BBB Requests Input on Proposed Online Code

The Better Business Bureau, through its BBBOnline entity, seems to have finally realized that it can leverage its name in the online world to provide basic auditing over online business. Just as a company may display the Better Business Bureau seal on their advertising to tell customers to expect a certain level of service, online business may soon have the same opportunity to display a seal whose source indicates an updated set of guidelines tailored to business on the internet through the BBBOnline Code of Online Business Practices.

The BBB seems to have realized that they cannot account for all situations, and have asked for commentary on their draft. While the code is supposed to apply to all ecommerce models, including online auctions and charity sites, there are no specific provisions geared toward those models. Feel free to peruse their draft. December 30, 1999 is the deadline for comment on the proposed code.

The draft includes five main principles that the BBB expects sites to adhere to in order to display the seal:

1. Disclose! Disclose! Disclose!
   Online businesses shall disclose to their customers and prospective customers, clearly, conspicuously, and in easy-to-understand language, accurate information about the business, any goods or services offered through an online transaction, and, if applicable, the transaction itself. Full details.
2. Tell the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth!
   Online businesses shall not engage in deceptive or misleading trade practices with regard to any aspect of electronic commerce, including advertising and marketing, or in their use of technology. Full details.
3. Have Respectful Information Practices!
   Online businesses shall adopt information practices that are respectful of the consumer's concerns and treat the information with care. They shall post and adhere to a privacy policy based on fair information principles, take appropriate measures to provide adequate security, and respect consumer's preferences regarding unsolicited email. Full details.
4. Aim to Please!
   Online businesses shall make online shopping a positive consumer experience and shall seek to resolve disputes that are raised by their customers, clients, or licensees in a timely and responsive manner. Full details.
5. Take Special Care with Children!
   If online businesses target children under the age of 13, they shall take special care to protect them. Full details.

There are three free regional (US) conferences for people to comment on the code. They are December 1, 1999 in Denver, December 2 in Palo Alto, and December 9 in Washington D.C.

Because of the BBB's name and reputation in the brick and mortar world, many consumers may come to expect to see a BBB seal over time. The only way to guarantee that the seal has any value is if we as web developers take the time to comment on it. We need to ensure that their guidelines are both reasonable and attainable, otherwise we're the only ones to blame if they aren't. When your newest client expects you to post the seal on the site you build, you had better be sure that you and the client agree with, and will support, the requirements to display that seal.

You can visit the site to read about the current BBBOnline seals. The three they currently have are the Reliability Seal, the Privacy Seal, and the Kid's Privacy Seal. Eligibility requirements are linked from each description.

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IE5.0 for Mac Delayed Again

Microsoft has verified reports that Internet Explorer 5.0 will be pushed back from the fall release date to a winter release date. Back in July, Microsoft acknowledged the shift from a summer release date to a fall release date.

According to Microsoft, the delay is due to their attempts to introduce "cool end-user features" while still offering "strict compliance" with the W3C HTML guidelines, although which HTML version was not specified. Full implementation of CSS1 and partial implementation of CSS2 is promised, as well as a plan to have both the Mac and Windows versions use the same DOM.

Putting aside the potential oxymoron of "cool features" and "strict compliance," it will also offer some Macintosh-only features, such as an auction-watch feature, and the ability to scale smaller fonts up so they more closely match those represented in web pages viewed on a Windows version of IE.

Outlook Express 5.0 for Mac is supposedly still on schedule for a fall release.

You can get more information at News.com or at MacWEEK.

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Apple Cinema Display - why bother?

Can somebody please explain to me as a web developer the benefits of buying the Apple Cinema Display?

I've seen a few articles here and there where they tout it as the monitor that web developers will go ga-ga over, like this more balanced one at WebReview.com. But so far, none of them have even remotely justified it, they've just given in to the Apple hype. Perhaps it was marketing genius to make the monitor the big announcement over the new G4 at this week's Seybold Conference in San Francisco, but I don't see it. The audacity of that has certainly brought the monitor into the limelight, and it's not like anyone was going to fail to notice the G4 if they didn't promote it quite as much.

$3,999 for the monitor, or $500 more than a pretty solid G4. It just doesn't make sense. For that kind of money, why not get two good monitors? Or why not get one good 19" and a $100 14" monitor?

One argument is the need to place palettes somewhere. Well, 22" is nice, but you get more area off the 17"/19" and 14" dual monitor setup at a fraction of the price. At home I run my monitor at 800 x 600. The comparable resolution for the Cinema Display is 1,024 x 640. Wow. 224 extra pixels of width and 40 of height. Is that even a full palette? At work, I run at 1024 x 768. The comparable Cinema Display resolution is 1,280 x 800 pixels. Not enough to get me interested, especially since I can have a 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 second monitor dedicated to holding my palettes.

Is some web geek somewhere going to decide that his designs look better at this new 'cinema' style aspect ratio than at the traditional 4x3? Is he going to start bitching about supporting not only 640 x 480, but also a 4 x 3 aspect ratio? Is the two-page display that important to the web developer? If so, what ever happened to all those lovely Radius two-page monitors I used to work on, but have since lost track of?

Plus, it's still a liquid crystal display, and while I know that color accuracy isn't achievable on the web, I'd like to feel more comfortable with it. I will admit, for an LCD, the monitor looks better than most (it had better for that price). But at the same time, how many people can you crowd around your desktop before they're outside of the 160 degree viewing angle (yes, it's good, but it's not good enough for the groups that gather around my machine).

There is the smaller footprint, but I'd still rather have a monitor arm so I can crank it anywhere at any time. Frankly, I don't care what color my computer is, or how pretty it looks. I want a case with a flat top so I can stack stuff, and I want a monitor on an arm so I can swing it around as I adjust my seat. And hey, I wanna put my collection of Smurfs on my monitor as well, it's another shelf to me. I know it sounds silly, but where would I stack them if I got this new monitor?

Still, probably one of the best flat screens I've seen, but not worth the hype or the dollars in my book. Do check out the specs, though, and get jealous at the first geek on your block to get one.

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XHTML 1.0 Now Proposed Recommendation by W3C

The W3C yesterday reclassified the XHTML 1.0 specification from a working draft to a proposed recommendation.

The XHTML specification is a reformulation of the HTML 4.0 specification as an XML 1.0 application, as well as three DTDs corresponding to ones defined by HTML 4.0.

From the date this entered a proposed recommendation review period until September 22, 1999, W3C Advisory Committee representatives are encouraged to review this specification.

XHTML will appear very familiar to those who know HTML, since it still uses the greater-than and less-than symbols to denote markup tags as well as many familiar HTML tags and attributes. However, it introduces a number of new restrictions and features designed to make it both compatible with old browsers that support previous HTML specifications, and compliant with XML and future generations of XML-compliant browsers.

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WebTV Viewer 2.0b Available

The developer site.

It is currently version 2.0, and is still in beta. The Macintosh version is 5.8MB, the Wintel version is 4.2MB.

For those of you who like to test in WebTV, here are some of the new features in 2.0:

"Numerous bugs have been fixed in this new release of the Viewer, and PAL support has been added. Additionally, Microsoft Intellimouse users can now use the mouse wheel to scroll up and down in a Web page.

"The WebTV Viewer 2.0 includes new interactive television features that enable you to create and test interactive TV links in the Viewer. These new features are available from the new TV menu and should greatly speed up your interactive TV work."

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White Paper on JPEG 2000 Available

The Digital Imaging Group has made the white paper for JPEG 2000 available, finally.

Apparently the ISO JPEG Committee and the Digital Imaging Group want to ensure that the standard is both robust, and unlike PNG, actually gets widely adopted. To help this, in their white paper they try to impress upon the reader the archaic nature of the current standard while preaching potential benefits of the new standard.

You can download the report at the Digital Imaging Group by clicking on Downloads and scrolling down, or get the document directly (in Word format), but then you miss out on seeing a link to the Internet Imaging Protocol 1.05 Specification.

Participating companies are: Alinari Photo Archives, Agfa, Canon, Corbis, Digital Intelligence, Eastman Kodak, Hewlett Packard, LuraTech, NETIMAGE, and TrueSpectra.

Hmmm... I want to make a J2K joke...

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Activestate and Microsoft to Enhance Perl Support

ActiveState and Microsoft have just done up a 3-year contract for Perl Open Source development and support for Windows.

ActiveState will add features such as full Unicode support for Windows. In addition, what ActiveState refers to as a "significant amount of the development effort" will be released as open source code.

Betas of the next release are scheduled for August 1999.

You can see the press release on the ActiveState site at: http://www.activestate.com/press/releases/Microsoft.htm

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