your document from scratch
<html>
<head>
<title>Page title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Page main header</h1>
<h2>The short description I mentioned earlier</h2>
<div id="main">
<h3>smaller header</h3>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<h3>Another header</h3>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<h4>Even smaller header</h4>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
<div id="side">
<h3>smaller header</h3>
<p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
That's for example, and you could mess with the CSS as you wish to style your page but leave markup clean and meaningful, to know what each tag mean you might consider checking HTML Dog.
At the end I like to point you to this Wikipedia entry that has more technical details about the topic.
]]>In case if you don't know, Eric Meyer considered to be the top of the industry of CSS, He wrote alot of books including "Eric Meyer on CSS" and "More Eric Meyer on CSS" and alot more.
Any way I don't think I will use Meyer's Sculptor, I enjoy hand coding every bit of CSS on my DreamWeaver code view.
]]>Ofcourse I get different reactions from "WOW" to "Excuse me, is that a site!", but what really may be a point of discussion is the choice of colors, I always get confused by how various people are in color tastes.
I always thought about this, why people are so different in color tastes? why do some people may adore a design color selections and others hate it?
All my life I've been thinking of this till I get to something and this is what I wanted to say from the beginning after all this introduction, please don't think I'm nuts.
I thought maybe every person see colors differently, for example what you see green I see red or what you see light grade of blue I see it very bluish like the blue in RGB, so now you thinking how do I get to this? why do I think that different eyes see different colors? I tell you why, remember back when your teacher first teach you colors how do she do it? she hold a red card in her hands and said this is red, then a blue card this is blue etc... so every child get in his head that this color is red and that is blue, after class a kid said I like blue color the other said I like green.
I'm not trying to prove something here, I'm just saying why not, maybe my theory is right, how will we know if we see colors differently or not, maybe there is kind of scientific research or something about this issue I don't know maybe scientist could prove or disprove this, but I'm speaking away from science and scientists.
By the way I like orange so much, maybe you see it as big lemons I don't know but I still like it.
What if I'm this person insisting on my opinion while it's wrong, how will I know it's wrong. I remember all this cases I fought for then after a long time I discovered maybe by chance that I'm totally wrong, if we are two arguing about something both of us 100% sure he is right, one of us has to be wrong, why not me? That's how I discovered I'm not the most intelligent person out there.
I face this problem alot in meetings with clients to discuss there websites, my clients usually have no idea about websites or maybe a slight background, they started to say I want my main website color to be dark violet for example while I see that there type of business and targeted visitors will not like or get comfortable with this color, this is just an example it may get more complicated than that maybe your client tell you change the navigation place or structure.
In this case I have to try to convince my client that this is better bla bla bla usually they don't get convinced so we get to a middle solution and you have to do it not to lose the job while you know that you could do this website alot better than this.
Always put a probability even if it's small that your opinion might be wrong. If it's your profession you're talking about decrease this probability if it's away of your profession and for example it's the first time you hear about this issue etc.. then increase this probability.
It may help to use the word "I think" or "I believe".
Well this is not what I do but I just thought to right about this because I think it's really an important issue that has to be solved, and by the way I'm not 100% sure that what I've just written is true :)
]]>Other good news is that Leopard which is the all new mac OS will be there by October with great new features like new improved Finder, Spaces & Time Machine which could be a life saver in case of losing files etc..
Other news is that apple changed it's site main layout specifically the navigation I see it alot better now the new navigation is alot more usable, it looks like it's done using CSS & JavaScript which makes it highly accessible. I only wish they could make a liquid layout I have to stretch my browser all the screen width to get rid of the horizontal scroll.
Enjoy
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