State of Web Dev Survey Results

Scroll Magazine, John Allsopp and Web Directions conferences all got together and ran the State of Web Development 2010 survey to gather information from developers on what technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices they use. The survey results gather the answers to 50+ questions and present them in a few different ways. They provide the com­plete (anonymized) set of responses in CSV for­mat for download, a PDF info­graphic overview (see the big image above), just the results to all the ques­tions (often compared to 2008) or their own detailed analysis.

As you read through the results, you may notice that what web developers use as their browser and platform does not correspond to the bulk of users. For example, 51% of respondents use Mac OSX, and 54% use Firefox as their primary platform. This does not correspond to general users who range from 8% to 15% on Mac OSX and 16% to 45% on Firefox. Granted, all stats are relative to the site reporting them, but from my own experience with our clients, the numbers for web developers are not the same as for the general public.

I do find it odd that web developers tend to eschew the very browsers and platforms that the general public uses (such as IE on Windows) and reserve them only for testing. I'd feel better if these developers were as familiar with what users actually use on a day-to-day basis than only testing on them for projects. This lack of familiarity with how the web is experienced through the same lens as the user can be both jarring and cause developers to fail to take advantage of, or code around, browser features/issues that are known to regular users.

You may find that statements about HTML5 and CSS3 adoption really require more context than the answers can provide. The same is true for certain technologies and how they are applied (I may use CSS rounded corners on a personal project, for example, but not on a client site). Here is a quick overview of some of the results (emphasis theirs):

• Few respon­dents use any form of Internet Explorer for their day to day web use, but IE8 is the num­ber one browser devel­op­ers test their sites in.
• Google Chrome has jumped dra­mat­i­cally as the browser of choice for devel­op­ers, to rank 3^rd, at 17% just behind Safari at 20%. Firefox remains the num­ber one choice by some way, but respon­dents were split between 3.5 and 3.6 at the time of our sur­vey. Firefox 3.6 was released only a week before the sur­vey began.
• Over half of respon­dents now use Mac OS X as their pri­mary oper­at­ing system.
• Nearly a third of respon­dents (up from 16%) use Mobile Safari, while Android use is at around 4%.
• JQuery has become even more dom­i­nant, with nearly 80% of all respon­dents using the library, up from 63% last year.
• Desktop-​​like appli­ca­tion frame­works, such as Cappuccino and SproutCore show lit­tle sign of wide­spread adop­tion by devel­op­ers. Perhaps the day of desktop-​​like web apps is yet to come, or per­haps devel­op­ers really aren't look­ing to build webapps which mimic the desktop.
• More respon­dents (45%) than not (44%) use CSS3 and exper­i­men­tal CSS, up dra­mat­i­cally from last year (only 22% then were using CSS3 and nearly 70% not)
• Last sur­vey, only 4% were using font link­ing using @font-face. This sur­vey that's climbed to 23%
• HTML5 is now used to some extent by around 30% of respon­dents, up from under 10% last survey

Read More

W3C Testifies on Web Accessibility to US House

I might have posted this last week, considering this was scheduled to happen on Thursday, April 21, but then the time shifted from 10am to 1pm, and then no notes went up.

Judy Brewer, Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was scheduled to appear (testify) before the US House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. The hearing itself has an equally brief name, Hearing on Achieving the Promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the Digital Age — Current Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities. The W3C was kind enough to post a press release.

Despite the lack of notes appearing online at the federal site, her testimony (or the advance, pre-written testimony) is available as an Acrobat document.

Some quotes from her four page statement:

WAI is supported in part by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research at the US Department of Education; the European Commission; WAI Sponsors; and W3C Member organizations.

The US Access Board has stated its intent to harmonize the web portions of its Section 508 regulations with WCAG 2. WCAG has been referenced in a Department of Justice ADA technical assistance manual, and in negotiated ADA settlements within the banking, retail and sports sectors.

Barriers include missing alternative text for images, missing captions for audio, forms that "time out" before you can submit them, images that flash and may cause seizures, text that moves or refreshes before you can interact with it, and websites that don't work with assistive technologies that many people with disabilities rely on. The impact on people with disabilities when there is a lack of accessibility ranges from exclusion from social networks, to missed school admissions, lost jobs, and inability to access life-saving health care information.

She outlines the following opportunities to improve and accelerate web accessibility:

• publishing existing data on the compliance of federal websites with Section 508 requirements, and conducting new studies that evaluate gaps in ADA compliance across Title II and Title III entities;
• communicating the applicability of the ADA to the Web more clearly, with updated guidance reflecting the benefits of standards harmonization at international, federal, and state levels;
• promoting development of improved authoring tools that facilitate the production of accessible web content, and that include accessible templates for website development;
• continuing research and development on accessibility techniques for new technologies, improved accessibility supports for cognitive disabilities, and more affordable assistive technologies.

In the end, this entire session appears to have been just an FYI session, but without notes yet on what happened, you'll have to do what I am doing, and just wait for them to appear to see if there were any clear calls to action.

UPDATE (April 27, 2010): I am taking the link from the first comment below and including it: "A Letter to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary" by John Foliot. It links to the accessible transcripts that he created.

Read More

Adobe to Drop iPhone Support, Target Android

And the saga continues. If you read my post Adobe vs. Apple or Flash vs. HTML5 from a few days ago, you already know that Apple and Adobe appear locked in a battle over Flash and the iPhone OS. It's clear Apple wasn't planning on backing down and it's certainly not in Adobe's best interests to continue the fight.

It should come as no surprise that Adobe is walking away. Mike Chambers, the Principal Product Manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform at Adobe (that's how he lists it on his blog), has said as much in his blog post, On Adobe, Flash CS5 and iPhone Applications.

He starts out with the clause from Apple that started this all, noting that developers can expect to see their Flash-developed applications slowly get booted from the iTunes store. However, Adobe has already built the export features into Flash CS5 that allows developers to target iPhones and iPads and plans to ship the software with those features still intact, even if Apple still blocks acceptance of applications built with that technology.

Instead, he claims that Adobe and Google have been working together to target Android phones and Android-based tablets with Flash 10.1. In short, all the work you have already done as a Flash developer to target the iPhone OS can simply be brought over to the Android OS. He provides links to some developers who are already making the switch, targeting Android now instead of iPhone.

There are some links in the blog post which I am including here. Since Apple has been silent on this entire dust-upand the general trend has been that Apple's licensing enforcement (both for app content and programming language) is arbitrary, I can't really offer counter-links or even counter-arguments. It also justifies my cheating and just parroting links from the original blog post.

• Apple Locks iPhone Developers in Its Walled Garden at PCWorld.
• Apple Wants To Own You at Slate.
• Mark Fiore can win a Pulitzer Prize, but he can't get his iPhone cartoon app past Apple’s satire police at Nieman Journalism Lab.
• Apple's New Developer Agreement Unlevels the iAd Playing Field at Wired.

Read More

Library of Congress Archives Tweets

To quote the Library of Congress, or at least its first tweet and second tweet announcement (follow it at @librarycongress):

Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.

Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. ALL tweets. More info here http://go.usa.gov/ik4

This is old news to most of you, and it's only barely over 2 days old. Heck, I heard about it on Twitter within a half hour thanks to a re-tweet from someone I follow (@zeldman). Then I saw it picked up on a some sites that I follow within a couple hours ("Library of Congress to Preserve Tweets for Eternity" at Mashable). A few hours after that, The New York Times posted it on their site ("Library of Congress Will Save Tweets"). And of course there's been plenty of chatter about it since (and I wasn't even at Chirp to see everyone react to the announcement, but you can still read the Twitter announcement on its blog).

The Library of Congress has posted an explanation on its blog ("How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive"), explaining that public tweets are getting archived and acknowledging that Twitter process 50 million tweets a day. This doesn't fall outside of the domain of the Library. They currently archive legal blogs, web sites of candidates for national office, and sites of members of Congress, all dating back to 2000. They already have 167 terabytes of just that data alone. In addition, the Library operates the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at digitalpreservation.gov.

I would be the first to say that the bulk of tweets don't really contain much value. If anything they show our fascination with the inane and our inability to spell as a culture. However, it also means that the average person can get his/her wacky (140 character) idea into the archives, something generally reserved for those who have the ability to get published (often considered the elite). It's also a great log of the day-to-day history of the world (as told by the small percentage that tweets) and will provide insight into our current culture for future generations (or space aliens with lots of time to kill).

If you read the Library blog, however, you'll see comments from people who clearly are missing the point. Someone asks who owns the tweets, but only asks between Twitter and the author, failing to ask about the Library or recognize that libraries don't hold copyright to works they archive. Another asks why the government thinks it has a right to archive his "PRIVATE" tweets, clearly missing the part where the Library says it is only grabbing public tweets. Someone else thinks this will come back to hurt him/her by saving hurtful/stupid tweets for all time, while failing to recognize that it's already happening via site like Google and that perhaps they shouldn't say just anything in what is truly a public forum. The only comments that have any merit or lamenting the cost associated with doing this, but then nobody knows the actual cost — for all we know they are just getting handed a giant database file to post to a back-up machine, all of a few minutes' worth of work. In short, there is some entertaining reading in there.

If you are not at the office and willing to engage in some humor that is in poor taste, you can see the comic that summarizes some of the banality of Twitter. Read the Penny Arcade comic that started a new term.

Read More

Opera and Chrome on the Rise

Opera reported on Tuesday that it has exceeded 100 million users. This is split between 50 million desktop users and 50 million mobile users. This doesn't count users on game consoles, connected TVs and set-top boxes, many of which also run Opera. Opera owes part of this growth to the 10.5x release, which is faster than the 10.10 release — the JavaScript engine alone is seven times faster. Overall Opera claims "year-on-year growth [...] on desktop now stands at over 30%."

In a curious twist, Apple has also approved Opera Mini for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Many didn't think Apple would approve it because it competes with Safari, even to the point that Opera built a countdown page showing how much time would pass until it was approved, but on Tuesday it got the nod (20 days, if you are curious). The question is — does it support Flash?

Mashable reported last Tuesday that Chrome has grown in popularity more quickly than other browsers. They report that Chrome now has a 6.1% market share, beating out Safari and Opera, and gaining on Firefox (24.5%). Some of this growth may be due to its release for the Mac in February that improved (and stabilized it) over the December release.

Both of these browsers may also owe some of these number increases to a recent anti-trust settlement between Microsoft and the European Commission. When users of Microsoft Windows 7 first try to surf the web they are first presented with a "browser ballot" in Internet Explorer that shows a list of other browsers the user may install ("Windows 7's European browser ballot screen revealed, rolling out next week" at Engadget, Feb. 19, 2010). After a month after the browser ballot screen was implemented, Internet Explorer's share in France has dropped by 2.5%, 1.3% in Italy and 1% in the UK ("Browser ballot already hurting Internet Explorer market share" at ars technica, March 23, 2010). Time will tell whether those new users stay true to their new browsers or slowly work their way back to IE.

Read More

Adobe vs. Apple or Flash vs. HTML5

Any of you watching the recent iPad coverage may already know that the iPad not only does not support Flash, there is no intention on the part of Apple to support Flash. Granted, the iPhone doesn't support Flash, but neither do most other mobile devices. iPhone users had been complaining about this for a while and Apple cited its policy toward acceptance of software from third-party manufacturers as a reason not to expect it ("Why Apple Won't Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone," Wired, Nov. 17, 2008).

With Apple's pitch that the iPad would replace netbooks and slide into the average user's hands as the de facto web surfing platform, hopes were high that the iPad would support Flash. The original iPad promos even showed Flash in use, but those were quietly changed without any acknowledgment from Apple ("Apple Pulls Flash Content From iPad Promos," PCWorld, Jan. 30, 2010).

In the last couple weeks things have heated up even more. Apple modified its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement (part of the iPhone OS SDK) to expand on a section covering how external applications can be developed:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++ and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

While Flash Player 10.1 is now available (or on its way) for other mobile devices (Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, webOS and BlackBerry), the iPhone is still not having it. This new language essentially blocks a utility Adobe created to allow Flash developers to convert their Flash projects to the iPhone app format. And that utility still didn't bring Flash support to Safari on the iPhone ("Adobe Announces Flash Support for iPhone (But Only for Apps)," Mashable, Oct. 5, 2009). On the bright side, Adobe is also planning to support exporting to the HTML5 canvas element.

Apple has been quick to point out that anything you can do in Flash can be done in HTML5. Not only is this patently not true (primarily because HTML5 isn't even a finished spec yet — see "Too Soon to Advocate HTML5?" at this blog), the Safari browser doesn't support it all (CSS3 and HTML5 support checklist). Given how many sites use Flash for even basic features like non-critical content or add-on features, the average web surfer on his or her iPhone/iPad will just see blank areas where Flash should appear. Apple is free to limit its support at no cost to itself, but if companies truly want their Flash-specific features to work on an iPhone or iPad, they now have to consider not only how they might technically do that, but how much they are willing to spend to achieve it.

If you've known me or read my posts for long enough, you know I have generally considered Flash to be a usability and accessibility nightmare, primarily because Flash developers have often abandoned best practices and made up their own rules for interaction. And I'll just gloss over search engines by only mentioning them in this sentence, because that's just low-hanging fruit for an anti-Flash rant. But while Flash may not be my ideal method to build things, it's also a de facto standard for many aspects of current web design — animated objects, integrated video, interactivity. Yes, much of this can be done using HTML and JavaScript, but the Flash development environment allows many companies to develop features for their sites at a relatively inexpensive cost and not worry about cross-browser scripting issues.

A handful of companies are already re-orienting their sites or at least their strategies, but these are companies who know they have to target iPhone and iPad users ("Virgin America Ditches Adobe Flash for New Site" at Mashable, March 3, 2010). They are also companies who have the budget to do it. For the rest of us, the best thing we can do is continue to watch the battle between Adobe and Apple and see where it goes. I predict no winner. However, I do see the losers in this battle — end users and smaller organizations who cannot afford a rebuild.

Related News

• "Apple v Adobe: this time it's executable" at The Guardian, April 9, 2010.
• "Adobe CTO Defends Flash Against Apple, HTML5" at Webmonkey, February 2, 2010.
• "Adobe CEO: Apple 'hurts customers'" at MacDailyNews, April 14, 2010.
• "Adobe vs Apple: Flash of the Titans" at Mac Observer, April 14, 2010.

Read More

Your Site Speed to Affect Its Google Rank

If you've been paying attention to the world of SEO and the intersection with Google, then you may have heard a few months back that Google was considering using the speed of a site to affect a site's rankings. Google has already factored in the speed of a site when considering its AdWords quality score.

On Friday, Google announced that it is now implementing site speed as a factor in organic search rankings. What this means is that if your site is an extremely heavy download or just takes too long to draw, then it may be penalized in the organic search listings.

While Google doesn't explicitly define site speed, it's safe to assume that it is a combination of overall page size (including files) and render time (including server response and time to draw the page). For those developers who seem incapable of posting anything smaller than a 1Mb image in the banner, or slimming down their HTML be removing all the extraneous cruft, this is motivation to start working on those optimization skills, even if their sites don't feel the wrath of the penalty.

Some things to keep in mind:

• Currently only 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed.
• There are over 200 hundred factors used in determining page rank, and this one isn't being weighted to high that it kicks out the major ones.
• It currently only applies to visitors searching in English (although you can expect to see them change that over time).
• It launched a few weeks back, so if your site hasn't changed in its search engine rankings, you are probably safe.
• Google links to a number of tools to test the speed if your site. Check out the links at code.google.com/speed/tools.html.
• Nealry four months old now, Google Site Performance is an experimental Google Webmaster Tools Labs feature that shows you latency information about your site.

Hopefully few of you are concerned by this. If you are following best practices, you are already striving to have your public-facing sites draw quickly. Not only does this do things like reduce the load on your servers, it also cuts down on your overall bandwidth costs. An additional advantage is that you don't have to rely on your end user having a fast computer, lots of RAM (or swap space on the drive), and a fast connection. Given how many people surf in corporate environments that aren't exactly cutting edge, this is just good practice.

Related Articles:

• Using site speed in web search ranking at the Google blog.
• Of Google and Page Speed at Zeldman.com
• Page Speed Factored into Google Search Rankings at WebSiteOptimization.com
• Site Speed Now a Factor in Google Rankings at LifeHacker.
• Google Search Rankings Now Consider Site Speed at Mashable.
• Site Speed May Soon Affect Google Page Ranking at Search Engine Journal.
• Site Speed, Google's Next Ranking Factor at Search Engine Land.

Read More

Mapping Location-Based Social Media

If you have been paying any attention to the social media space for the last few years, then you've watched the rise in location-based social media. A few years ago Loopt and Brighkite offered the ability for users to check in to a physical location. Then came Google Latitude, Foursquare and Gowalla. Each one had its selling point — games, competition, badges, pins, notifying when your friends are near, creating a history of your travels, and so on.

Part of the appeal of these tools is seeing where you have been, almost like a travelogue for a person, as well as tracking others (friends or family). Brighkite, for example, has offered a GeoRSS/KML feed for some time that you can feed into Google Maps or MapQuest, or really anything that can read the geo-tagged posts. It has taken some time, but the rest of the web is finally catching up:

• Twitter is asking for your location, and displaying map links with tweets.
• Facebook has announced its intent to track location.
• Smart phone utilities are popping up to make it easier to track activity in a place.

Go ahead and read the rest of the article (and see the swanky screen shots) at evolt.org: Mapping Location-Based Social Media

Read More