Plug-ins Getting Unplugged from IE

Many of you may already be aware of the Eolas Technologies lawsuit against Microsoft for patent infringement as reported on News.com. It is perhaps the only time the general web community hasn't been rooting for the little guy to win out over Microsoft. For those who don't know, the short short on it is that Eolas has claimed that the concept of plug-ins, a patent owned by the University of California, and licensed exclusively to Eolas, has been infringed by the very ability of Internet Explorer to play plug-ins inline with browser content.

Ultimately, this means that running Flash movies, or other plug-ins, alongside web page content (Flash art on HTML pages, for example) is a violation and that developers need to find another way to do it — whether by invoking dialogs when a plug-in is about to launch or by opening alternative content in new application windows. The implications of this are big. So much so, that the W3C has weighed in and formed an advisory panel (the HTML Patent Advisory Group) and released a FAQ on how the patent may impact the web.

On Tuesday, Microsoft said that it will make adjustments to Internet Explorer by early 2004 to prevent it from infringing on the patent. For now, the changes will consist of the browser firing a dialog box before allowing the embedded plug-in to run. Microsoft, Apple, Macromedia, and Real Networks have all provided information to developers to allow them to avoid infringing on the Eolas patent. Sadly, most of these fixes require extensive use of client-side script and invalid HTML tags in order to work. Zeldman goes into detail on the validation and accessibility issues on his site, and has a number of links to examples and some thoughts on how this will pan out over the next few months.

Some links to the software makers on the hook:

• The Microsoft Developer Network site provides instructions for developers, as well as follow-up information on the changes to the handling of ActiveX controls by IE.
• Apple's Developer Connection offers suggestions and sample pages with QuickTime movies.
• Macromedia's Developer Center offers a number of FAQs and suggestions for developers. As Macromedia may stand the most to lose, they offer a number of pages devoted to the potential impact.
• RealNetworks also offers sample code and suggestions to work around the changes to Internet Explorer and the patent.

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ICANN Moves .org Away from VeriSign

This Saturday, the .org top-level domain (TLD) will no longer be privately managed. With VeriSign's contract with ICANN for management of the .org TLD ending December 31, 2002, ICANN put management of the new registry out to bid and has chosen the Internet Society (ISOC) / Public Interest Registry (PIR) to take over the registry.

Despite rumblings that the .org TLD might be restricted to not-for-profits sometime around 2007, the current move imposes no restrictions and instead only makes a suggestion that .org be used for "noncommercial" sites. From the PIR site:

Noncommercial endeavors are those not conducted or maintained for the purpose of making a profit. This wide range includes (but isn't limited to) charitable, artistic, scientific, personal, educational, social, cultural, and religious endeavors.

.ORG sites are run by clubs, incorporated and unincorporated not-for-profit organizations, industry associations, families, individuals, schools, foundations, and more. Even for-profit companies run .ORG sites devoted to their noncommercial activities, such as charitable or volunteer programs.

With the transition, PIR has claimed a number of benefits and improvements:

• Supposedly a .org domain name will be usable minutes after registration.
• All WHOIS data for the .org TLD will eventually be consolidated into one central database.
• Revenues from .org registrations will be donated to outreach and educational programs.

VeriSign will close the .org registry on Saturday, January 25th at 14:00 UTC (9:00 a.m. Eastern time in the USA). The registry database and other functions will then be transferred to PIR. PIR will reopen for new registrations at 23:00 UTC on Sunday, January 26 (6:00 p.m. Eastern time in the USA). During this shutdown, no new .org registrations (or updates to existing .org domains) will be possible.

For a period of time after the re-opening, PIR will impose a Stability Control period, expected to be completed within 48 hours of the reopening. During this period, no modifications will be allowed to existing .org domain records. New .org names can be registered after the registry re-opens, but once registered, no updates to the domain record will be allowed until the stability controls are removed.

You can find out more about the Public Interest Registry at http://www.pir.org/. Internic discusses the transition in a FAQ about the .org transition. Sadly, no releases on the move could be found on the VeriSign site.

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On Safari

So you've been wondering what all the hubbub is about this new browser that Apple has released, right? I bet you're thinking to yourself, "oh dear, even more browsers in which to test." Well, you're right, it is a new browser to test, but it's eerily familiar to many of us.

Apple announced Safari as its new web browser during its MacWorld bonanza, and posted a ~3MB beta download for Jaguar users (OSX v10.2, better for v10.2.3) on its site at http://apple.com/safari/. This page also contains all the latest marketing speak on the browser, something worth reading before downloading.

Safari is built on the KDE rendering engine, using KHTML and KJS libaries (opensource), all of which power the familiar *nix browser, Konqueror. For those who've never been able to test on Konqueror and have access to a Mac, now you can do some basic testing (it won't be an exact match, but it's a start). For those who don't have a Mac but do have access to Konqueror, the same logic applies, just reversed.

Below are some of the known features and bugs of the browser, and while not exhaustive by any means, is good way to get thinking about how it may render your sites.

• Supposedly CSS1, CSS2, DOM0, DOM1 (reportedly "almost"), and DOM2 compliant.
• In CSS testing, supports attribute selectors, :first-child pseudo-class, :hover on arbitrary elements (tr for sure, anyway), @media, and adjacent sibling selectors.
• Aiming for compliance with ECMA-262 3rd Edition (JavaScript 1.5).
• Can render Java applets.
• Reportedly renders more quickly than Netscape, Internet Explorer, or Chimera.
• Will try to download XHTML files with XML mimetype instead of just display them.
• 72dpi (versus 96dpi) rendering of type.
• Doesn't display link title attributes as tooltips.
• Pop-up blocking appears to be built in.
• Currently identifies self as ( Note the "like Gecko" comment.):
  Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48

Screen capture showing how the evolt.org home page renders in Safari. As you can see, it looks pretty darn good, which is a testament to Safari's rendering engine, and the swanky, valid code under evolt.org's hood.

Screen capture showing how a evolt.org article page renders in Safari. Much like the home page, it holds its own for interpreting the code on the page, handily accepting our compliant HTML and CSS and then rendering it into the work of art that you are reading now.

Further Reading

MacEdition Guide to CSS2 Support in Mac-only Browsers, and the first column is Safari. See the abridged version for comparisons with other browsers.

KDE-maintained compilation of CSS2.1 visual media support in KHTML/KDE3.1.

The developer list for the KHTML and KJS libraries that power Safari, which talks about bugs, fixes, and support.

A review at Dive Into Mark, including screen shots and the results on testing across the HTML and CSS specs, as well as a number of CSS techniques/hacks.

Review at Six Log, with reader comments.

Mac Net Journal has a review.

Insanely Great Mac reviews it, and has a bunch of user comments.

The Mac News has an overview.

Safari-specific AppleScripts.

Matt Haughey comments (of MetaFilter fame).

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CSS-D Finds New Home at evolt.org

The incredibly popular, active, and valuable mailing list devoted to Cascading Style Sheets, CSS-Discuss (css-d), has moved its hosting to evolt.org. After some brief list overlap, and a lot of server tweaking, the list opened its doors to its new home Monday, December 9.

Started and moderated by Eric Meyer, author of four books on CSS, css-d quickly grew to 2,500+ members and more than 50 messages a day. This load began to tax the hosting resources Eric had in place in the beginning, and so he began a search in early November to look for a new home.

The evolt.org UK branch, evolt.org.uk was kind enough to offer server space and bandwidth, thanks to the efforts of Lachlan Cannon and John Handelaar. In particular, John had to wrestle with a particularly ornery Cobalt Raq configuration in the time-honored tradition of trying random stuff until it worked.

Advantages of the move include more control over mailing list features for the administrator, the ability to have a css-discuss domain as the list address, and, ideally, resolution of problems with members getting multiples of multiple messages. Bringing the old list archive over is just a matter of time.

The css-d mailing list is devoted to the discussion of CSS and its real-world applications. Theory is sometimes discussed, but for the most part, it's a list for practical and daily use of CSS in projects. Find out more about css-d and sign up for the mailing list at its new home, css-discuss.org.

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Book Review: Usable Web Menus

From the Publisher

Title: Usable Web Menus
Authors: Andy Beaumont, Dave Gibbons, Jody Kerr, Jon Stephens
ISBN: 1904151027
Publisher: glasshaus
Price: US$ 13.99 at Amazon.com
Page Count: 200
Publication Date: March 2002

When developing a web site, one of the most important things to consider is the navigation menu, to allow your users to find their way around it. It needs to usable, informative, and well implemented, but this can take time. This book will take all the hassle out of implementing web menus, in whatever style and technology you wish, by providing full code samples, along with walkthrough tutorials on how they work to allow easy customisation for your own needs.

This book covers the design and implementation of navigation menus using JavaScript and CSS (DHTML), and Flash on the client-side. Later chapters look at dynamically populating these menus from server-side data sources (databases and XML) using middleware (such as ASP and PHP).

Chapter 1: Rules for Good Menu Design

This first chapter is written by Dave Gibbons, and attempts to frame usability issues for web-based menus. While the book tries to avoid overly-technical, or even preachy, explanations of usability rules, this chapter glosses over some key rules of interface design. Since this topic is only afforded the space of one chapter, however, there's not a lot of room to go into great detail.

Instead, the author presents 12 rules of menu design and goes into some detail on each, often with examples. The bad examples aren't given enough detail to explain why they are bad, however, and the author makes some assertions that would be more valuable with supporting evidence of any kind. I'm also not sure the author understands all the factors behind building accessible sites, primarily because he implies XML/XSL(T) sites will enjoy greater accessibility, which isn't necessarily true. He does, however, provide links to the WAI and a page on Section 508.

Overall, this chapter is good, if a bit generalized.

Chapter 2: Information Architecture for Menus

Also written by Dave Gibbons, this chapter addresses information architecture, as well determining and testing your audience. There is a good series of questions for identifying the users by their needs, goals, and available technology. Given what you've learned about your users, it further addresses how best to present the information to those users so it makes sense and speeds their access to the information they want. User testing is only allotted one page, but it is at least addressed in here.

And this is where the handy introduction to usability and information architecture abruptly ends.

Chapter 3: Basic JavaScript Menus

Authored by John Stephens, this is the one chapter that I would actually like to see removed from the book. It starts off simply enough, but starts to quickly gather momentum as it tumbles away from all the usability and accessibility suggestions presented up until now.

Starting off with a brief introduction to CSS and JavaScript, simple image rollovers are presented, followed by the use of the :hover pseudo-class. This is even a JavaScript powered menu that disables the navigation for the page the user is currently viewing, a potentially handy script for developers who don't have access to a server-side scripting language and don't want to customize the navigation for every page on the site.

After this, the author presents navigation menus based on form elements. The first example uses buttons, although instead of using <input type="submit">, the author chooses to use <input type="button"> and fires each using an onclick event handler. The <form> tag has no action attribute. Users without JavaScript enabled are thus penalized since the navigation menu will completely fail to work. In addition, there is no discussion about the implications of form elements acting as navigation elements.

Continuing the descent, the author provides samples of navigation menus based on checkboxes and then radio buttons, both of which introduce a host of usability concerns (smaller hit states, checkboxes imply more than one option, JavaScript-only, etc.). In fact, the only interface issue the author points out is how Netscape Navigator 4.x displays incorrect background colors on radio buttons in tables. Hell, even using a <label> element on the options would have at least indicated that the author cared somewhat about the user instead of flexing his simplified JavaScript muscles.

Following up to these two examples is a select-menu based navigation. This might not be so bad only because so many people use them, if not for the known usability issues, and the author suggesting that the current page be hidden from the options, preventing any type of user memory on the location of options in the menu (what he refers to as a "jump menu with intelligence"). He closes the chapter with a double-jump menu, allowing users to select an option in one select box, only to have to then select an option in a second select box.

Given that the title of this book is Usable Web Menus, there's really no reason this chapter should have been included, at least not without caveats every page.

Chapter 4: Menus with Advanced Scripting and DHTML

John Stephens continues with a slightly more practical chapter, only because it has a useful JavaScript cookie functions, in case you don't already have one in your library. The chapter continues to make gratuitous use of JavaScript to create a style switcher powered with a pop-up window (a pop-up window killer might kill it, though). In its defense, it does present the code necessary to allow Netscape 6 to natively allow the user to switch between style sheets.

The chapter then spends an inordinate amount of time working with image maps, something which was generally unnecessary in the context provided, and didn't do a remarkable job of showing advanced scripting, as the chapter title promises. Eventually, an image map displayed in a <div> that can be hidden by the user was presented, although its usability benefits, if any, were not addressed.

The last pair of examples showed a menu loosely based on the Windows95 Explorer folder pane interface, and offered some useful blocks of code to hide and show menu elements.

Chapter 5: Flash Menus

Penned by Andy Beaumont, this chapter offers a refreshing break. This author knows about the stigma Flash has for usability and accessibility, and creates examples that don't suffer as most Flash-based navigation does. Although the author doesn't specify the version used to create the examples, Flash 5 appears to be the culprit.

The chapter starts off showing how to create, via movie clips and ActionScript, basic menus from a hard-coded list. The example is built upon to show how to feed the menus with XML, and then how to feed the XML from a PHP/MySQL setup. The code downloads on the glasshaus site also offer an ASP/MSSQL version, even though the book doesn't go into it at all.

For some reason, though, the author modifies his XML from the second example to the third, forcing a minor re-write to the XML-parsing ActionScript. Otherwise, the chapter has a number of useful tips. It does not, however, delve any deeper into usability issues beyond the token page at the beginning of the chapter, let alone those related to the specific menu sample.

Chapter 6: Dynamic Server-Side Menus

This final chapter, authored by Jon Stephens and Jody Kerr, finally addresses a menu other than a basic navigation menu by giving an example of a breadcrumb trail. While the trail may be unnecessarily encased in a multi-cell table, it's shown with a PHP/MySQL, ASP/MSSQL, and ASP/XML implementation, allowing many readers to benefit from it. The chapter goes into some detail on PHP and MySQL, while deferring to Microsoft on ASP and SQL Server.

After the breadcrumb trail example, the final menu example from chapter 4 (the Explorer-style menu) is brought back, and the reader is shown how to populate the JavaScript with some of the server-side language presented earlier in the chapter.

Resources

There were as many references for ASP, PHP, or JavaScript as there were for usability at the end of the book. If anything this is evidence that the book is far more code-oriented than anything else, and that usability isn't given the priority its title implies.

Recommendation

All the code samples in the book are targeted for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x+, Netscape Navigator 4.x, Netscape 6.x, and Opera 5.x+ for Windows, and Internet Explorer 4.x+, Netscape 6.x+, and Opera 5.x+ for the Mac.

For a book on menus that are supposed to be usable, I was disappointed at how usability factors were discussed only at the beginning, as opposed to within each example as an exploration of the value of each suggested menu. Chapter 3 really brought this to an extreme by presenting menus that younger developers, assuming books know best, might blindly use without regard to their impact simply because they are in a book on usable menus.

The code examples are generally good, and handy references for younger developers. It's nice to see Flash represented, even if only in passing. For the price, it's not a bad book to have on the shelves for reference, but it's not one I would run out and buy.

And one minor peeve — alt is an attribute, not a tag.

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Mozilla 1.0, Right on Time

Mozilla.org has officially released the 1.0 version of Mozilla, which, of course, includes the Gecko rendering engine.

Since 1998, when Netscape opened up the source code to allow development of a new browser, through the aquisition of Netscape by AOL in 1999, followed by the release of Netscape 6.0 (built on beta versions of Mozilla) two and a half years after the Mozilla project was launched, the entire project has been alternately assaulted for taking way too long and being too buggy and praised for holding up standards and open source as an ideal.

Most recently, AOL released the first Netscape 7 Preview Release (no telling how many more there may be), although that happened before the release of Mozilla 1.0. Most likely, the final 7.0 release will be based on Mozilla 1.0.

Of course, with AOL now testing Netscape in CompuServe, threatening to deploy it to the AOL service, and given that Mozilla is open source, it will be interesting to see how this release impacts the suit AOL Time Warner has filed against Microsoft for strong-arm browser practices. While this release itself isn't going to change the state of the browser wars overnight, it's an awfully big symbol to be held up in court.

Check out some of the articles on Mozilla here at evolt.org.

Features

The following is pulled from a release over on MozillaZine.org that trumpets the arrival of Mozilla 1.0. After all, they say it better than I.

Mozilla 1.0 features full support for HTML 4.0, XML 1.0, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1), and the W3C Document Object Model level 1 (DOM1). Mozilla 1.0 also has the industry's best support for Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2), the Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM2), and XHTML. Standards support also includes XML data exchange and manipulation of XML documents with SOAP 1.1, XSLT, XPath 1.0, and FIXptr, as well as support for display of mathematical equations using MathML. Finally, it features a solid foundation of support for data transport protocols (HTTP, FTP, and SSL/TLS), multilingual character data (Unicode), graphics (GIF, JPEG, PNG and MNG) and the latest version of the world's most popular scripting language, JavaScript 1.5.

Further, Mozilla has been designed for easy localization into languages other than English, and localized versions of Mozilla 1.0 will be available in the following languages (with more to follow): Asturian, Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, Galician, German, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Slovak, Serbian and Ukrainian.

Platforms

Mozilla 1.0 is available for the following platforms, so go try to download it over there:

• Win32
• MacOS 8.5, 8.6, 9.x
• MacOS X
• Linux
• BSD/OS (bsdi)
• FreeBSD
• OpenVMS
• OS/2
• Tru64 Unix

Ports are in the works for the following platforms:

• MacOS X using Carbon instad of Cocoa
• BeOS
• Irix
• The Qt toolkit, a Unix front-end
• A pure Java version
• Amiga DE (Digital Environment)
• Acorn RISC OS

Future

I'm taking bets on when the 1.1 release comes out...

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Nielsen Snipes E-comm Sites, Teams with Macromedia

Jakob Nielsen, in a busy week, releases a report criticizing e-commerce sites, and teams up with Macromedia to help them make Flash 99% less bad.

E-commerce Is 51% Bad

The first report, from News.com, describes a study released by the Nielsen Norman Group. The study claims that, from a field of 15 e-commerce sites, in total they met 49 percent of the usability guidelines developed by Nielsen's consulting company.

The L.L. Bean web site scored highest by meeting 66 percent of the guidelines, while Home & Garden had the lowest score, meeting only 38 percent of the guidelines. Amazon.com was left out of the survey, for reasons unknown, even though it ranked in first place two years ago.

Flash May Become 99% Somewhat Bad

Also this week, as covered at News.com, Macromedia and Nielsen announced that they would team up to create usability guidelines that can take advantage of the UI improvements offered in Flash MX. Of course, these are just guidelines, and there's no guarantee they'll be followed by anyone, but there is at least acknowledgment from Macromedia that improvements can be made in Flash.

Some of us here should be familiar with Nielsen's article, Flash: 99% Bad, written way back in October of 2000. Well, as of June 3, it's been updated with a sub-heading, Flash Now Improved, even though NNGroup hasn't actually started working on Flash yet.

Macromedia also has a press release on their site.

Other Reading

• Articles about Flash on evolt.org
• Articles about E-commerce on evolt.org

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