IE 9 and the Future of Web Standards

May 11th, 2010 - by Scott Gale - 1 Comment, Add »

Recently it was announced that for the first time in over a decade Internet Explorers global market share has dropped below 60%. Although in my personal experience the stats don’t reflect that, it is an important moment for web developers. At one point in history (not long ago) when you asked most web developers what browser to install, the answer would invariably come back; FireFox. Interestingly though, FireFox has plateaued a bit, and WebKit based browsers are now impinging the dominant IE market share. We’ve seen an emergence of WebKit based browsers, especially Chrome in recent statistics. This is widely attributed to the simple fact that Chrome focused on the two things that people really care about on the web; speed and standards support.

This trending competition in the browser space is a great thing. Nobody wants innovation stunted by having everyone dependent on one browser. Web standards are a great thing as well, because it enables proper content delivery to all, no matter the browsing engine. Here is where the philosophy of Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla have combined: The “Same markup” notion. This is where both competition and web standards can flourish. All these companies have recently stated the philosophy of code rendering the same way, no matter what browser you are in. You may be browsing using the Trident rendering engine for IE9 or the WebKit rendering engine for Chrome and Safari.

The problem is when reality catches up with us. Lets face it, Microsoft has never been that great about web standards. FireFox has found it’s niche but there are still subtle differences between Mac and PC in rendering. The WebKit rendering engine has different versions for Chrome, Safari, and mobile. It is my hope that these companies working together with the w3c can help developers to solve some of these problems and bring website development into a more mature environment.

Microsoft released the second developer platform preview for IE9 this month. They have been working with the w3c to add and support the standards. They have been quite involved, but previously, even after being involved they did not support a number of standards. Why will this round be different? It appears they are more engaged. When I head to “An Event Apart” in two weeks, Microsoft is speaking on how to kill IE6. They are there speaking to the web developer community and with the w3c. When I tested IE 9 this week I noticed that it does have a few encouraging signs of progress:

1. IE9 now supports the use of CSS3 selectors. When I tested this on CSS3.info I confirmed that all of the selectors were supported.
2. IE9 supports CSS3 rounded corners! Thank the lord! It’s about time. Where are you guys on box-shadow?

I have included a screen shot of scottgale.com rendering on IE9 with a couple tweaks. Still no drop-shadow, but I do get some corner rounding, which is a big start. You can see that it is picking up the rounding for the select boxes, the submit button, and the bottom corners.

They also mention that they support CSS3 media queries for mobile, netbooks, and full desktops. However, my dream would be that these are not necessary. I see this as a baby step for Microsoft in the right direction, hopefully they can keep that going.

In the spirit of competition and standards, these companies need to come together and do what is best for web developers. If these companies can’t pull together the “Same markup” philosophy then don’t expect developers to get behind the spirit of browser competition. What will happen is everyone will start touting a single browser that is fast and supports web standards. For Microsoft with their sliding browser percentage, it’s time to step up and help improve the lives of the web developers and the end users. It’s time for all the companies to come together and make real web standards happen.

Best iPad Apps Roundup

May 8th, 2010 - by Scott Gale - 12 Comments, Add »

So now that both the iPad and the iPad 3G are out, I thought I would post a roundup of the best iPad apps out there that I’ve found. I know there is a lot of curiosity around the potential of the iPad and its interface. I would love to hear from other people what apps they have enjoyed.

Evernote – This is one of the best apps ive ever used. In fact, the draft for this post was typed on the iPad in Evernote. It syncs all your notes and documents with your iphone, ipad, and computer. Making sure that anytime a new though jumps into your head you have a place to stay organized. Creativity doesn’t just happen 9-5, Monday – Friday, so it’s nice to have your thoughts in sync.

Marvel – This app represents one of the great points of differentiation between the iPad and the Kindle. The Kindle is great for books, but for news and things like comics it was always a problem. The iPad’s capability really kicks up the options for those categories. As an added bonus, Marvel allows you to download some of their classic comics for free. There is another app called “Comics” if you aren’t happy with just Marvel.

NPR – Great app for news buffs. NPR posts great articles that are excellent to read on the crystal clear iPad screen. One of the cooler features of this app, however, is that you can stream your favorite shows from NPR right to the iPad on demand.

AIM – I can’t show a screenshot of this one without having to blur out everyone’s Facebook comments and my AIM buddy list. For me, the instant messaging client is a necessity for work communication, so that is a major part of why it made my list. This app is a pretty standard AIM client but nice to have nonetheless. The app has “Lifestream” which will aggregate your social activity but I prefer hootsuite for my social aggreation.

Pandora – Standard Pandora app with an iTunes looking interface. I’m a Pandora fan. I haven’t found any limitations in this application versus the full web version yet. The expandable menu for each song allows you to bookmark the song or the artist. There is also an option to buy the song direct from iTunes or search the artist in iTunes which I find handy if you have interest in the songs you are hearing. It is a bummer that since there is no multitasking, once you start browsing for the artist in iTunes, the iPad has to stop playing Pandora. One other thing that I noticed is you can’t delete a station if you accidentally add one which is easy to do with the sensitive touch interface.

Words HD – Scrabble with a luxurious board compared to the iPad’s tiny cousin the iPhone. I wonder if I’m getting an unfair advantage playing on the “big screen”. It’s a great way to stay in touch with the family if you were scrabble opponents as kids like mine was. Plus, you might learn something. One down side of words is that you never get penalized for playing incorrect words, so you can try combinations until you’re blue in the face. Scrabble also makes an application for $9.99 that I haven’t tried yet. It would really be nice to play against more than just one person.

Molecules – This one is an install and forget it sort of thing. It is fun to play with for about 10 minutes and think of doctors using the iPad to enhance their general diagnosis capabilities. There are molecule setting options for DNA, Acetylcholinesterase, Insulin, and TRNAPHE. The application also offers different views (I prefer the cylinder view myself). If you are in the medical field there is one very cool thing you can do with this. This application connects to the RCSB Protein Data Bank. In a matter of minutes I was able to download the Crystal Structure of the 2009 H1N1 virus, view, and rotate on the screen, pretty cool.

Netflix – I love being able to stream high quality movies using the Netflix app. I watched one over WiFi that looked amazing. When you watch movies over 3G Netflix downsamples the stream. The 3G at my house using full bars was noticeably slower when browsing movies and loading the app. The video quality was not great and jerky in parts, but you’re watching a streaming movie from the cell towers so, not quite there yet. I think AT&T is a tad deluded about their network capability but that is a separate post.

SugarSync – Even though there is no accessible file system on the iPad I sync my documents to the cloud via SugarSync. The files you sync to SugarSync can be viewed and emailed to others using their iPad app. Dropbox is also on this bandwagon. Make’s it easy to be sure you have access to your important files anywhere. I tested viewing docx and xlsx files and it worked fine. It does not allow you to edit the documents however.

Labyrinth 2 HD - Fun game to try out the gyroscope. This has a multiplayer option and is made by Illusion Labs, the same company that coded the Skateboarding came Touch/Grind HD. This game has a lot of features for encouraging social engagement through multiplayer, online browsing, and level creation, but really I just tried the single player levels. It takes a little while to get the hang of all the new obstacles that are in this, but once you get past that it is pretty fun, a tutorial will take you through the basics.

ABC – Stream ABC shows, although it crashed my iPad a couple times.

Yahoo Entertainment – I have multiple TVs in the house and only 1 has a cable box. This is a great TV guide if you have analog TVs in the house or don’t want use the guide. This has some other features, such as, video on demand for news and sports. It also has entertainment news in a format that I’m not crazy about. I personally am just using this for the guide capability. One of the really handy features of the guide is the “Show Details” option. By using this you can click on a show and see all the information about all the shows in the season, so if you are coming in mid-stream, you can see where the season is at with respect to the story line.

The Weather Channel – Nice array of weather functionality and views. The app utilizes the iPad’s location services and can do multiple map overlays including clouds and radar. I personally never really trust weather reports so its nice to be able to play back the radar and see what is actually about to happen. This app also offers a streaming video weather reports, but the local reports are pretty robotic.

These are my favorite apps that I have dug up so far. You might be asking, where are Facebook, Hootsuite, LinkedIn, Google Docs, and Google Voice. If you look at my home screen you’ll notice that I have a few of those on there. However, these are simply Safari home screen links to the respective sites. I’ve found that for the most part all those items listed above work fine for the iPad using their straight up web browser modes. Facebook has a link for touch devices called touch.facebook.com but I find I just end up using the actual full site.
So for these there aren’t apps for them, but are apps needed? The beauty of the iPad is that standard websites with no browser plugins work great.

Apps I tried and didn’t love:

For both Amazon and Kayak the search functionality is quite a bit more limiting than on the actual site, and both their full sites work fine on the iPad. So from my perspective there is no real point in having an app for those, but if you do build an app, it needs to be able to reproduce the search criteria. It’s the same problem on the iPhone but the point for simplicity is a little more arguable for the iPhone due to the form factor. For Twit Touch – I love the TWIT network but this app keeps crashing my iPad. It’s nice to be able to watch streaming live TWIT shows, but I really need more stability from that app.

So there is my first roundup. Looking forward to what gets built in the future. Please comment and let me know some great apps that you have found.

How to build a WordPress HTML5 theme

April 22nd, 2010 - by Scott Gale - 3 Comments, Add »

iPhone, iPad, video HTML5 deployment, Webkit, Chrome, Safari, web standards, canvas elements, and disappearing flash support. These are just a few of the many reasons to explore HTML5 and its capability. Add WordPress, a very customizable system that allows skinning of the underpinning code in order to achieve the desired result and you get a great basic test case for HTML5.

What follows is quick synopsis of how to setup an HTML5 WordPress skin and some of the benefits this brings:

To start, I setup basic HTML5 markup. Utilizing new tags. Here is what the structure looks like:

Using this basic system as a framework, I added microformats to the header and footer for human and machine readable information. You can view the source and search for “vcard” to see my microformat header.

Next, I started utilizing some of the great things that HTML5 and CSS3 have to offer. HTML5 has new form field types that work well for the iPad, iPhone, and Webkit. In other browsers they fall back to be standard text input fields so it’s not a problem to use them in general markup, even for IE6 (everyones favorite). Here is a breakdown of some of the new HTML5 form fields:
<input type=”search” placeholder=”SEARCH” value=”"/>
The new search input type has a really cool attribute called “placeholder”. Placeholder is a value that disappears when the form field focuses, a function that we no longer have to emulate with JavaScript on browsers that support this. The type search also tells the iPhone, iPad, and future dynamic keypads to use a different “enter” key. Note how the iPad shows “Search” on the keyboard:

<input type=”email”/>
This field type also tells mobile devices to change their keyboard accordingly. Here is an example of the iPad keyboard with this field type:

<input type=”url”/>
This field type also tells mobile devices to change their keyboard accordingly. Here is an example of the iPad keyboard with this field type:

Now its time to add the CSS. Using CSS3 for rounded corners, drop shadows, and gradients, quickly eliminates the need for extra divs, classes, and most importantly, images. I used these styles to do the buttons, the input fields, header and footer styling, and even the background. Here are some of the basic CSS3 styles used:

/* create the body gradient */
body {

	background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #fff, #ccc);
	background: -webkit-gradient(linear, center top, center bottom, from(#fff), to(#ccc));
}

/* do the rounded corners and drop shadow on the header */
header {
	-moz-border-radius-topleft:8px;
	-webkit-border-top-left-radius:8px;
	-moz-border-radius-topright:8px;
	-webkit-border-top-right-radius:8px;
	-moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 1);
	-webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 1);
	box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 1);
}

/* create the button for form submission and search submission */
form .submit {
	background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #073842, #000);
	background: -webkit-gradient(linear, center top, center bottom, from(#073842), to(#000));
}

With these styles it’s quick, easy, and image free to do what use to be a much more arduous process for many of us.

Now you’re all done except for IE

Now that the markup is in place and the styles are in place. We have to make it work for lesser browsers that can’t handle new standards (aka IE). There seems to be a misconception out there that this is difficult, but it is actually a few simple steps. For my blog I conceded that there would be some degradation of the look for browsers that don’t support CSS3 so that makes life easier, and of course it may be a luxury not everyone can afford.

IE Step 1: Add support for styling of the HTML5 tags
To do this, all we have to do is include a JS file called html5shiv hosted on googlecode.com. This in essence does a document.createElement and a few other things to get IE to recognize the HTML5 elements. We can wrap this in conditional comments because it is only required for IE.

<!--[if lte IE 9]>
<script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

IE Step 2: IE specific CSS
For any IE specific CSS that you want to do (I added a few different border treatments and color tones to make the site still look ok) add the IE specific CSS file.

So the sum of your checking for IE should look something like this:

<!--[if IE]>
  <script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/blog/wp-content/themes/scottgale/style-ie.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<![endif]-->

Make sure after you add this to validate your markup with the w3c validator. It handles HTML5 quite well from my experience.

And now your are done!

I hope this helps everyone to explore this new web standard. The blogosphere is an easy place to try this out and help perpetuate these ideas. Please let me know if I need to explore any of these concepts in more detail for people.

Custom HTML5 WordPress Skin Released!

April 19th, 2010 - by Scott Gale - 2 Comments, Add »

I just released my custom HTML5 WordPress skin, and it is a relief to get back to being able to post after working on this. Over the course of working on this I found many new HTML5 tidbits that really help us struggling web developers.

Over the next week I plan on highlighting some of the tech I used so keep an eye out for the next post. Some cool stuff to mention:

New Form Fields that preset iPhone and iPad entry according to field type.
New search field capability supported in Safari.
Only 8 images required to make the whole site, rest done with CSS3 gradients and rounded corners
Google Chrome Frame Support, making the web faster and removing IE 1 user at a time.
Google hosted code fix for IE
New tags such as section, article
Added microformat support
And many more, stay tuned..